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Title: George Bernard Shaw
His life and works
Author: Archibald Henderson
Release date: October 16, 2024 [eBook #74591]
Language: English
Original publication: Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd
Credits: Andrés V. Galia, Thiers,Knysna and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
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* * * * *
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
HIS LIFE AND WORKS
[Illustration: =George Bernard Shaw.=]
_Lumière autochrome._
By Alvin Langdon Coburn.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
HIS LIFE AND WORKS
_A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY_
(_Authorized_)
By
ARCHIBALD HENDERSON, M.A., Ph.D.
Of the University of North Carolina
_With 33 Illustrations, including two Plates in Colour (one from
an autochrome by Alvin Langdon Coburn, the other from a water-colour
by Bernard Partridge), two Photogravures (Coburn and Steichen), and
numerous facsimiles in the text_
STEWART & KIDD COMPANY
CINCINNATI
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911,
STEWART & KIDD CO.
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
More than six years ago I conceived the idea of writing a book about
Bernard Shaw. The magnitude of the undertaking and the elusiveness of
the subject, had I realized them then in their full significance, might
well have made me pause. My earliest interest in his work, aroused by
his thoughtful laughter and piqued by his elfish impudence, convinced
me that this remarkable talent was like no other I had known.
In characteristic style, Mr. Shaw once gave the following fantastic
account of the evolution of the present work. A young American
professor, Shaw explained, wished to write a book about him.
Originally, he thought of beginning his task by writing an article for
a daily newspaper. But so rapidly did the material grow that he soon
saw the necessity of expanding the newspaper article into a long essay
for a monthly review. When the essay was completed, in view of the mass
of material in his hands, it appeared totally inadequate to express
what he really wished to say about Bernard Shaw. It then occurred to
him to write a short book entitled “G. B. S.” Alas! This plan had also
to be relinquished, for it was now manifest that in no such small
compass was it possible to do justice to his subject. At last he hit
upon the brilliant scheme of his final adoption: he would write a
history of modern thought in twenty volumes. After considering the
forerunners of his hero in the first nineteen volumes, he would devote
the twentieth solely to the treatment of George Bernard Shaw.
Such is the history of the genesis of this book--as narrated by
Shaw in the well-known Milesian manner. His whimsicalities find gay
expression in the invention of such fantastic stories, which delight
his auditors and exasperate only the persons concerning whom the
invention is concocted. For example, Mr. Shaw once laughingly declared
that “Henderson began by hailing me as an infant prodigy, and ended by
pronouncing me a genius.” And he delights in retailing the story of my
chivalrously to his rescue under the impression that he was an unknown
and struggling dramatist who sorely needed, and greatly deserved,
enthusiastic championship.
The real history of this biography, if not so interesting or amusing,
at least possesses the merit of greater accuracy. I was first drawn to
Shaw, not because he was a Socialist, a publicist, an economist. I was
concerned with neither his fame nor his obscurity. I had seen his plays
produced in America, had followed the ups and downs of his career as a
dramatist, and was marking the rise of his star successively in Austria
and Germany. The Shaw who caught and held my interest was the dramatist
of a new type. I planned writing a brief study of Bernard Shaw and his
plays less comprehensive in scope even than the subsequent studies of
Holbrook Jackson, Gilbert Chesterton and Julius Bab. Mr. Shaw furnished
me with a brief outline of his career and I set to work. After studying
his works for some months, I sent a series of queries to Mr. Shaw. Fear
fell upon me when, some time later, I received from him a card saying
that he had only come to the forty-first page of his reply; and he
assured me that if this business was to come off, it might as well be
done thoroughly. Fear was turned to consternation when the big budget
finally arrived. “I knew that you thought you were dealing simply with
a new dramatist,” wrote Mr. Shaw, “whereas, to myself, all the fuss
about Candida was only a remote ripple from the splashes I made in
the days of my warfare long ago. I do not think what you propose is
important as _my_ biography, but a thorough biography of any man
who is up to the chin in the life of his time as I have been is worth
writing as a historical document; and, therefore, if you still care
to face it, I am willing to give you what help I can. Indeed, you can
force my hand to some extent, for any story that you start will pursue
me to all eternity; and if there _is_ to be a biography, it is
worth my while to make it as accurate as possible.”
[Illustration: =Facsimile of page 54 of a letter from Bernard Shaw
to the biographer, of date January 17th, 1905.=]
In this way my original plan was developed and expanded. Mr. Shaw's
abundant sympathy and encouragement; the overflowing measure of
material afforded me; the insight into a life and a period of
tremendous significance and vitality; all these combined to offer an
opportunity not to be neglected. My interest in the subject deepened
with my knowledge. It became my aim to write--not a Rougon-Macquart
history of modern thought in twenty volumes--but an account of the
movements of a most interesting period, the last quarter of the
nineteenth and the opening decade of the twentieth centuries, _à
propos_ of Bernard Shaw. As the work progressed, Shaw warned me--and
the reporters--that in attempting his biography I had undertaken a
“terrific task,” an opinion endorsed by others. I remember one day
being introduced to Mr. Bram Stoker as Bernard Shaw's biographer;
whereupon he remarked with genuine feeling in his tone: “I can only
say that you have my profoundest sympathy!” Soon after I had fairly
embarked upon the undertaking, in fact, Shaw pointed out to me its
magnitude. “I want you to do something that will be useful to yourself
and to the world,” he wrote in February, 1905; “and that is, to make
me a mere peg on which to hang a study of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, especially as to the collectivist movement in
politics, ethics and sociology; the Ibsen-Nietzschean movement in
morals; the reaction against the materialism of Marx and Darwin; the
Wagnerian movement in music; and the anti-romantic movement (including
what people call realism, materialism and impressionism) in literature
and art.”
During the progress of the work I beheld Shaw conquer America, then
Germany, then England, and, lastly, the Scandinavian countries and
Continental Europe. I realized that my subject, beginning as a somewhat
obscure Irish author, had thrown off the garb of submerged renown,
taken the public by storm, and become the most universally popular
living dramatist, and the most frequently paragraphed man in the
world. No British dramatist--not even Shakespeare!--had conquered the
world during his lifetime; yet Shaw, just past fifty, had succeeded
in turning this cosmic trick. Clippings, pictures, journals and books
poured in upon me from every quarter of the globe. I discovered that
Shaw was a man with a past as well as a genius with a future, and I
realized the truth of his cryptic boast that he had lived for three
centuries.
Now and then, to relieve the burden of my thoughts, I would write an
essay for some German, French, or American review. But I only met with
base ingratitude from the subject of the essay. “Your articles have
been a most fearful curse to me,” Mr. Shaw wrote me on one occasion,
after the appearance of an article in which I had referred to his
unobtrusive philanthropy. “For instance, the day before yesterday I
got a typical letter. The writer has nine children; has lost his wife
suddenly, and was on the point of shooting himself in desperation for
want of fifteen pounds to get him out of his difficulties, when he
happened to come on a copy of your article. He instantly felt that here
was the man to give him the fifteen pounds and save his life. He is
only one out of a dozen who have had the same idea. I shall refer them
all to you with assurances that you have read your own character into
mine, and are a man with a feeling heart, a full pocket, and a ready
hand to give to the afflicted.”
When the book was well under way, I came to England, at Mr. Shaw's
invitation, to “study my subject.” My views of his work and genius
remained fundamentally the same, though the personal contact with one
of the most vivid and remarkable personalities of our time, quite
naturally brought about some marked modifications of my more remote
impressions, and corrected some of the minor misunderstandings which
are inevitable in the absence of a personal acquaintance. Many passages
in his works, many phases of his personality, hitherto obscure or
incomprehensible, became clear to me. I learned the meaning of his
plays, the purport of his philosophy, and the objects of his life not
from my view-point alone, but from his own. In the quiet of Ayot, we
read and discussed together the portion of the biography then written.
With frequent criticism and comment Mr. Shaw helped me to a new and
larger comprehension of his life and work.
[Illustration: =Shaw and the Biographer.=]
Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire. July, 1907. From a photograph taken
by Mrs. Bernard Shaw.
On my return to America I once more approached my task--this time with
the illumination of personality, and with the deeper knowledge of
his own interpretation of his life and works, even though Mr. Shaw's
views might not, and often did not, entirely tally with my own. The
biography was now written finally, from the first chapter to the last.
One who has pursued the errant course of a Will-o'-the-wisp may
understand somewhat of my effort to follow the devious route of G. B.
S. With interest, though I confess at times with dwindling patience, I
have followed the lure of that occasionally somewhat impishly un-kindly
light, “o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent,” till after the
fashion of his kind, he abandoned me, wayfaring, on the brink of the
abyss to save my neck as best I might. Which things are a parable.
Characteristically, and, it must be admitted, in a sense justly, he
remarks that a biography of a living man cannot be finished till he
is dead, or words to that effect. But the chances there are against
the Biographer as well as the Biographed; and I have no fancy, I
confess, that the book should be, as he once maliciously prophesied, “a
posthumous work for both of us,” nor that he should be justified in his
presentiment that we should “both die the moment we finished it.”
While nothing but death can fitly end a man's life, being no Boswell,
and having my own life to attend to as well as his, I have brought
these “twenty volumes” to a close. A man who has already, by his own
account, “lived three centuries,” is as likely to live three more; but
it is less probable that I shall see the end of them. So I take Time by
the forelock and write _finis_ to a contribution which can only
hope to cover the first three centuries.
“Who is to tackle Mr. Bernard Shaw,” Mr. Augustine Birrell once asked,
“and assign to him his proper place in the providential order of
the world?” This work is in no sense an effort to assign to Bernard
Shaw his “proper place in the providential order of the world.”
Such a task it is impossible to accomplish so long as Shaw lives to
belie it. No more is it possible to say the final word about any
genius in mid-career with limitless possibilities before him. Shaw's
masterpiece--even a series of masterpieces!--perhaps remains to be
written. His career may have only just begun.
This book is designed to give an authoritative account, biographical
and critical, of Bernard Shaw's work, art, philosophy and life up to
the present time. Perhaps its appearance is not premature. Shaw has
suffered no little from the Shavians. He has served more than once as
an excuse for propaganda and counter-propaganda. But save for one or
two glaring exceptions, the fatuities of the cult, and the image of the
shrine and burning candles have in large measure vanished--it is hoped,
to return no more. The time seems ripe for conscientious and thoughtful
consideration of the man and his work, in relation to the thought
movement of our time--irrespective of political bias and personal
prejudice. Perhaps the portrait, though neither “disparaging” nor
“unflattering,” may present the “real Shaw,” if more “unexpectedly,”
perhaps no less truly, in that I am “a stranger to the Irish-British
environment.”
If I have succeeded in removing a legendary figure from the atmosphere
of contemporary mythology, and in portraying the real man in the light
of common day, then an earnest search for the _aurea media_ of
true criticism will not have proved wholly fruitless. I hope I may
have succeeded, in some adequate degree, in exhibiting, in their true
colours, what Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once justly described to me in a
letter as “that humour and that courage which have cleansed so much of
the intellect of to-day.”
PREFACE
I have neither space nor words to express, in full measure, my
gratitude and indebtedness to the many friends, critics, scholars and
men of letters who have aided me in the preparation of this work.
First of all I wish to thank Mr. Shaw himself for his assistance.
The voluminous correspondence filled with criticism, exposition and
reminiscence; the immense trouble taken in placing ample materials at
my disposal; the personal assistance in detailed discussion of the
work--will have made this work possible. For the views expressed in
this biography Mr. Shaw is in no sense responsible. On many points
we are in hearty disagreement. At this place, I take pleasure in
expressing my indebtedness to Mrs. Shaw, for kind assistance and
helpful suggestions.
Valuable assistance, especially in connection with the earlier stages
of Shaw's career as a dramatist, was derived from Mr. William Archer's
collection of Shaviana, which he freely and most generously placed
at my disposal. The chapter on Shaw as a critic of music I could
not have written without the articles lent me by Mr. Archer. I am
likewise greatly indebted to Mr. Holbrook Jackson, who gave me free
access to his collection of Shaviana, and lent me valuable material
hitherto unknown to me, or inaccessible. During the entire course of
the preparation of the present work, I have received the counsel and
aid of that scholarly student of the drama, Mr. James Platt White, of
Buffalo, New York, who freely placed the services of himself and his
fine library of dramatic literature at my disposal.
To certain able students of Shaw's work, some of them not known to me
personally, and also to a few personal friends, I am also especially
indebted. To Mr. John Corbin, Professor William Lyon Phelps and
Professor E. E. Hale, Jr., in connection with the chapters treating
of the plays; to Mr. James Huneker, in connection with the chapter
treating of Shaw as a critic of music; to the late Mr. Samuel L.
Clemens and to Dr. C. Alphonso Smith in connection with other critical
and biographical chapters--for reading these portions of the work,
for helpful criticism in some instances, for the loan of material in
others, to all my thanks are gratefully accorded. Needless to say, they
are in no wise responsible for any faults or errors of mine. In various
ways, in lesser degree, I am indebted to Miss Sally Fairchild, Mr.
Henry George, Jr., Mr. J. T. Grein and Mr. Austin Lewis.
Of foreign critics, I wish especially to thank M. Augustin Hamon, the
French translator of Shaw's works, for his interesting suggestions, his
numerous acts of kindness, and for the rich mass of documents embodying
the continental criticism of Shaw with which he has kept me supplied;
and Herr Siegfried Trebitsch, of Vienna, the German translator of
Shaw's works, for detailed information in regard to Shaw's position
and recognition in German Europe. I cannot permit myself to omit
from the list of those to whom I am especially indebted the names of
M. Jean Blum, formerly Professor at the Lycée, Oran, Algeria; Herr
Heinrich Stümcke, editor of _Bühne und Welt_; Professor Paul
Haensel, of the University of Moscow; Dr. Julius Broutá, of Madrid, the
Spanish translator of Shaw's works; Herr Hugo Vallentin, the Swedish
translator of Shaw's works; Mr. J. M. Borup, the Danish translator of
Shaw's works; Baron Reinhold von Willebrand, editor of the _Finsk
Tidskrift_, Helsingfors, Finland; M. Auguste Filon, now resident
in England, I believe; and Dr. Georg Brandes, of Copenhagen. In the
text of the present work, or in footnotes, I trust I have not failed
to express my indebtedness to everyone, not heretofore mentioned, who,
in one way or another, has aided me in the present work. I should,
however, like to acknowledge here my indebtedness to the officials of
the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C, of the British Museum, and
of the Cambridge University Library, for their unfailing courtesy and
helpfulness.
I have taken the utmost pains to include among the illustrations the
most notable representations ever made of Shaw--sculpture, portrait,
photograph and cartoon. Moreover, the thought of presenting Shaw to
the eye in the most characteristic and representative way, as he
appeared at various stages in his career, has been constantly borne in
mind. My thanks are now expressed to M. Auguste Rodin for permission
to reproduce a photograph of his bronze bust of Shaw, the marble
replica of which, presented by Mr. Shaw, now stands in the Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin; to Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, Paris,
for a photograph of his remarkable plaster bust of Shaw, said to
have been made in forty minutes; to the Hon. Neville S. Lytton, for
permission to reproduce his unique portrait of Mr. Shaw, after the
Innocent X. of Velásquez; to Mr. Bernard Partridge for the loan of his
admirable water-colour of Shaw; to Miss Jessie Holliday for the loan
of her striking water-colour of Shaw, her photo-drawing of Mr. Webb,
and her sketch of Mr. Archer; to Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. E. T. Reed
for permission to reproduce cartoons of Shaw; to Mr. H. G. Wells for
permission to reproduce his drawing of six Socialists; to Mr. Joseph
Simpson, the artist, and Mr. J. Murray Allison, the owner, for the loan
of a black-and-white wash drawing--all the best of their kind. I was so
fortunate as to enlist the interest and co-operation of those two great
American artist-photographers, Alvin Langdon Coburn (London) and Éduard
J. Steichen (Paris). Notable portraits and pictures were taken by them
especially for this work--one Lumière autochrome and four monochromes
by Mr. Coburn, and two monochromes by Mr. Steichen. For permission
to photograph the first and last pages of the original manuscript of
_Love Among the Artists_--and also for supplying me with much
other valuable material--I am indebted to Mr. D. J. Rider. I wish to
express my thanks to Dr. M. L. Ettinghausen, of Munich, who secured
for me many playbills of the productions of Shaw's plays in German
Europe. I wish to express my thanks also to Mr. Roger Ingpen, for his
assistance in the matter of illustrations. My thanks are likewise
extended to the proprietors of _Punch_ and _Vanity Fair_ for
permission to reproduce certain cartoons which originally appeared in
those publications. In especial, I wish to thank Mrs. Shaw for her
intelligent aid in the selection of likenesses of Mr. Shaw from his own
large collection.
In accordance with the original plan for the biography of Mr. Shaw, the
present volume was to contain an appendix, treating chronologically and
critically of the production of Shaw's plays throughout the world, from
the inception of his career as a dramatist. It has proved advisable to
publish this appendix later in a separate, souvenir volume, embodying
the history of the dramatic movement inaugurated by Bernard Shaw.
Consequently, the chapters in the present volume dealing with Shaw's
plays are concerned primarily with critical discussion of the genesis
and art of the plays, touching upon their production only in the most
casual and adventitious way.
Mr. Shaw is fond of saying: “I am a typical Irishman; my family came
from Hampshire.” His lineal ancestor, Captain William Shaw, was of
Scotch descent; lived in Hampshire, England; and in 1689 went to
Ireland, where the family has since lived. The strains in Mr. Shaw's
ancestry are so complicated and interwoven, that it has seemed
important to publish a genealogical chart of the Shaw family. The
researches were conducted by the expert genealogist, Rev. W. Ball
Wright, M.A., Osbaldwick Vicarage, York, at the instance and under the
direction of Mr. Shaw himself. The chart, compiled from the data of Mr.
Wright, was prepared by the experts of the Grafton Genealogical Press,
New York.
* * * * *
To my wife, for her untiring assistance and inestimably valuable
criticism, I cannot cancel my debt of gratitude by any expressions,
however eloquent. I could not have written this book without her aid.
It is to her intellectual directness and to her genius for suggestive
criticism, that the present volume owes very much of whatever merit it
may possess.
ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND.
_November 30th, 1910._
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
The association of America and Bernard Shaw connotes, at the first
glance, incongruity if not mutual antipathy. There is at once a
suggestion of conflict between the most individualistic personality
of the day and the most individualistic nation of the world. One of
America's deplorable, if amiable, weaknesses is the predilection for
inviting estimates of herself from supercilious people who know nothing
about her. And one of Shaw's amusing idiosyncracies is his fancy for
discoursing freely upon subjects of which he is pathetically ignorant.
Bull-baiting is his daily pastime; but now and then he eagerly yields
to the tempting invitation to take a new fling at America. So from
time to time we have the diverting spectacle of a remarkably clever
and shrewd Irishman making quaintly stupid and delightfully inapposite
strictures upon a country he has never visited and upon a people among
whom he has never lived or even sojourned.
Imagine a Martian making his first studies of the United States through
the sole intermediary of the writings and discourses of Mr. Bernard
Shaw. What a lurid and shocking picture would be presented to his
view! The United States, thus portrayed, is a “nation of villagers,”
suburban in instinct and parochial in moral judgments, “overridden
with old-fashioned creeds and a capitalistic religion.” The Americans
are an “appalling, horrible, narrow lot,” and America is a “land of
unthinking, bigoted persecution.” The American woman is attractive,
beautiful, and well-dressed--but has no soul. The American man is a
machine of voluble activity without progressive impetus, whose single
aim is the acquisition of wealth. America is a semi-barbaric country,
incessantly shocking the world with its crass exposures of political
corruption and industrial brigandage, murders, manslaughters, and
lynchings, peonage, sweat-shops, child-labor, and white slavery. It
is fifty years behind England, and a hundred years behind Europe, in
art, literature, science, religion, and government--in a word, in
civilization.
This lurid chromo, painted in crude and primary colors, is clearly
the Shavian reflection of English press-opinion of America and the
Americans--if it is not one of Mr. Shaw's most successful comic
fictions. In whatever proportion jest and earnest may be commingled
in such a comic fiction, certainly it is disappointing to find a man
who has often proven himself an exceedingly clear-sighted observer
and astute thinker with respect to subjects upon which he is fully
informed, betray so pathetic an ignorance of the realities of American
life. Mr. Shaw has been content to acquire his notions concerning
America at second hand, and often at third and fourth--a method of
acquiring information which is to be recommended for ease rather than
for accuracy.
The English newspaper is, actually, a standing menace to perfectly
equable relations between England and America. There is a yellowness
of sensationalism, and there is a yellowness of deliberate
misrepresentation. There is a deeper, more subtle inaccuracy than that
which inheres in the distortion of facts; it is the inaccuracy which
inheres in the suppression of facts. The picture of America daily
presented to English eyes through the medium of the English press is a
caricature--a broad, crude caricature. It is so flagrant as to lead to
the lurid chromo of America achieved by Mr. Shaw. The English visitor
to the United States, who gets no further than the hotels of the great
cities and the rear platform of an observation car, catches only the
most superficial of impressions--chiefly of the hurried metropolitan
search for wealth and of the natural, still almost primitive, wildness
of the landscape. England means censoriousness; and English curiosity
and inquisitiveness are more than often misguided--searching into and
accentuating those phases of American life and character which are most
open to adverse criticism, and overlooking or ignoring those indicative
features and attributes which are most suggestive in their utility and
value.
In reality, England and America have much to learn from each other that
will be mutually helpful and beneficial. That spirit of generosity
which characterizes America in her relations to all the world is the
significant deficiency in the English national character. America is
the supreme exemplar of internationalism. America is open-mindedness,
enterprise, acquisitiveness. England, as instanced most signally in
her splendid public institutions, is unsparingly generous--liberally
sharing her treasures with all the rest of the world. But she is
deplorably retrograde, as a nation, through declining to utilize
the best that is to be found in other nationalities and other
civilizations. It is, perhaps, sometimes more generous to receive
than to give. England austerely plays the _rôle_ of model to
other nations; but she cannot abide to “sit at the feet of wisdom,” to
appropriate for her own advancement the good and the useful in others,
whosoever those others may be. England's besetting sin of national
vanity is the canker in the flower of her civilization, the ominous
source of her progressive relinquishment of international supremacy.
On the other hand, America has much to learn from England, and from
that phase of English spirit signally exemplified in the person of
Bernard Shaw. For if he is anything, Shaw is a free thinker--in the
original and entirely uncorrupted meaning of that term. His is that
boundless naïveté so fertile for truth's own discovery. Not only is
he free thinker: he is equally free writer and free speaker. He says
exactly what he thinks--and a good deal more. He coats the pill of the
satirist with the sugar of the artist; his wit stands sponsor for his
irreverence. In Nietzschean phrase, Shaw is a “good European.” He is
fully abreast of the most advanced thought of Europe, and consistently
maintains relations with the latest developments in the fine arts,
philosophy, and sociology. For many years, he has served as a channel
for the influx into English-speaking countries of the streams of
European consciousness. As an original thinker, Shaw has independently
arrived at many conclusions which have been more rigorously elaborated
by numerous modern thinkers, from Stirner, Nietzsche and Ibsen to
Maeterlinck, Bergson and James. As the literary popularizer of
contemporary philosophic ideas, Bernard Shaw is one of the heralds of
that steadily evolving spirit of cosmopolitan culture which bids fair
to give the intellectual note of the twentieth century.
In this hour of America's great national resurgence in the effort to
purge the body politic of glaring social evils, it is helpful to study
Bernard Shaw and to discover that his most distinctive and noteworthy
service as a public character has been his splendid struggle for the
inculcation of the highest ideals of unselfish public service. England
far surpasses America in the relative amount of public service rendered
by individuals and public organizations in behalf of the general
welfare, without remuneration or the hope of remuneration. “I am of
the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community,” Bernard Shaw
has finely declared, “and as long as I live it is my privilege to do
for it whatsoever I can.” Only when individual leaders of opinion in
America, of which there is now no dearth, are supported everywhere by
an awakened public conscience and a universally functioning spirit of
individual responsibility, shall we secure throughout our country, from
hamlet to metropolis, the much desiderated remedy for social abuse and
the progressive perfecting of popular government.
ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
Salisbury, N. C., September 4, 1911.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION v
PREFACE xi
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION xv
I. DUBLIN DAYS 3
II. LONDON 31
III. THE NOVELIST 59
IV. THE FABIAN SOCIETY 89
V. THE CART AND TRUMPET 121
VI. SHAVIAN SOCIALISM 151
VII. THE ART CRITIC 195
VIII. THE MUSIC CRITIC 231
IX. THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 261
X. THE PLAYWRIGHT--I 293
XI. THE PLAYWRIGHT--II 335
XII. THE PLAYWRIGHT--III 363
XIII. THE TECHNICIAN 409
XIV. THE DRAMATIST 431
XV. ARTIST AND PHILOSOPHER 453
XVI. THE MAN 491
APPENDIX.--A GENEALOGY OF THE SHAW FAMILY. 513
ILLUSTRATIONS
COVER DESIGN
A Satyric Mask. _From an original in the Department of Greek
and Roman Antiquities, British Museum._
COLOURED PLATES
George Bernard Shaw.
_Lumière autochrome, by Alvin Langdon Coburn_ _Frontispiece_
Ahenobarbus at Rehearsal. _Water-colour of G. B. Shaw,
by J. Bernard Partridge_ _facing p._ 246
PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES
George Bernard Shaw. “The Diabolonian.” _Monochrome
by Éduard J. Steichen_ _facing p._ 80
George Bernard Shaw. “The Philosopher.” _Monochrome
by Alvin Langdon Coburn_ " 468
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
Shaw and the biographer. _Photo by Mrs. Bernard Shaw_ _facing p._ viii
Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, George Carr Shaw, etc. " 18
Shaw at the age of twenty-three " 46
Sidney Webb " 92
Henry George " 96
Karl Marx " 96
Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2 _p._ 103
The Socialist (George Bernard Shaw in 1891) _facing p._ 116
The Cart and Trumpet " 144
A Study of Six Socialists " 164
Cover design of Fabian Essays, 1890. _By Walter Crane_ _p._ 179
Fitzroy Square, London _facing p._ 196
William Morris " 211
George Bernard Shaw. A Cartoon. _By Max Beerbohm_ " 232
Pope Innocent X. " 262
The Modern Pope of Wit and Wisdom. _By Neville S. Lytton_ " 262
John Bull's other Playwright. A Cartoon. _By E. T. Reed_ " 270
William Archer. _By Jessie Holliday_ " 276
Bernard Shaw. _Black-and-white wash sketch
by Joseph Simpson_ " 294
In Consultation (G. B. S. and the author).
_By É. J. Steichen_ " 336
H. Granville Barker. _By A. L. Coburn_ " 372
Shaw's House at Ayot St. Lawrence " 422
George Bernard Shaw. _Photo by Histed_ " 436
Shaw's present home in London (10, Adelphi Terrace) " 446
A plaster bust of Shaw. _By Troubetzkoy_ " 480
G. B. S. (A Cartoon). _By Joseph Simpson_ _p._ 497
A bust of Shaw. _By Rodin_ _facing p._ 500
A Prophet, the Press, and Some People.
_From a water-colour by Jessie Holliday_ " 506
FACSIMILES
MANUSCRIPTS
A page of a letter from Bernard Shaw
to the biographer _facing p._ vi
The first and last pages of original MS. of _Love
Among the Artists_ _pp._ 65-66
PLAYBILLS, ETC.
PAGE
Sunday Afternoon Lectures. March, 1886 126
_The Philanderer._ Berlin 301
_Mrs. Warren's Profession._ Munich 301
_Arms and the Man._ London. First performance 311
_You Never Can Tell._ Stockholm 326
_The Man of Destiny._ Frankfort 326
_Candida._ Paris 349
_Candida._ Brussels 352
_Man and Superman._ New York 365
_Candida._ New York 379
_The Doctor's Dilemma._ Cologne 395
_Arms and the Man._ Frankfort 395
_Press Cuttings._ London 403
A GENEALOGICAL CHART _facing p._ 514
DUBLIN DAYS
“If religion is that which binds men to one another, and
irreligion that which sunders, then must I testify that I
found the religion of my country in its musical genius and its
irreligion in its churches and drawing-rooms.”--_In the Days of
My Youth._ By Bernard Shaw. _Mainly About People_, 1898.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW:
HIS LIFE AND WORKS
CHAPTER I
It is a circumstance of no little significance that Bernard Shaw and
Oscar Wilde, two dramatists whose plays have achieved so notable a
success on the European stage, should both have been born in Dublin
within two years of one another. It has been the good fortune of no
other living British or Irish dramatist of our day to receive the
enthusiastic acclaim of the most cultured public of continental Europe.
What more fitting and natural than this sustention, by the countrymen
of Swift and Sheridan, of the Celtic reputation for brilliancy,
cleverness and wit?
George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26th, 1856--well-nigh a century
later than his countryman and fellow-townsman, Richard Brinsley
Sheridan. Only one year before, in 1855, was born Shaw's sole rival
to the place of the foremost living dramatist of the United Kingdom,
Arthur Wing Pinero. It is an interesting coincidence that the year
which saw the demise of that “first man of his century,” Heinrich
Heine, also witnessed the birth of the brilliant and original spirit
who is, in some sense, his natural and logical successor: Bernard
Shaw. There is some suggestion of the workings of that wonderful law
of compensation, which Emerson preached with such high seriousness,
in this synchronous relation of birth and death, connecting Heine
and Shaw. The circumstance might be said to proclaim the unbroken
continuity of the comic spirit.
Bernard Shaw possesses the unique faculty of befuddling the brains
of more sane writers than any other living man. The critic of
conventional view-point is dismayed by the discovery that Shaw
is bound by no conventions whatever, with the possible exception
of the mechanical conventions of the stage. Shaw is essentially
an intellectual, not an emotional, talent; the critic of large
imaginative sympathy discovers in him one who on occasion disclaims the
possession of imagination. Unlike the idealist critic, Shaw is never a
hero-worshipper: he derides heroism and makes game of humanity. To the
analytic critic, with his schools, his classifications, his labellings,
Shaw is the elusive and unanalyzable quantity--a fantastic original, a
talent wholly _sui generis_. With all his realism, he cannot be called
the exponent of a school. It would be nearer the truth to say that he
is himself a school.
It is futile to attempt to measure Shaw with the foot-rule of prejudice
or convention. Only by placing oneself exactly at his peculiar point
of view and recording the impressions received without prejudice,
preference or caricature, can one ever hope to fathom the mystery of
this disquieting intelligence. Most mocking when most serious, most
fantastic when most earnest; his every word belies his intent. The
antipode to the farcicality of pompous dulness, his gravity is that of
the masquerader in motley, the mordant humour of the licensed fool.
Contradiction between manner and meaning, between method and essence,
constitutes the real secret of his career. The truly noteworthy
consideration is not that Shaw is incorrigibly fantastic and frivolous;
the alarming fact is that he is remarkably consistent and profoundly
in earnest. The willingness of the public to accept the artist at his
face value blinds its eyes to the profound, almost grim, seriousness of
the man. The great solid and central fact of his life is that he has
used the artistic mask of humour to conceal the unswerving purpose of
the humanitarian and social reformer. The story of the career of George
Bernard Shaw, in whom is found the almost unprecedented combination
of the most brilliantly whimsical humour with the most serious and
vital purpose, has already, even in our time, taken on somewhat of the
character of a legend. It might become a fairy story, in very fact, if
we did not finally determine to relate it, to associate it in printed
form with the life of our time.
How to write the biography of so complex a nature? The greatest living
English dramatic critic once confessed that he never approached a
more difficult task than that of interpretation of Shaw's plays. One
of Shaw's most intimate friends once suggested that the title of his
biography would probably be “The Court Jester who was Hanged.”
A few years ago, in discussing with me the plan of his biography, Mr.
Shaw suggested for it the euphonious if journalistic title--_G. B.
S. Biography and Autobiography_. Though the book as a whole is not
developed along the lines originally suggested sufficiently to render
that title truly applicable, for this first chapter surely none could
be more suitable. These “Dublin Days” have been reproduced by Shaw with
much amplitude, and more or less precision; so that, accepting Shaw's
definition of Autobiography and mine of Biography, the result will be a
narrative of much falsehood and perhaps a little truth.
“All autobiographies are lies,” is Shaw's fundamental thesis. “I do
not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies. No
man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime,
involving, as it must, the truth about his family and friends and
colleagues. And no man is good enough to tell the truth in a document
which he suppresses until there is nobody left alive to contradict
him.” The true, the real autobiography will never be written; no man,
no woman--Rousseau, Marie Bashkirtseff?--ever dared to write it. Were
one to attempt to write the book entitled, _My Heart Laid Bare_, as Poe
says somewhere in his _Marginalia_, “the paper would shrivel and blaze
at every touch of the fiery pen.” Shaw once “tried the experiment,
within certain limits, of being candidly autobiographical.” He produced
no permanent impression, because nobody ever believed him; but the
extent to which he stood compromised with his relations may well be
imagined. His few confidential reminiscences won him the reputation of
being the “most reckless liar in London”; they reeked too strongly of
the diabolism mentioned by Poe. And yet we must accept Shaw's comically
irreverent autobiographical details, in view of his assertion that they
are attempts at genuine autobiography.
In the autobiographical accounts of his youth and early life, as
well as in many conversations on the subject with Mr. Shaw, I have
discovered ample explanation of his scepticism concerning the binding
ties of blood, of the strangely unsympathetic, even hostile, relations
between parents and children displayed throughout his entire work.
These autobiographical accounts reveal on his part less filial
affection than a sort of comic disrespect for the mistakes, faults and
frailties of his parents and relatives.
Mr. Shaw's grandfather was a Dublin notary and stockbroker, who left
a large family unprovided for at his death. George Carr Shaw, his
son and Bernard Shaw's father, was an Irish Protestant gentleman;
his rank--a very damnable one in his son's eyes--was that of a poor
relation of that particular grade of the _haute bourgeoisie_ which
makes strenuous social pretensions. He had no money, it seems, no
education, no profession, no manual skill, no qualification of any sort
for any definite social function. Moreover, he had been brought up “to
believe that there was an inborn virtue of gentility in all Shaws,
since they revolved impecuniously in a sort of vague second cousinship
round a baronetcy.” His people, who were prolific and numerous, always
spoke of themselves as “the Shaws” with an intense sense of their own
importance--as one would speak of the Hohenzollerns or the Romanoffs.
An amiable, but timid man, the father's worst faults were inefficiency
and hypocrisy. His son could only say of him that he might have been
a weaker brother of Charles Lamb. Proclaiming, and half believing,
himself a teetotaller, he was in practice often a furtive drinker.
The one trait of his which was reproduced in his son, his antithesis
in almost every other respect, was a sense of humour, an appreciation
of the comic force of anti-climax. “When I was a child, he gave me my
first dip in the sea in Killiney Bay,” writes his son. “He prefaced it
by a very serious exhortation on the importance of learning to swim,
culminating in these words: 'When I was a boy of only fourteen, my
knowledge of swimming enabled me to save your Uncle Robert's life.'
Then, seeing that I was deeply impressed, he stooped, and added
confidentially in my ear: 'And, to tell the truth, I never was so sorry
for anything in my life afterwards.' He then plunged into the ocean,
enjoyed a thoroughly refreshing swim, and chuckled all the way home.”
All the Shaws, because of that remote baronetcy, Mr. Shaw once gravely
assured me, considered it the first duty of a respectable Government
to provide them with sinecures. After holding a couple of clerkships,
Shaw's father, by some means, finally asserted his family claim on the
State with sufficient success to attain a post in the Four Courts--the
Dublin Courts of Justice. This post in the Civil Service must have
been a gross sinecure, for by 1850 it was abolished, and he was
pensioned off. He then sold his small pension and went into business
as a wholesale dealer in corn, a business of which he had not the
slightest knowledge. “I cannot begin, like Ruskin, by saying that my
father was an entirely honest merchant,” said his son in one of his
autobiographical confidences. “I don't know whether he was or not; I
do know that he was an entirely unsuccessful one.” In addition to a
warehouse and office in the city, he had a flour mill at a place called
Dolphin's Barn, a few miles out. This mill, attached to the business as
a matter of ceremony, perhaps paid its own rent, since the machinery
was generally in motion. But its chief use, according to Bernard Shaw,
“was to amuse me and my boon companions, the sons of my father's
partner.”
When he was about forty years of age, Shaw's father married Lucinda
Elizabeth Gurly, the daughter of a country gentleman. Students in
eugenics might find in their disparity in age--a difference of twenty
years--some explanation of the singular qualities and unique genius
of their son. The estate in Carlow, now owned by Mr. Shaw, descended
to him from his maternal grandfather, Walter Bagnal Gurly, through
his mother's brother. Miss Gurly was brought up with extreme severity
by her maternal aunt, Ellen Whitcroft, a sweet-faced lady, with
a deformed back and a ruthless will, who gave her niece the most
rigorous training, with the intention of subsequently leaving her a
fortune. The result of this course of education upon Miss Gurly was
ignorance alike of the value of money and of the world; her marriage,
hastily contracted when her home was made uncomfortable for her by
her father's second marriage, gave her a sufficient knowledge of
both. Her aunt, angered by this unexpected and vexatious conduct on
the part of this absurdly inexperienced young woman, her erstwhile
paragon and _protégée_, summarily disinherited her. In many ways, Miss
Gurly's marriage proved a disappointment. Her husband, one of the most
impecunious of men, was far too poor to enable her to live on the
scale to which she had been accustomed. Indeed, he was anything but a
satisfactory husband for a clever woman. It was in her music that Mrs.
Shaw found solace and comfort--a refuge from domestic disappointment.
The formative influences of Shaw's early life were of a nature to
inculcate in him that disbelief in popular education, that disrespect
for popular religion, and that contempt for social pretensions which
are so deeply ingrained in his work and character. Is it any wonder,
after his youthful experience with orthodox religion, that, like
Tennyson, he cherished a contempt for the God of the British: “an
immeasurable clergyman”? In his own perverse and brilliant way, he has
told us the history of his progressive revolt against the religious
standards of his family:
“I believe Ireland, as far as the Protestant gentry are
concerned, to be the most irreligious country in the world. I
was christened by my uncle; and as my godfather was intoxicated
and did not turn up, the sexton was ordered to promise and vow
in his place, precisely as my uncle might have ordered him
to put more coals on the vestry fire. I was never confirmed,
and I believe my parents never were either. The seriousness
with which English families take this rite, and the deep
impression it makes on many children, was a thing of which I
had no conception. Protestantism in Ireland is not a religion;
it is a side in political faction, a class prejudice, a
conviction that Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons,
who will go to hell when they die, and leave Heaven in the
exclusive possession of ladies and gentlemen. In my childhood
I was sent every Sunday to a Sunday school where genteel
children repeated texts, and were rewarded with little cards
inscribed with other texts. After an hour of this, we were
marched into the adjoining church, to fidget there until our
neighbours must have wished the service over as heartily as
we did. I suffered this, not for my salvation, but because my
father's respectability demanded it. When we went to live in
the country, remote from social criticism, I broke with the
observance and never resumed it.
“What helped to make this 'church' a hot-bed of all the social
vices was that no working folk ever came to it. In England the
clergy go among the poor, and sometimes do try desperately
to get them to come to church. In Ireland the poor are
Catholics--'Papists,' as my Orange grandfather called them. The
Protestant Church has nothing to do with them. Its snobbery is
quite unmitigated. I cannot say that in Ireland every man is
the worse for what he calls his religion. I can only say that
all the people I knew were.”
One must beware of the error of exaggerating the influence of
Puritanism upon Shaw's character in his youth. Mr. Shaw has laughed
consumedly at Mr. Chesterton for speaking of his “narrow, Puritan
home.” A little incident may serve to reflect the tone of the heated
religious controversies that went on in Mr. Shaw's home when he was a
lad. Shaw's father, one of his maternal uncles, and a visitor engaged
one day in a discussion over the raising of Lazarus. Mr. Shaw held the
evangelical view: that it took place exactly as described. The visitor
was a pure sceptic, and dismissed the story as manifestly impossible.
But Shaw's uncle described it as a put-up job, in which Jesus had made
a confederate of Lazarus--had made it worth his while, or asked him
for friendship's sake to pretend he was dead and at the proper moment
to pretend to come to life. “Now imagine me as a little child,” said
Shaw in narrating the story, “in my 'narrow, Puritan home,' listening
to this discussion. I listened with very great interest, and I confess
to you that the view which recommended itself most to me was that of my
maternal uncle, and I think, on reflection, you will admit that that
was the right and healthy point of view for a boy to take, because my
maternal uncle's view appealed to a sense of humour, which is a very
good thing and a very human thing, whereas the other two views--one
appealing to my mere credulity and the other to mere scepticism--really
did not appeal to anything at all that had any genuine religious
value.... Now that was really the tone of religious controversy at that
time, and it almost always showed us the barrenness on the side of
religion very much more than it did on the side of scepticism.” This
anecdote brings irresistibly to mind Mark Twain's story of the old
sea-captain who declared that Elijah had won out in the altar contest,
not because of his superiority over the other prophets, or of his God
to theirs, but because, under the pretence that it was water, he had
had the foresight to inundate his altar with--petroleum!
A short while after he entered a land office in Dublin as an employee,
a position secured for him by his uncle, Frederick Shaw, a high
official in the Valuation Office, it was discovered that the young
Shaw, then in his teens, instead of being an extremely correct
Protestant and church-goer, was actually what used to be known in
those days as an “infidel.” Many were the arguments, on the subject
of religion and faith, that arose among the employees of the firm,
arguments that usually went hard for young Shaw, the novice, untrained
in dialectic. “What is the use of arguing,” one of the apprentices,
Humphrey Lloyd, said to Shaw one day, “when you don't know what
a syllogism is?” As he once told me, Mr. Shaw promptly went and
found out what it was, learning, like Molière's hero, that he had
been making syllogisms all his life without knowing it. Mr. Uniacke
Townshend, Shaw's employer, a pillar of the church--and of the Royal
Dublin Society--so far respected his freedom of conscience as to make
no attempt to reason with him, only imposing the condition that the
subject be not discussed in the office. Although secretly chafing
under the restraint, young Shaw for a time honourably submitted to the
stern limitation; but an outbreak of some sort was inevitable. The
immediate occasion of his first alarming appearance in print was the
visit of the American evangelists, Moody and Sankey, to Dublin. Their
arrival in Great Britain created a considerable sensation, and young
Shaw went to hear them when they came to Dublin. Not only was he
wholly unmoved by their eloquence, but he actually felt bound to inform
the public that, if this were Religion, then he was, on the whole,
an Atheist. Imagine the extreme horror of his numerous uncles when
they read his letter, solemnly printed in _Public Opinion_.[1] These
evangelistic services, he maintained, “were not of a religious, but a
secular, not to say profane, character.” Further, he said: “Respecting
the effect of the revival on individuals I may mention that it has a
tendency to make them highly objectionable members of society, and
induces their unconverted friends to desire a speedy reaction, which
either soon takes place or the revived one relapses slowly into his
previous benighted condition as the effect fades; and although many
young men have been snatched from careers of dissipation by Mr. Moody's
exhortations, it remains doubtful whether the change is not merely in
the nature of the excitement rather than in the moral nature of the
individual.”
The complete story of his “honest doubts,” and his conscientious revolt
against the hollowness and inhuman frigidity of the religion he saw
practised around him, he has related in the most ludicrously irreverent
vein:
“When I was a little boy, I was compelled to go to church on
Sunday; and though I escaped from that intolerable bondage
before I was ten, it prejudiced me so violently against
church-going that twenty years elapsed before, in foreign
lands and in pursuit of works of art, I became once more a
church-goer. To this day, my flesh creeps when I recall that
genteel suburban Irish Protestant church, built by Roman
Catholic workmen who would have considered themselves damned
had they crossed its threshold afterwards. Every separate
stone, every pane of glass, every fillet of ornamental
ironwork--half dog-collar, half-coronet--in that building must
have sowed a separate evil passion in my young heart. Yes;
all the vulgarity, savagery, and bad blood which has marred
my literary work, was certainly laid upon me in that house of
Satan! The mere nullity of the building could make no positive
impression on me; but what could, and did, were the unnaturally
motionless figures of the congregation in their Sunday clothes
and bonnets, and their set faces, pale with the malignant
rigidity produced by the suppression of all expression. And
yet these people were always moving and watching one another
by stealth, as convicts communicate with one another. So was
I. I had been told to keep my restless little limbs still all
through the interminable hours; not to talk; and, above all,
to be happy and holy there and glad that I was not a wicked
little boy playing in the fields instead of worshipping God. I
hypocritically acquiesced; but the state of my conscience may
be imagined, especially as I implicitly believed that all the
rest of the congregation were perfectly sincere and good. I
remember at the time dreaming one night that I was dead and had
gone to Heaven. The picture of Heaven which the efforts of the
then Established Church of Ireland had conveyed to my childish
imagination, was a waiting-room with walls of pale sky-coloured
tabbinet, and a pew-like bench running all round, except at
one corner, where there was a door. I was, somehow, aware
that God was in the next room, accessible through the door. I
was seated on the bench with my ankles tightly interlaced to
prevent my legs dangling, behaving myself with all my might
before the grown-up people, who all belonged to the Sunday
congregation, and were either sitting on the bench as if at
church or else moving solemnly in and out as if there were a
dead person in the house. A grimly-handsome lady, who usually
sat in a corner seat near me in church, and whom I believed to
be thoroughly conversant with the arrangements of the Almighty,
was to introduce me presently into the next room--a moment
which I was supposed to await with joy and enthusiasm. Really,
of course, my heart sank like lead within me at the thought;
for I felt that my feeble affectation of piety could not impose
on Omniscience, and that one glance of that all-searching eye
would discover that I had been allowed to come to Heaven by
mistake. Unfortunately for the interest of the narrative, I
woke, or wandered off into another dream, before the critical
moment arrived. But it goes far enough to show that I was by no
means an insusceptible subject; indeed, I am sure, from other
early experiences of mine, that if I had been turned loose in
a real church, and allowed to wander and stare about, or hear
noble music there instead of that most accursed 'Te Deum' of
Jackson's and a senseless droning of the 'Old Hundredth,' I
should never have seized the opportunity of a great evangelical
revival, which occurred to me when I was still in my teens, to
begin my literary career with a letter to the Press, announcing
with inflexible materialistic logic, and to the extreme horror
of my respectable connections, that I was an atheist. When,
later on, I was led to the study of the economic basis of
the respectability of that and similar congregations, I was
inexpressibly relieved to find that it represented a mere phase
of industrial confusion, and could never have substantiated its
claims to my respect, if, as a child, I had been able to bring
it to book. To this very day, whenever there is the slightest
danger of my being mistaken for a votary of the blue tabbinet
waiting-room or a supporter of that morality in which wrong
and right, base and noble, evil and good, really mean nothing
more than the kitchen and the drawing-room, I hasten to claim
honourable exemption, as atheist and socialist, from any such
complicity.”[2]
The lesson of the selfishness and insincerity of society ineradicably
impressed upon Ibsen's mind in his childhood days is paralleled by
a similar experience in the youth of Shaw. The ingrained snobbery
of society as he saw it, the contempt for those lower in social
pretensions, if not in social station, revolted the lad's whole
nature. He soon became animated with a Carlylean contempt for the
snobbery of “respectability in its thousand gigs.” As in the case of
the disconsolate Stendhal, Shaw was not long in discovering that his
family revered what he despised, and detested what he enthusiastically
admired. An incident he relates, in illustration of this trait in his
father, serves in great measure to explain Shaw's scorn, in after
life, of the blandishments of the drawing-room, his intolerance of
fashionable society.
“One evening I was playing on the street with a schoolfellow
of mine, when my father came home. He questioned me about this
boy, who was the son of a prosperous ironmonger. The feelings
of my father, who was not prosperous and who sold flour by the
sack, when he learned that his son had played on the public
street with the son of a man who sold nails by the pennyworth
in a shop are not to be described. He impressed on me that
my honour, my self-respect, my human dignity, all stood upon
my determination not to associate with persons engaged in
retail trade. Probably this was the worst crime my father ever
committed. And yet I do not see what else he could have taught
me, short of genuine republicanism, which is the only possible
school of good manners.
“Imagine being taught to despise a workman, and to respect a
gentleman, in a country where every rag of excuse for gentility
is stripped off by poverty! Imagine being taught that there
is one God--a Protestant and a perfect gentleman--keeping
Heaven select for the gentry; and an idolatrous impostor
called the Pope, smoothing the hell-ward way for the mass of
the people, only admissible into the kitchens of most of the
aforesaid gentry as 'thorough servants' (general servants) at
eight pounds a year! Imagine the pretensions of the English
peerage on the incomes of the English lower middle-class. I
remember Stopford Brooke one day telling me that he discerned
in my books an intense and contemptuous hatred for society. No
wonder! though, like him, I strongly demur to the usurpation
of the word 'society' by an unsocial system of setting class
against class and creed against creed.”[3]
As to education, in the ordinary sense, the lad had none: he never
learned anything at school. He found no incentive to study under the
tutelage of people who put _Cæsar_ and _Horace_ into the hands of small
boys and expected the result to be an elegant taste and knowledge of
the world. His first teacher was his uncle, the Rev. William George
Carroll, Vicar of St. Bride's, Dublin--reputed the first Protestant
clergyman in Ireland to declare for Home Rule. We have one brief but
comprehensive glimpse of his school life at this period of immaturity:
“The word education brought to my mind four successive schools where my
parents got me out of the way for half a day. In these _crèches_--for
that is exactly what they were--I learned nothing. How I could have
been such a sheep as to go to them, when I could just as easily have
flatly refused, puzzles and exasperates me to this day. They did me a
great deal of harm, and no good whatever. However, my parents thought
I ought to go, being too young to have any confidence in my own
instincts. So I went. And if you can in any public way convey to these
idiotic institutions my hearty curse, you will relieve my feelings
infinitely.... As a schoolboy I was incorrigibly idle and worthless.
And I am proud of the fact.” In the preface to _John Bull's Other
Island_, Shaw has referred in particular to the Wesleyan Connexional
School, now Wesley College, Dublin. Here the Wesleyan catechism was
taught without protest to pupils, the majority of whom were Church
(Protestant Irish) boys! So long as their sons were taught genuine
Protestantism, the parents didn't bother about the particular brand.
The school's most famous alumni are Sir Robert Hart and Bernard Shaw.
In the school roll-book Shaw is entered for the first time as attending
on April 13th, 1867. Unfortunately, only a bare record of his class
marks is given. “He seems to have been generally near or at the bottom
of his classes,” said the principal, the Rev. William Crawford, in a
letter to me of date August 6th, 1909; “but, perhaps typically of the
man, he jumped up suddenly to second place once in his first quarter,
and does not seem to have aspired again. He was entered in the 'First
Latin Class,' I suppose the most junior division on the classical
side.” Shaw sat in class between a classic and a mathematician, both in
after years distinguished scholars. Each did his appropriate share of
young Shaw's work. In return Shaw would narrate for their delectation,
according to the account of one of the twain, numerous stories from the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, in his own peculiar and inimitable vein. Shaw
was only in his tenth year when he entered the Wesleyan Connexional
School; and in that year Dr. H. R. Parker, of Trinity College, Dublin,
was head master and Rev. T. A. McKee was governor. Apparently, no
picture of the old school now exists; the new building stands near, but
not on, the site of the old school.[4]
It might be imagined, from the evidence of Shaw's own confessions
just detailed, that it was impossible for a boy who “took refuge in
idleness” at school to acquire any sort of an education; but such a
supposition is very wide of the mark. The discipline he received at
home, the discipline of _laissez faire et laissez aller_, which might
have spoiled the average boy, had just the opposite effect upon this
strangely inquisitive, alarmingly self-assertive child. If he lost
somewhat in youthful gentleness and tenderness, he gained greatly in
manly determination and independence. If he was never treated as a
child, at least he was let do what he liked. Thus the habit of freedom,
which, as he once assured me, most Englishmen and Englishwomen of his
class never acquire, came to him naturally.
One might say of Shaw's mother that she was the antithesis of Candida
on the domestic plane. In many respects she was a forerunner of the
“new woman” of our own day--independent, self-reliant, indifferent
to public opinion. She was, in her son's phrase, “constitutionally
unfitted for the sentiment of wifehood and motherhood”; her genuine
energy and talents were bestowed almost undividedly upon music. Not
long after her marriage to Mr. Shaw, she became the right hand of an
energetic genius, who had formed a musical society and an orchestra
in Dublin. These organizations were composed wholly of amateurs--and
unavoidably so--in view of the state of musical activity in Dublin at
the time. By all the local professors of music this energetic genius
and man of successful ambitions, George John Vandaleur Lee, was held
in the greatest contempt, even hatred, because he had repudiated
their traditions, and thereby actually trained himself to become an
effective teacher of singing. Through actual dissection, as well as
by practical singing, he studied the anatomy of the throat until he
was able, by watching and hearing a singer, to state with certainty
the exact nature of the physical processes going on. From Badeali, an
Italian opera singer, who preserved a splendid voice to a great age, he
learned the secret of voice preservation. This method he taught to Mrs.
Shaw so successfully that when she gave up singing, late in life, it
was not because her voice failed her, but because her age made singing
ridiculous.[5]
Lee's twofold influence upon the young Shaw--indirectly through Mrs.
Shaw's musical activities, and directly through the inspiration of
his personal character, one of phenomenal competence and unswerving
determination--is very markedly visible in the Shaw of after years,
the brilliant musical critic and the doggedly persistent seeker after
worthy success and merited fame. Mrs. Shaw studied singing under Lee,
and thorough bass under Logier. She assisted Lee in all his various and
varied enterprises, copying orchestral parts and scoring songs for him.
She led the chorus for him at the musical society; and at different
times she appeared in operas produced and directed by Lee, playing
Azucena in _Il Trovatore_, Donna Anna in _Don Giovanni_, Margaret in
Gounod's _Faust_, and Lucrezia Borgia in Donizetti's opera of that
name. Finally, in order to facilitate matters, Mrs. Shaw kept house for
Lee by setting up a joint household, a sort of “blameless _ménage à
trois_”--the phrase her son used in speaking of it to me--which lasted
until 1872, the year of Lee's departure for London.
As all these operas were rehearsed at his home, it was only natural
that Bernard Shaw should pick up, quite unconsciously, indeed, a
knowledge of that extraordinary literature of modern music, from Bach
to Wagner, with which his mother and Lee were so familiar. While he
was yet a small boy, he whistled and sang, from the first bar to the
last, not only the operas he frequently heard, but also the many
oratorios rendered from time to time by the musical society. Indeed,
Mr. Shaw once remarked that, besides their respectability, the chief
merit of his family was a remarkable aptitude for playing all sorts of
wind instruments by ear, even his father playing “Home, Sweet Home”
upon the flute. Before he was fifteen, Bernard Shaw knew at least one
important work by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rossini,
Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Gounod from cover to cover. Not only did
he whistle the themes to himself as a street boy whistles music-hall
songs, but he also sang incessantly, to himself and for himself, opera
and oratorio, in an “absurd gibberish which was Italian picked up by
ear--and Irish Italian at that.” No one ever taught him music in his
youth, but when he grew up, although he had a very indifferent
voice, he took some singing lessons under his mother. At first, he
found that he could not make a rightly produced sound that was audible
two yards off. But he learned readily, under the competent instruction
of his mother, and now his voice, “a commonplace baritone of the most
ordinary range, B flat to F, and French pitch preferred for the F,” is
distinguished rather by audibility than in any other respect. It is
noteworthy that the lessons he learned from his mother--the secrets
of breathing and enunciation--proved of incalculable value to him
afterwards on the platform, in the strenuous days of his dialectical
warfare.
[Illustration: =Reproduced from a copy, by Bernard Shaw, of the original
photograph by Richard Pigott, forger of the Parnell letters.
Taken in 1863.=]
Although Bernard Shaw idled away his time at school, the very real
education he received through other broader and deeper channels has
since saved him, he stoutly maintains, from being “at the smallest
disadvantage with men who only know the grammar and mispronunciation
of the Greek and Latin poets and philosophers.” The other great motor
of educational influence in his youth was the National Gallery of
Ireland; to that cherished asylum, which he haunted in the days of his
youth, he has often expressed his unmeasured gratitude. Whenever he
had any money, he bought volumes of the Bohn translation of Vasari;
and at fifteen he knew enough of a considerable number of Italian and
Flemish painters to recognize their work at sight. His communion with
the masterpieces preserved in the Dublin Gallery was so solitary that
he was once driven to say, with comically extravagant egoism, that he
believed he was the only Irishman, except the officials, who had ever
been there. This acquaintance with art and the history of art “did
more for him,” he once asserted, than the two cathedrals in Dublin so
magnificently “restored” out of the profits of the drink trade. I think
we must conclude, with the ever modest autobiographer, that, thanks to
communism in pictures, he was really a very highly educated boy.
Through lack of means, the Shaws were unable to give their son a
university education; perhaps no regret need be felt on this score,
since it is not unlikely, in view of his attitude towards a university
education, that he would have taken refuge in idleness at Oxford,
Cambridge, or Dublin, just as he had done at the schools he had
already attended. Unlike his future colleagues in dramatic criticism,
William Archer and Arthur Bingham Walkley, graduates of Edinburgh
and Oxford respectively, Shaw despised, half ignorantly, half
penetratingly, the thought of a university education, for it seemed to
him to turn out men who all thought alike and were snobs. So in 1871,
at the age of fifteen, he entered the office of an Irish land agent,
Mr. Charles Uniacke Townshend, and remained there until March, 1876.
Perhaps the Ibsenite, the Nietzschean of after years was thus beginning
a course of preliminary training: Henri Beyle used to say that to have
been a banker was to have gone through the best preparatory school for
philosophy. During this period Bernard Shaw lived in lodgings in Dublin
with his father, who had by this time given up that furtive drinking,
of which his son in after life spoke with such frank levity. The lad's
salary at first was eighteen pounds a year, his position that of junior
clerk. He had no fondness for his work, and took no interest in land
agency; nevertheless, he made a very satisfactory clerk. At the end of
about a year, a sudden vacancy occurred in the most active post in the
office, that of cashier. As this involved a sort of miniature banking
business for the clients, and the daily receipt and payment of all
sorts of rents, interests, insurances, private allowances and so on,
it was a comparatively busy post, and a position of trust besides. The
junior clerk was temporarily called upon to fill the sudden vacancy
pending the engagement of a new cashier of greater age and experience.
He performed his numerous duties so successfully that the engagement of
the new man was first delayed and then dropped. The child of fifteen,
laboriously and successfully struggling to change his sloped, straggly,
weak-minded handwriting into a fair imitation of his predecessor's, is
father of the man of forty, carefully drawing up elaborate contracts
with theatre managers, who never kept them. By this initial exhibition
of enterprise, young Shaw's salary, now twenty-four pounds a year,
was doubled, which meant a considerable step ahead. The clear-cut
chirography of the Shaw of to-day and the neatness of arrangement so
noticeable in his apartments at Adelphi Terrace are the results of
his early training; indeed, he was a remarkably correct cashier and
accountant, as one of Mr. Shaw's colleagues in the office once told
me. While he was always ignorant of the state of his own finances, and
to-day troubles little about his personal accounts, he was never a
farthing out in his accounts at the office.
Land agency in Ireland was, and is still, a socially pretentious
business. Although the position Shaw held was regarded as a very
genteel sort of post, yet to him this was no gratification, but quite
the reverse. It was saturated with a class feeling for which, even
at that time, he had an intense loathing. The position carried with
it, nevertheless, certain obvious advantages. It secured for him the
society of a set of so-called apprentices, who were, in fact, idle
young gentlemen who had paid a big premium to be taught a genteel
profession. Though the premium was not paid to Shaw, still he took
delight in teaching his co-workers various operatic _scenas_, which
were occasionally in full swing when the principal or a customer
would enter the office unexpectedly. On one occasion, Mr. Shaw once
told me gleefully, a certain apprentice sang: “_Ah, che la morte_” in
his tower--standing on the washstand with his head appearing over a
tall screen--with such feeling and such obliviousness to all external
events, that the whole office force was suddenly struck busy and silent
by the arrival of Mr. Townshend, the senior partner, who stared,
stupended, at the bleating countenance above the screen and finally
fled upstairs, completely beaten by the situation. The young clerk
thus found plenty of fun and diversion in his association with young
men of culture and education; this did not make him hate his work any
the less. His natural antipathy to respectability asserted itself very
early in his career: he once said that land agency was too respectable
for him. Moreover, the enforced repression concerning his religious
beliefs bred in him a spirit of discontent and revolt. Although he
realized that silence on the subject was undoubtedly an indispensable
condition of sociability among people who disagreed strongly on such a
matter, yet he chafed under the restraint. To such a restraint he felt
he could never permanently submit. This incident alone would have had
the ultimate effect of making him a bad employee. Fortunately for the
world, it put land agency and business as a serious career out of the
question for him. The author of _Widowers' Houses_ collecting rents as
a lifelong profession is a ludicrous, an incredible incongruity. Shaw
retained his place simply for the sake of financial independence. When
he gave up his position, his employer was sorry to lose him, and, at
the request of Shaw's father, readily gave him a handsome testimonial.
In speaking of the circumstance one day, Mr. Shaw told me that he was
furious that such a demand should have been made. Nothing could have
shown more clearly his distaste for the position he held. “Once or
twice,” commented Mr. Shaw, “my employer showed himself puzzled and
annoyed when some accident lifted the veil for a moment and gave him a
glimpse of the fact that his excellent and pecuniarily incorruptible
clerk's mind and interest and even intelligence were ten thousand
leagues away, in a region foreign, if not hostile.” Surely this was
another age of “inspired office boys.”[6]
In 1872, Mr. Lee left Dublin for London, the joint household broke
up, and all musical activity ceased. The return to a single household
on Mr. Shaw's income was all but impossible, for his affairs were
as unprosperous as ever. At this time there was even some question
of Bernard Shaw's two sisters becoming professional singers. With
characteristic energy and decisiveness, Mrs. Shaw boldly cut the
Gordian knot by going to London and becoming a professional teacher
of singing. This domestic _débâcle_ robbed young Shaw of his mother's
influence, which was always stimulating and inspiring, if somewhat
indirectly and impersonally so. It deprived him also of music, which,
up to that time, had been his daily food. This sudden deprivation
of the solace of music came to him as a distinct surprise. He had
never dreamed of such a contingency. Fortunately the piano remained.
Although he had never until then touched it except to pick out a tune
with one finger, he now set to work in earnest to learn the art of
piano playing. It was in a spirit of desperation that he went out
and bought a technical handbook of music, containing a diagram of
the keyboard. No finger exercises, no _études de vélocité_ for Shaw:
he at once got out _Don Giovanni_ and tried to play the overture! It
took him ten minutes to arrange his fingers on the notes of the first
chord. “What I suffered, what everybody in the house suffered, whilst I
struggled on, labouring through arrangements of Beethoven's symphonies,
of _Tannhäuser_, and of all the operas and oratorios I knew, will never
be told.” It was in vain now, he said, merely to sing: “my native
wood-notes wild--just then breaking frightfully--could not satisfy my
intense craving for the harmony which is the emotional substance of
music, and for the rhythmic figures of accompaniment which are its
action and movement. I had only a single splintering voice, and I
wanted an orchestra.” This musical starvation it was that drove him to
the piano in disregard of the rights of his fellow-lodgers.
“At the end of some months I had acquired a technique of my
own, as a sample of which I may offer my fingering of the scale
of C major. Instead of shifting my hand by turning the thumb
under and fingering
C D E F G A B C
---------------
1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5
I passed my fourth finger over my fifth, and played
C D E F G A B C
---------------
1 2 3 4 5 4 5 4.
This method has the advantage of being applicable to all
scales, diatonic or chromatic, and to this day I often fall
back on it. Liszt and Chopin hit on it too, but they never used
it to the extent I did. I soon acquired a terrible power of
stumbling through pianoforte arrangements and vocal scores; and
my reward was that I gained penetrating experiences of Victor
Hugo and Schiller from Donizetti, Verdi, and Beethoven; of the
Bible from Handel; of Goethe from Schumann; of Beaumarchais
and Molière from Mozart; and of Merimée from Bizet, besides
finding in Berlioz an unconscious interpreter of Edgar Allan
Poe. When I was in the schoolboy adventure vein, I could range
from Vincent Wallace to Meyerbeer; and if I felt piously and
genteelly sentimental, I, who could not stand the pictures of
Ary Scheffer or the genteel suburban sentiment of Tennyson and
Longfellow, could become quite maudlin over Mendelssohn and
Gounod. And, as I searched all the music I came across for the
sake of its poetic or dramatic content, and played the pages
in which I found poetry or drama over and over again, whilst
I never returned to those in which the music was trying to
exist ornamentally for its own sake and had no real content at
all, it soon followed that when I came across the consciously
perfect art work in the music dramas of Wagner, I ran no risk
of hopelessly misunderstanding it as the academic musicians
did. Indeed, I soon found that they equally misunderstood
Mozart and Beethoven, though, having come to like their tunes
and harmonies, and to understand their mere carpentry, they
pointed out what they supposed to be their merits with an
erroneousness far more fatal to their unfortunate pupils than
the volley of half-bricks with which they greeted Wagner (who,
it must be confessed, retaliated with a volley of whole ones
fearfully well aimed).”[7]
Although he did a good deal of accompanying, especially in the days
of his intimacy with the Salt family, he never really mastered the
instrument. Once, in a desperate emergency, he supplied the place of
the absent half of the orchestra at a performance of _Il Trovatore_ at
a People's Entertainment evening at the Victoria Theatre--and, luckily,
came off without disaster. To-day he goes to his little Bechstein
piano, a relic of the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and fearlessly
attacks any opera or symphony. He is his own Melba, his own Plançon,
too, thanks, as his wife pathetically explains, to “a remarkable power
of making the most extraordinary noises with his throat.” He even
revels in the pianola! And I have shared his enjoyment in his own
rendition of a Chopin nocturne upon that remarkable mechanical toy.
Bernard Shaw would have been a model young man at the desk but for
the fact that, like Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Boston Custom House,
like Ibsen at the apothecary's shop in Grimstad, his heart was not in
the thing. “I never made a payment,” he once frankly confessed to me,
“without a hope or even a half resolve that I should never have to make
it again. In spite of which, I was so wanting in enterprise and so shy
and helpless in worldly matters (though I believe I had the air of
being quite the reverse), that six months later I found myself making
the payment again.”
There gradually came to him a consciousness of the futility of his
life, the consciousness of one who has been freed of illusion. In
this young boy was none of the soft-blarney, the winning and dulcet
melancholy, of the proverbial Irishman. He escaped that mystic
influence of Roman Catholicism, which produces the phantast, the
dreamer and the saint. Calvinism had taught him that “once a man
is born it is too late to save him or damn him; you may 'educate'
him and 'form his character' until you are black in the face; he is
predestinate, and his soul cannot be changed any more than a silk purse
can be changed into a sow's ear.” In the atmosphere of the Island of
the Saints--“that most mystical of all mystical things”--he learned
to realize the barrenness of all else in comparison with the supreme
importance of realizing the purpose of his existence on this earth.
Hence it was that his work and position finally became unbearably
irksome, unendurable. London imperatively beckoned to him. That way,
perhaps, lay freedom from the obsession of hated respectability,
freedom from repression of his convictions, freedom for
self-development and spiritual expansion. At the age of twenty, this
raw Irish lad, wholly ignorant of the great world, walked out of his
office, and threw himself recklessly into London. There, immediately
after the death of his sister Agnes in the Isle of Wight, in 1876, he
joined his mother in _la lutte pour la vie_.[8] There he was to set
the crystalline intellectual clarity, the philosophic consciousness
of the brilliant Celt, into sharp juxtaposition with the plodding
practicality, the dogged energy of the complacent Briton. There he was
to find the arena for his championship of those advanced movements
in art, music, literature and politics, which give significance and
character to the closing quarter of the nineteenth century.
In these early years we may discern in Shaw the gradual birth of the
social consciousness, the slow unfolding of deep-rooted impulses toward
individualism and self-expression. Like other boys of his day and time,
Shaw melted lead on Holieve, hid rings in pancakes, and indulged in
the conventional mummeries of Christmas. But to him these were dreary,
silly diversions, against which his nature rebelled. He once refused
to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday--for the very good reason that he
had never celebrated his own. In the conventional sense, he was never
“reared” at all: he simply “grew up wild.” No effort was made to form
his character: he developed from within, strangely aloof in spirit
from the healthy gaieties of the normal lad. Thus was bred in him,
even at an early age, a sort of premature asceticism which left its
indelible mark upon his character. The puritanic convictions which have
animated his entire life find their origin in the half-instinctive,
half-enforced aloofness of his childhood days.
Shaw was not brought up, as we might expect, a Nonconformist; he was a
member of the Irish Protestant Church. He rebelled against the inhuman
repression, the meaningless ritualism of his church; but the influences
of his home, nevertheless, left their impress upon his nature.
His whole long life is an outcry of soaring individualism against
repressive authority; and yet the puritan intensity in condemnation
of self-indulgence, the ascetic revolt from alcoholism, speaks forth
unmistakably in the humanitarian, the vegetarian, the teetotaller of a
later epoch.
The ingrained and constitutional protestantism of his forbears found
expression in his boyish, yet rigorously atheistic protest against the
religion of Moody and Sankey. In this audacious protest we can scarcely
expect to find any sort of matured conviction; it is the first bold
denial of his life. Thus early we observe the workings of polemic, of
criticism and analysis--before he had ever left Irish soil. Even then,
I fancy, he felt faint stirrings of a deeper religious protestant
faith. In that protest, we may discern a forecast of the _Plays for
Puritans_ and _The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet_.
Thrown upon his own resources, sharing with his fellows none of the
wholesome and joyous foolhardiness of youth, he developed a maturity
of judgment, a detachment in observation, out of all proportion to
his years. His puritanism expressed itself in silent condemnation of
the social self-righteousness he saw around him, the distinctions so
sharply drawn on lines, not of individual worth, but of social station
and respectability. That arresting passage in _Man and Superman_ in
which he describes the birth of the social passion is a piece of
spiritual autobiography: it changed the child into the man. There was
already at work within him the leaven of the later social revolution of
our own day. Intensity of political conviction was a family tradition
and heritage. In the eighteenth century a Shaw had been leader of the
“Orangemen”; and in the nineteenth century one of Shaw's uncles was the
first Protestant priest in Ireland who, contrary to the convictions of
his companions in creed, declared himself in favour of Home Rule. By
heritage, by environment, by temperament, Bernard Shaw was destined to
display throughout his life that intensity of political conviction,
that depth of humanitarian concern, that passion for social service
which will for ever remain associated with his name.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This letter, signed “S,” appeared in _Public Opinion_ on April 3d,
1875. It is a criticism of the methods adopted by Messrs. Moody and
Sankey, and an attempt to show that the enormous audiences drawn to
the evangelistic services were not proof of their efficacy. Shaw then
proceeds to explain the motives which induced many people to attend,
predominant among them being “the curiosity excited by the great
reputation of the evangelists and the stories, widely circulated, of
the summary annihilation by epilepsy and otherwise of sceptics who had
openly proclaimed their doubts of Mr. Moody's divine mission.” This
letter has been reprinted in _Public Opinion_, November 8th, 1907.
In his monograph on Shaw (pp. 42-3), Mr. Holbrook Jackson has
pointed out that this was not Shaw's first bid for publicity. In the
_Vaudeville Magazine_ of September, 1871, there appeared among the
Editorial Replies the following: “G. B. Shaw, Torca Cottage, Torca
Hill, Dalkey, Co. Dublin, Ireland.--You should have registered your
letter; such a combination of wit and satire ought not to have been
conveyed at the ordinary rate of postage. As it was, your arguments
were so weighty, we had to pay _twopence_ extra for them.”
[2] _On Going to Church._ This essay appeared originally in the _Savoy
Magazine_, January, 1896; it is now published in book form by John W.
Luce and Co., Boston, Mass.
[3] _In the Days of My Youth._ By Bernard Shaw. _Mainly About People_,
1898.
[4] Compare _Jubilee of Wesley College, Dublin_, December, 1895--being
a special number of the _Wesley College Quarterly_.
[5] Lee continued steadily to advance in his profession, becoming
successively music-teacher, opera-conductor, festival conductor,
and finally fashionable teacher of singing in Park Lane, London.
He accomplished everything that he undertook, even conducting a
Handel Festival in Dublin, participated in by Tietjens, Agnesi,
and other leading singers of the day. For several years he enjoyed
great popularity in London as a teacher of music. When he died,
quite suddenly, at his home in Park Lane, it was discovered, Shaw
afterwards remarked, that he had exhausted his stock of health in his
Dublin period, and that the days of his vanity in London were days of
progressive decay.
[6] In speaking of his apprenticeship as a clerk in the land office,
Shaw declares: “I should have been there still if I had not broken
loose in defiance of all prudence, and become a professional man of
genius--a resource not open to every clerk. I mention this to show that
the fact that I am not still a clerk may be regarded for the purposes
of this article as a mere accident. I am not one of those successful
men who can say, Why don't you do as I do?'”--From _Bernard Shaw as a
Clerk_. _By Himself_ in _The Clerk_, January, 1908.
[7] _The Religion of the Pianoforte_, in the _Fortnightly Review_,
February, 1894.
[8] Mr. Shaw's other sister, Miss Lucy Carr Shaw, was the immediate
cause of her mother's settling in London. She became a professional
singer, and, later, a writer. Her best known book is entitled _Five
Letters of the House of Kildonnel_.
LONDON
“My destiny was to educate London, but I had neither studied
my pupil nor related my ideas properly to the common stock of
human knowledge.”--_George Bernard Shaw: an Interview_, in _The
Chap-Book_, November, 1896.
CHAPTER II
“When did you first feel inclined to write?” Shaw was once asked.
“I never felt inclined to write, any more than I ever felt inclined
to breathe,” was his perverse reply. “I felt inclined to draw:
Michelangelo was my boyish ideal. I felt inclined to be a wicked
baritone in an opera when I grew out of my earlier impulse towards
piracy and highway robbery. You see, as I couldn't draw, I was
perfectly well aware that drawing was an exceptional gift. But it never
occurred to me that my literary sense was exceptional. I gave the whole
world credit for it. The fact is, there is nothing miraculous, nothing
particularly interesting, even, in a natural faculty to the man who
has it. The amateur, the collector, the enthusiast in an art, is the
man who lacks the faculty for producing it. The Venetian wants to be
a cavalry soldier; the Gaucho wants to be a sailor; the fish wants to
fly, and the bird to swim. No, I never wanted to write. I know now, of
course, the value and the scarcity of the literary faculty (though I
think it over-rated); but I still don't want it.” And he added: “You
cannot want a thing and have it, too.”
That Shaw did want to write, however, is clearly shown by the early
outpourings of the artistic mood in the imaginative boy. When he was
quite small, he concocted a short story and sent it to some boys'
journal--something about a man with a gun attacking another man in the
Glen of the Doons. In after years, spiritual adventures fired his soul;
at this time, the gun was the centre of interest. The mimetic instinct
of childhood in his case, however, found incentives to the development
of almost every artistic faculty other than writing. His hours spent
in the National Gallery of Ireland, his study of the literature of
Italian art, filled him with the desire to be another Michelangelo;
but he couldn't draw. Like Browning, Shaw wished to be an artist, and,
like Browning also, he wished to be a musician. He heard music from
the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same; he knew whole
operas and oratorios. He wanted to be a musician, but couldn't play; to
be a dramatic singer, but had no voice. The facile conqueror of every
literary domain, mocked in later life with the accusation of being a
sort of literary Jack-of-all-trades, was only puzzled as a youth to
discover in himself a single promising potentiality.
A casual remark of an acquaintance first startled Shaw, then in his
teens, into recognition of the fact that he lacked any sort of final
consciousness in regard to his own position and destiny. The apprentice
in the land agency office, eight or ten years Shaw's senior, who sang,
“_Ah, che la morte_” with such deadly effect, one day happened to
observe that every young fellow thinks that he is going to be a great
man until he is twenty. “The shock that this gave me,” Mr. Shaw once
confessed to me with perfect naïveté, “made me suddenly aware that this
was my own precise intention. But a very brief consideration reassured
me--why, I don't know; for I could do nothing that gave me the smallest
hope of making good my calm classification of myself as one of the
world to which Shelley and Mozart and Praxiteles and Michelangelo
belonged, and as totally foreign to the plane on which land agents
laboured.”
In _Cashel Byron's Profession_, the hero, a prize-fighter, remarks that
it is not what a man would like to do, but what he can do, that he must
work at in this world. Naturally enough, Bernard Shaw, the young lad in
his teens, had not yet come to any sort of artistic self-consciousness.
Shaw may be said to have spent half of his life in the search for the
Ultima Thule of what he _could_ do. And it is by no means certain,
judging from the lesson of his career, that he has yet discovered
all of his capabilities. Certain it is that, at this formative stage
in his career, he had found only one: the ability to keep--not to
write--books. Mr. Shaw once pictured for me his state of dejection at
this time over his inefficiency and incompetence. “What was wrong with
me then was the want of self-respect, the diffidence, the cowardice
of the ignoramus and the duffer. What saved me was my consciousness
that I must learn to do something--that nothing but the possession of
skill, of efficiency, of mastery, in short, was of any use. The sort
of aplomb which my cousins seemed to derive from the consciousness that
their great-great-grandfather had also been the great-great-grandfather
of Sir Robert Shaw, of Bushy Park, was denied to me. You cannot be
imposed on by remote baronets if you belong to the republic of art. I
was chronically ashamed and even miserable simply because I couldn't do
anything. It is true that I could keep Mr. Townshend's cash, and that
I never dreamt of stealing it; and riper years have made me aware that
many of my artistic feats may be less highly estimated in the books of
the Recording Angel than this prosaic achievement; but at this time it
counted for less than nothing. It was a qualification for what I hated;
and the notion of my principal actually giving me a testimonial to my
efficiency as a cashier drove me to an exhibition of rage that must
have seemed merely perverse to my unfortunate father.”
In these days of inarticulate revolt against current religious and
social ideals, Shaw somehow found an outlet for that seething lava
of his spirit, which was one day to burst forth with such alarming
effect. This, Shaw's first published work, was the forthright letter
in _Public Opinion_, in which he sought to stem the force of the
first great Moody and Sankey revival by the announcement that he,
personally, had renounced religion as a delusion! Besides this single
public vent for his insurgency, he had found, in the friendship of a
kindred spirit of imaginative temperament, the opportunity for the
expression of all the doubts, hopes and aspirations of his eager
and revolutionary intelligence. With one of his schoolfellows, Shaw
struck up a curious friendship: this young fellow, Edward McNulty,
was afterwards known as the author of _Misther O'Ryan_, _The Son of a
Peasant_, and _Maureen_,[9] three very original and very remarkable
novels of Irish life. Both boys possessed imaginative temperaments,
and their association gave promise of ripening into close and lasting
friendship. But circumstances separated them so effectually that,
after their schooldays, they saw very little of each other. McNulty
was an official in the Bank of Ireland, and had been drafted to
the Newry branch of the institution, while Shaw, as we know, was in
Mr. Townshend's land office in Dublin. During the period of their
separation, between Shaw's fifteenth and twentieth years, they kept
up a tremendous correspondence. In this way they probably worked off
the literary energy which usually produces early works. The immense
letters, sometimes illustrated with crude drawings and enlivened by
brief dramas, which came and went with each post, served as “exhausts”
for the superfluous steam of their literary force. It was understood
between them that the letters were to be destroyed as soon as answered,
as their authors did not relish the possibility of such unreserved soul
histories falling into strange hands.
I believe that Shaw perpetrated one more long correspondence, this
time with an unnamed English lady, whose fervently imaginative novels
would have made her known, Shaw once asserted, had he been able to
persuade her to make her name public, or at least to stick to the same
pen name, instead of changing it for every book. Shaw also made one
valuable acquaintance at this time through the accident of coming to
lodge in the same house with him. This was Chichester Bell, of the
family of that name distinguished for its inventive genius, a cousin of
Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and a nephew of Melville
Bell, the inventor of the phonetic script known as Visible Speech. The
author of the _Standard Elocutionist_, Chichester Bell's father, whom
Shaw has described as by far the most majestic and imposing looking
man that ever lived on this or any other planet, was the elocution
professor in one of the schools attended by Shaw in his youth, the
Wesleyan Connexional, now Wesley College, attendance at which, we may
be sure from Shaw's case, by no means implied Methodism.[10] Although
a qualified physician, Chichester Bell did not care for medical
practice, and had gone to Germany, where he devoted himself to the
study of chemistry and physics in the school of Helmholtz. Shaw's
intercourse with Bell proved to be of great value to him. They studied
Italian together, and while Shaw did not learn Italian with any final
thoroughness, he learned a great deal else, chiefly about physics and
pathology. It was through his association with Bell that he had come
to read Tyndall and Trousseau's “Clinical Lectures.” But Bell is to be
remembered chiefly in relation to Shaw, as first calling his serious
attention to Wagner. When Shaw discovered that Bell, whose judgment he
held in high regard, considered Wagner a great composer, he at once
bought a vocal score of _Lohengrin_, which chanced to be the only
sample to be had at the Dublin music shops. From this moment dates the
career of the remarkable music critic, who, in after life, swept Max
Nordau off the field with his brilliant and unanswerable defence of the
master-builder of modern music. For the first few bars of _Lohengrin_
completely converted him. He immediately became, and ever afterwards
remained, the “Perfect Wagnerite.”
The days of Shaw's youth before he went to London, as we have seen,
were poisoned because he was taught to bow down to proprietary
respectability. But even in his “unfortunate childhood,” as he calls
it, his heart was so unregenerate that he secretly hated, and rebelled
against, mere respectability. In after life, he found it impossible
to express the relief with which he discovered that his heart was all
along right, and that the current respectability of to-day is “nothing
but a huge inversion of righteous and scientific social order weltering
in dishonesty, uselessness, selfishness, wanton misery, and idiotic
waste of magnificent opportunity for noble and happy living.” Not
the evangelist's but the true reformer's zeal was always Shaw's. He
had too much insight not to recognize the futility of the effort to
reform individuals; his humanitarian spirit was impersonal and found
its freest manifestation in fulmination and revolt against social
institutions. Concerning the unsocial system of setting class against
class, and creed against creed, he has mordantly expressed himself:
“If I had not suffered from these things in my childhood,
perhaps I could keep my temper about them. To an outsider
there is nothing but comedy in the spectacle of a forlorn
set of Protestant merchants in a Catholic country, led by
a miniature plutocracy of stockholders, doctors and land
agents, and flavoured by that section of the landed gentry
who are too heavily mortgaged to escape to London, playing at
being a court and an aristocracy with the assistance of the
unfortunate exile who has been persuaded to accept the post
of lord-lieutenant. To this pretence, involving a prodigious
and continual lying, as to incomes and the social standing of
relations, are sacrificed citizenship, self-respect, freedom
of thought, sincerity of character, and all the realities of
life, its votaries gaining in return the hostile estrangement
of the great mass of their fellow countrymen, and in their own
class the supercilious snubs of those who have outdone them
in pretension and the jealous envy of those whom they have
outdone.”
The power which he found in Ireland religious enough to redeem him from
this abomination of desolation was, fitly enough, the power of art. “My
mother, as it happened, had a considerable musical talent. In order to
exercise it seriously she had to associate with other people who had
musical talent. My first childish doubt as to whether God could really
be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable
fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother's
in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed
to Roman Catholics. Even the divine gentility was presently called in
question, for some of these vocalists were undeniably connected with
retail trade.”
The situation in which Mrs. Shaw found herself offered no alternative.
“There was no help for it; if my mother was to do anything but sing
silly ballads in drawing-rooms she had to associate herself on an
entirely republican footing with people of like artistic gifts, without
the smallest reference to creed or class. Nay, if she wished to take
part in the masses of Haydn and Mozart, which had not then been
forgotten, she must actually permit herself to be approached by Roman
Catholic priests and even, at their invitation, to enter that house
of Belial, the Roman Catholic chapel (in Ireland the word church, as
applied to a place of worship, denotes the Protestant denomination),
and take part in their services. All of which led directly to the
discovery, hard to credit at first, that a Roman Catholic priest could
be as agreeable and cultivated a person as a Protestant clergyman was
supposed, in defiance of bitter experience, always to be; and, in
short, that the notion that the courtly distinctions of Dublin society
corresponded to any real human distinctions was as ignorant as it was
pernicious. If religion is that which binds men to one another, and
irreligion that which sunders, then must I testify that I found the
religion of my country in its musical genius and its irreligion in its
churches and drawing-rooms.”
It was unerring common sense on the domestic plane, acquiescence in
the sole solution of a flinty problem of life, which reveals Shaw's
mother to us as the parent from whom he derived his determination,
and his firm grip on practical affairs. In marked contradistinction
to Lee, Mrs. Shaw made no concessions to fashion, firmly adhering
to her master's old method in all its rigour. She behaved with
complete independence of manner and speech in the mode of an Irish
lady confronted with English people openly describing themselves as
“middle-class.” On account of this characteristic independence her
first experiences in London were unfortunate and disheartening. Not
until she began to teach choirs in schools did she enter upon the road
of complete success. The results she produced in these undertakings
so pleased the inspectors--and more particularly the parents at the
prize distributions--that the head mistresses were sensible enough to
let her go her own way. Quite a conclusive proof of her ability is
found in the fact that this remarkable woman, vigorous and young-minded
to-day although now in the seventies, worked at that famous modern
institution, the North Collegiate School for Girls, until quite
recently. For some years she sought to retire for the same reason that
she stopped singing: to her Irish sense of humour there was an element
almost of the ridiculous in a first-rate school having an old woman of
between seventy and eighty wave a stick and conduct a choir. But D.
Sophia Bryant, the principal and an old friend of hers, could not see
her way to change for the better, and it was only within the last year
or two that Mrs. Shaw retired from her post. No doubt Mrs. Bryant was
right; for Mr. Shaw once remarked to me that it was not an easy matter
to find a woman in England who perfectly combines the ability to take
command in music with the knowledge of music as an artist, and not as a
school-mistress who has superficially studied the subject for the sake
of the certificates and the position.
Mr. Shaw's mother is the most remarkably youthful person for her
years I have ever known, with the possible exception of Mark Twain.
I remember with vivid pleasure taking tea with her and her son one
afternoon at her attractive little “retreat” in West London. Her eyes
danced with suppressed mirth as she talked, and it was quite easy to
see from whom her son derived his strong sense of humour. Mrs. Shaw
told several delightful stories, one of which deserves repetition here.
It seems that Mrs. Shaw is quite a medium and spiritualist, and takes a
great deal of interest in communicating with “spirits” from the other
world. One day she “called up” Mr. Shaw's sister and asked her what she
thought of George being such a distinguished man. The spirit expressed
surprise to hear the news. “But aren't you very proud of George?”
queried his mother disappointedly. “Oh, yes,” replied the spirit; “it's
all very well in its way. But,” she added, “that sort of thing doesn't
count for anything up here”!
Many of Mr. Shaw's very distinctive traits are a direct inheritance
from his mother, modified, to be sure, by the differences in
education, temperament and views of life. In her teaching of music,
Mrs. Shaw deliberately displayed total insensibility to the petty
dignities so cherished in English school-life. Upon visiting rectors,
head mistresses, local “personages,” and, in fact, upon all those
who wished things done their own way, she made what her son called
“perfectly indiscriminate onslaughts.” This aggressive assertion of
her authority would often have made her position untenable, had it
not been for her patent ability and unquestioned power of leadership.
Her outspoken frankness of manner and conduct, reproduced with such
comically extravagant excess in her son, always won her the support of
the discriminating: it was always the real “bigwigs” who understood
her manners. Mr. Shaw once said: “From my mother I derive my brains
and character, which do her credit.” I remember asking Mr. Shaw's
mother one day to what she attributed her son's remarkable success in
the world of letters. “Oh,” she said, without a moment's hesitation,
her eyes twinkling merrily the while, “the answer is quite simple. Of
course, he owes it all to me.”
To his parents, his mother in particular, Mr. Shaw is also indebted
for actual financial support during several years of an able-bodied
young manhood. But he has warned us against supposing, because he is
a man of letters, that he never tried to commit that “sin against his
nature” called earning an honest living. We have followed his struggles
from his fifteenth to his twentieth year--a period marking a social
and spiritual growth on his part, he maintains, of several centuries.
“I was born on the outskirts of an Irish city, where we lived exactly
as people lived in the seventeenth century, except that there were
gas-lamps and policemen in tall hats. In the course of my boyhood
literature and music introduced me to the eighteenth century; and I was
helped a step further through the appearance in our house of candles
that did not need snuffing, an iron-framed pianoforte and typhoid
sanitation. Finally, I crossed St. George's Channel into the decadence
of the mid-nineteenth-century England of Anthony Trollope, and
slowly made my way to the forefront of the age--the period of Ibsen,
Nietzsche, the Fabian Society, the motor-car, and my own writings.”
Very slowly indeed did he make his way to the forefront of the age of
Shavianism. He felt that he was a man of genius, and coolly classified
himself as such. With no effort of the imagination, and, likewise,
with no prevision of his subsequent oft-repeated failures and the
position of pecuniary dependence he was temporarily to occupy, he found
himself looking upon London as his destiny. There is something at once
amusing, inspiring, and pathetic in the spectacle of this bashful, raw,
inexperienced boy, fortified only by the confident consciousness of
his yet unproved superiority to the “common run” of humanity, throwing
himself thus headlong into London.
Little of romantic glamour, fittingly enough, attaches to Shaw's
early struggles in London. No rapt listening to the songs of rival
nightingales, Keats and Shelley, as with Browning; no impetuous and
clandestine marriage, as with Sheridan; no roses and raptures of
_la vie Bohème_, as with Zola. It is, instead, for the most part
a tale of consistent literary drudgery, rewarded by continual and
repeated failures. The rare and individual style of the satirist, the
deft fingering of the dramatist were wholly undeveloped, and even
unsuspected, during this tentative period in his career. He turned his
hand to various undertakings--to musical criticism, to versifying, to
blank-versifying, to novel-writing; but all equally to no purpose.
Asked once what was his first real success, he replied: “Never had
any. Success in that sense is a thing that comes to you and takes your
breath away. What came to me was invariably failure. By the time I
wore it down I knew too much to care about either failure or success.
Life is like a battle; you have to fire a thousand bullets to hit one
man. I was too busy firing to bother about the scoring. As to whether
I ever despaired, you will find somewhere in my works this line:
'He who has never hoped can never despair.' I am not a fluctuator.”
His self-sufficiency, even at this time, was proof against all
discouragement. Perhaps he found consolation also in the saying: “He
who is down need fear no fall.”
Shaw never experienced any poverty of spirit, of determination, or of
will; his poverty was pecuniary only. Until the time of his marriage
he remained secure from the accusation of being the mould of fashion
or the glass of form. While the Shaw of matrimonial respectability
bears all the marks of his wife's civilizing influence in the matter
of a _costume de rigueur_--fashionable clothes, patent-leather boots,
and even, on rare occasions, a “stiff” collar--his dress in the late
seventies and for twenty years thereafter was usually, like that of
Marchbanks, strikingly anarchic. His outward appearance, as someone
unkindly remarked, suggested that he might be a fairly respectable
plasterer! “Now,” said Shaw in 1896, “when people reproach me with
the unfashionableness of my attire, they forget that to me it seems
like the raiment of Solomon in all his glory by contrast with the
indescribable seediness of those days, when I trimmed my cuffs to
the quick with scissors, and wore a tall hat and _soi-disant_ black
coat, green with decay.” But the poverty of which this attire was the
outward, visible sign was “shortness of cash,” as numerous personal
reminiscences show. From the depressing and devitalizing effects of
“real poverty” he was strong enough to free himself, as the following
autobiographical confidence clearly evidences:
“Whilst I am not sure that the want of money lames a poor man
more than the possession of it lames a rich one, I am quite
sure that the class which has the pretensions and prejudices
and habits of the rich without its money, and the poverty of
the poor without the freedom to avow poverty--in short, the
people who don't go to the theatre because they cannot afford
the stalls and are ashamed to be seen in the gallery--are the
worst-off of all. To be on the down grade from the _haute
bourgeoisie_ and the landed gentry to the nadir at which the
younger son's great-grandson gives up the struggle to keep
up appearances; to have the pretence of a culture without
the reality of it; to make three hundred pounds a year look
like eight hundred pounds in Ireland or Scotland; or five
hundred pounds look like one thousand pounds in London; to
be educated neither at the Board School and the Birkbeck
nor at the University, but at some rotten private adventure
academy for the sons of gentlemen; to try to maintain a select
circle by excluding all the frankly poor people from it, and
then find that all the rest of the world excludes you--that
is poverty at its most damnable; and yet from that poverty
a great deal of our literature and journalism has sprung.
Think of the frightful humiliation of the boy Dickens in
the blacking warehouse, and his undying resentment of his
mother's wanting him to stay there--all on a false point of
genteel honour. Think of Trollope, at an upper-class school
with holes in his trousers, because his father could not bring
himself to dispense with a man-servant. Ugh! Be a tramp or be
a millionaire--it matters little which: what _does_ matter
is being a poor relation of the rich; and that is the very
devil. Fortunately, that sort of poverty can be cured by simply
shaking off its ideas--cutting your coat according to your
cloth, and not according to the cloth of your father's second
cousin, the baronet. As I was always more or less in rebellion
against those ideas, and finally shook them off pretty
completely, I cannot say that I have much experience of real
poverty--quite the contrary.”[11]
With that comic seriousness which always passes for outrageous
prevarication, Shaw has related that during the nine years from 1876
to 1885 his adventures in literature netted him the princely sum of
exactly six pounds. At first he “devilled” for a musical critic; but
his notices “led to the stoppage of all the concert advertisements
and ruined the paper”--“which died--partly of me.” He also began a
Passion Play in blank verse, with the mother of the hero represented as
a termagant. Ah, if that play had only been finished! But Shaw never
carried through these customary follies of young authors, unless we
agree with those who classify his novels as follies of a green boy. “I
was always, fortunately for me,” Mr. Shaw once remarked, “a failure as
a trifler. All my attempts at Art for Art's sake broke down; it was
like hammering tenpenny nails into sheets of notepaper.”
One finds it an easy matter to believe him when he tells us, not only
that he was provincial, unpresentable, but, more broadly speaking, that
he was in an impossible position. “I was a foreigner--an Irishman,
the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the
University mill. I was ... not uneducated; but, unfortunately, what I
knew was exactly what the educated Englishman did not know, and what he
knew--I either didn't know or didn't believe.” Six pounds was a very
small allowance for a growing young man, even a struggling author, to
live on for nine years. Even if we match him with equal scepticism, at
least we can discover, as will be seen, no error in his arithmetical
calculations. After Shaw had hounded the musical critic and his paper
to the grave, London absolutely refused to tolerate him on any terms.
As the nine years progressed, he had one article accepted by Mr. G.
R. Sims, who had just started a short-lived paper called _One and
All_. “It brought me fifteen shillings. Full of hope and gratitude,
I wrote a really brilliant contribution. That finished me.” During
this period, he received his greatest fee--five pounds--for a patent
medicine advertisement, a circumstance which may give some colour to
Dr. Meyerfeld's early denunciation of Shaw as a “quacksalver.” On
another occasion, a publisher asked Shaw for some verses to fit some
old blocks which he had bought up for a school prize book. “I wrote a
parody of the thing he wanted and sent it as a joke. To my stupefaction
he thanked me seriously, and paid me five shillings.” Shaw was so much
touched by the gift of five shillings for his parody that he wrote
the generous publisher a serious verse for another picture. With the
startling result that the publisher took it as a joke in questionable
taste! Is it any wonder that Shaw's career as a versifier abruptly
ended?
The analysis of the artistic temperament which Shaw puts in the mouth
of John Tanner--an analysis which Mr. Robert Loraine finds to smack
more of mania than of insincerity--is a cynical and distorted picture
at best. And yet it gives us a refracted glimpse of the position which
Shaw himself deliberately assumed. “The true artist,” Tanner rattles
on, “will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother
drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but
his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into
intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of
convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that
they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue
him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams,
to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do
this for their own purpose, whilst he really means them to do it for
his.” After various attempts “to earn an honest living,” Shaw gave up
trying to commit that sin against his nature, as he puts it. His last
attempt was in 1879, we are told, “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.” His interest in physics, his acquaintance
with the works of Tyndall and Helmholtz, and his friendship with Mr.
Chichester Bell, of which mention has been made, gave him, he asserts,
the customary superiority over those about him which he is in the habit
of claiming in all the relations of life. While he remained with the
company only a few months, he discharged his duties in a manner, which,
according to his own outrageous and comically prevaricative assertion,
“laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's London reputation.”
After this experience, he began, as he says, to lay the foundations
of his own fortune “by the most ruthless disregard of all the quack
duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to the White House, and
harness the real peasant boy to the plough until he is finally swept,
as rubbish, into the workhouse.” Far from being a “peasant lad,” who
climbed manfully upward from the lowest rung of the social ladder, he
was in reality the son of a gentleman who had an income of at least
three figures (four, if you count in dollars instead of pounds),
and was second cousin to a baronet. “I never climbed any ladder: I
have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby warn all
peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding
their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity so
dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own bad novels.”
Shaw seems intent upon convincing us that, like the artist of his own
description, he was an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others;
but we must take his confessions with the customary grain of salt.
“I was an able-bodied and able-minded young man in the strength of
my youth; and my family, then heavily embarrassed, needed my help
urgently. That I should have chosen to be a burden to them instead was,
according to all the conventions of peasant fiction, monstrous. Well,
without a blush I embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself
into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a
staff to my father's old age: I hung on to his coat tails. His reward
was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly
novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own
(now eminent in literature as Mr. John Mackinnon Robertson) prefiguring
me to some extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this
was a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension
from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some
sordid trade. Handsome or not, it was the only return he ever had for
the little pension he contrived to export from Ireland for his family.
My mother reinforced it by drudging in her elder years at the art of
music which she had followed in her prime freely for love. I only
helped to spend it. People wondered at my heartlessness: one young and
romantic lady had the courage to remonstrate openly and indignantly
with me, 'for the which,' as Pepys said of the shipwright's wife who
refused his advances, 'I did respect her.' Callous as Comus to moral
babble, I steadily wrote my five pages a day and made a man of myself
(at my mother's expense) instead of a slave.”
In Shaw's opinion, his brain constituted the sum and substance of his
riches. The projection and exposition of his experience came to be
the most urgent need and object of his life. He recognized a higher
duty than merely earning his living: the fulfilment of his individual
destiny. He resolved to become a writer. In this resolve to dedicate
all his powers to the art of self-expression, lies the explanation of
his strange words: “My mother worked for my living instead of preaching
that it was my duty to work for hers; therefore, take off your hat to
her and blush.”[12]
Although it was a “frightful squeeze” at times, Shaw was not wholly
destitute. A suit of evening clothes and the knack of playing a
“simple accompaniment at sight more congenially to a singer than most
amateurs,” gave him “for a fitful year or so,” the _entrée_ into the
better circle of musical society in London.
In this latter day of his assertion that money controls morality,
Shaw is perfectly consistent in speaking of his poverty and quotidian
shabbiness as the two “disgusting faults” of his youth. But at the
time he did not recognize them as faults, because he could not help
them. “I therefore tolerated the gross error that poverty, though an
inconvenience and a trial, is not a sin and a disgrace: and I stood for
my self-respect on the things I had: probity, ability, knowledge of
art, laboriousness, and whatever else came cheaply to me.” A certain
pride of birth, a consciousness of worthy ancestry, also sustained
him, and helped him to triumph over circumstance. It was this same
feeling which gave him suavity and poise during the later campaigns
of his revolutionary Socialism, and saved him from the excesses, the
blind fury, of the mere proletarian. He had a magnificent library
in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture-gallery in Trafalgar Square, and
another at Hampton Court, without any servants to look after or
rent to pay. During these years Shaw's gain in the cultivation of
his musical and artistic tastes more than compensated for his lack
of the advantages of wealth. Nor were his essays in literature and
criticism--I do not refer to his playful dilettantism--profitless in
any real sense. It is true that innumerable articles were consistently
returned to him; and yet he went his way undismayed, slowly saturating
himself with Italian art from Mantegna to Michelangelo, with the best
music from London to Bayreuth. And while London had not “caught his
tone,” musical or otherwise, at this time, the day was to come in which
he should reap the reward for his critical knowledge of art and music,
for the rare and individual style which he was slowly perfecting.
To the student of Shaw as the _littérateur_--the highwayman who “held
up” so many different forms of art--the chief interest of this period
is to be found in the five novels which he wrote during the five
years from 1879 to 1883--an average of one a year. His first novel,
written in 1879, and called, “with merciless fitness” as Shaw says,
_Immaturity_, was never published; and we are told that even the
rats were unable to finish it. George Meredith, the novelist, who
was a reader and literary adviser for the publishing firm of Chapman
and Hall, London, from 1860 to 1897, rejected the manuscript of
_Immaturity_, _sans phrase_--quickly disposing of it with a laconic
“No.” The remaining four have all been published, in magazines and in
book-form, either in England or America. Shaw “turned them out,” one
each year, with unvarying regularity and also with unvarying result:
refusal by the publishers. That six pounds which Shaw earned in nine
years must certainly have gone a long way--as postage stamps.
[Illustration: =Shaw at the Age of Twenty-three.=]
_From a photo by Window & Grove._
From a photograph taken in London, July 4th, 1879.
Mr. Shaw has carefully explained to us why his works were refused
by publisher after publisher. And I find no reason to question his
explanation to the effect that it was the world-old struggle between
literary conscience and public taste. The more he progressed towards
his own individual style, and ventured upon the freer expression of
his own ideas, the more he disappointed the “grave, elderly lovers
of literature.” As to the regular novel-publishing houses, whose
readers were merely on the scent of popularity, they gave him, we are
told, no quarter at all. “And so between the old stool of my literary
conscientiousness and the new stool of a view of life that did not
reach publishing point in England until about ten years later, when
Ibsen drove it in, my novels fell to the ground.”
We may omit for the present any discussion of the validity of Mr.
Shaw's claims as a “fictionist.” But the story of the circumstances
under which the novels finally found their way into print is certainly
worthy of narration. It was in 1882 that Henry George, by a speech
during one of the public meetings at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon
Street, London, fired Shaw to enlist, in Heine's phrase, “as a soldier
in the Liberative War of Humanity.”[13] About this time a body,
styling itself the Land Reform Union, which still survives as the
English Land Restoration League, was formed to propagate Georgite Land
Nationalization. The official mouthpiece of this body was called, if
memory serves, the _Christian Socialist_, which did not last long,
owing, as Shaw said, to a lack of Christians. Shaw made a number
of lifelong friends through his connection with this organization,
which he joined soon after its formation. Chief among these may be
mentioned James Leigh Joynes, Sydney Olivier and Henry Hyde Champion;
other acquaintances were two Christian Socialist clergymen--Stewart
Headlam and Symes of Nottingham. Shaw and Symes frequently indulged
in wordy warfare over the respective merits of Socialism and Land
Nationalization as universal panaceas for social evils. Symes argued
that Land Nationalization would settle everything, to which Shaw
cleverly and characteristically replied, as he once told me, that if
capital were still privately appropriated Symes would remain “the
chaplain of a pirate ship.” It is proof of Shaw's fundamental Socialism
that he still regards this as a very fair description of the position
of a clergyman under our present system.
Through his association with James Leigh Joynes and the Salt family
it is not difficult to trace Shaw's initial feeling for Shelley, and
the origin and growth of his humanitarian and vegetarian principles.
At this time Joynes had just been deprived of his Eton post because he
had made a tour in Ireland with Henry George and been arrested with
him under the Coercion Act by the police, who did not understand Land
Nationalization and supposed the two to be emissaries of the Clan na
Gael. Henry Salt, another Eton master, to whom Joynes' sister was
married, was not only, like Joynes, a vegetarian, a humanitarian, a
Shelleyan, but a De Quinceyite as well. Being a born revolutionist,
he loathed Eton; and as soon as he had saved enough to live with a
Thoreau-like simplicity in a labourer's cottage in the country, he
threw up his post and shook the dust of Eton from his feet. In company
with Joynes, Shaw visited the Salts once before they left Eton. It is
interesting in this connection to read an absurdly amusing description,
written by Shaw, of his first visit to them in the country at
Tilford--an article entitled _A Sunday on the Surrey Hills_.[14]
There were no children in the family; and one of Shaw's chief
amusements while visiting the Salts was to play endless pianoforte
duets with Mrs. Salt, on what he called “the noisiest grand piano that
ever descended from Eton to a Surrey cottage.” Salt found his _métier_,
not in Socialism, but in humanitarianism. He founded the Humanitarian
League, of which he is still secretary. This association of Shaw with
the Salt family eventuated in close and warm mutual friendship. Many
were the visits Shaw paid them at this time and in later years. It
was in the heather on Limpsfield Common, during his visits to them at
Oxford, that he wrote several of the scenes of his _Plays, Pleasant and
Unpleasant_.
In this association may be discovered the real link between Shaw
and the Humanitarians. For twenty-five years Shaw was a “cannibal,”
according to his own damning verdict. For the remainder of his life
he has been a strict vegetarian, professing his principles with a
comic force equalled only by the rigour with which he puts them into
practice. While the most of men in their boyhood have walked about
with a cheap edition of Shelley in their pockets, it is a tiresome
trait in Shaw, someone has slightingly remarked, that he has never
taken this cheap edition out. Shelley it was, certainly, who first
called Shaw's attention to the “infamy of his habits.” And it is
also true that Shaw has never discarded his vegetarian principles,
never repudiated Shelley's humane views and ideals of life. “It may
require some reflection,” Shaw once wrote, “to see that high feeling
brings high thinking; but we already know, without reflection, that
high thinking brings what is called plain living. In this century
the world has produced two men--Shelley and Wagner--in whom intense
poetic feeling was the permanent state of their consciousness, and
who were certainly not restrained by any religious, conventional or
prudential considerations from indulging themselves to the utmost of
their opportunities. Far from being gluttonous, drunken, cruel or
debauched, they were apostles of vegetarianism and water-drinking; had
an utter horror of violence and 'sport'; were notable champions of the
independence of women; and were, in short, driven into open revolution
against the social evils which the average sensual man finds extremely
suitable to him. So much is this the case that the practical doctrine
of these two arch-voluptuaries always presents itself to ordinary
persons as a saint-like asceticism.”[15]
At the time of the mutual intimacy of Joynes, Shaw, and the Salts, and
their unhesitating approval and admiration of Shelley, early in the
eighties, vegetarian restaurants began to be established here and there
throughout the country. These scattered restaurants, Mr. Shaw once
remarked in connection with his own conversion to the faith of Shelley,
“made vegetarianism possible for a man too poor to be catered for.”[16]
It is hardly open to doubt that, while Shelley first called Shaw's
attention to vegetarianism, it was Joynes and Salt who first confirmed
him in the belief, which soon became solidified into a hard-and-fast
principle, that “the enormity of eating the scorched corpses of
animals--cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted--becomes impossible
the moment it becomes consciously instead of thoughtlessly habitual.”
Another member of this coterie, in which there was no question of Henry
George and Karl Marx, but a great deal of Walt Whitman and Thoreau,
was the now well-known Socialist and author, Edward Carpenter, whose
_Towards Democracy_ and other works are a faithful reflex of the man.
It became the habit of these early apostles of “the simple life” to
wear sandals; Carpenter even wore his out of doors. He had taught the
secret of their manufacture to a workman friend of his at Millthorpe, a
village near Sheffield, where he resided. Not unfittingly, the habitual
wearer of moccasins, Carpenter, was always called The Noble Savage by
the members of this congenial and delightful circle. The noisy grand
piano grew noisier than ever when Shaw and Carpenter visited the
Salts--Carpenter, like Shaw, revelling in pianoforte duets with Mrs.
Salt.
The death of Joynes was a great grief to these close friends,
especially to Shaw. I am convinced that those mordantly incisive
and penetrating attacks which Shaw, in after life, made upon modern
surgery and modern medicine find their animus in his resentment of the
manner of Joynes' death. Certain passages from _The Philanderer_ and
_The Conflict of Science and Common Sense_ thus become more humanly
comprehensible. The literary activities of this circle, so sadly
broken up by the death of Joynes, were by no means confined solely
to Carpenter and Shaw. Joynes himself left a volume of excellent
translations of the revolutionary songs of the German revolutionists
of 1848--Herwegh, Freiligrath and others.[17] Salt, whom Shaw has
occasionally quoted, has published several monographs, his tastes and
predilections revealing themselves in the names of Shelley, James
Thomson, Jeffries and De Quincey.
The Socialist revival of the eighties is responsible for the final
publication of Shaw's novels. As long as he kept sending them to the
publishers, “they were as safe from publicity as they would have been
in the fire.” But as soon as he flung them aside as failures, with
a strange perversity, “they almost instantly began to show signs of
life.” Among the crop of propagandist magazines which accompanied the
Socialistic revival of the eighties was one called _To-Day_--not the
present paper of that name, but one of the many “To-Days which are
now Yesterdays.” It was printed by Henry Hyde Champion, but there
were several joint editors, of brief tenure, among whom were Belfort
Bax, the well-known Socialist, and James Leigh Joynes. Although
publishing his novels in this magazine, which it seems paid nothing for
contributions, “seemed a matter of no more consequence than stuffing so
many window-panes with them,” Shaw nevertheless offered up _An Unsocial
Socialist_ and _Cashel Byron's Profession_ on this unstable altar of
his political faith.[18]
With one noteworthy exception, there were no visible results from
the serial publications of these two novels. Shaw's novels, not
uncharacteristically, appeared in inverse order of composition; and
number five, _An Unsocial Socialist_, made Shaw acquainted with William
Morris, an acquaintance which, as we shall see, ripened later into
genuine and sincere friendship. To Shaw's surprise, as he tells us,
William Morris had been reading the monthly instalments with a certain
relish--a proof to Shaw's mind “how much easier it is to please a great
man than a little one, especially when you share his politics.”
Another propagandist magazine, created after the passing of _To-day_,
and called _Our Corner_, was published by Mrs. Annie Besant, with whom
Shaw had become acquainted about the time he joined the Fabian Society.
“She was an incorrigible benefactress,” Shaw says, “and probably
revenged herself for my freely expressed scorn for this weakness by
drawing on her private account to pay me for my jejune novels.” Up to
this time, all Shaw's literary productions seemed to have the deadly
effect of driving their media of circulation to an early grave. After
_The Irrational Knot_ and _Love Among the Artists_ had run through
its pages in serial form, _Our Corner_ likewise succumbed to the
inevitable.[19]
To Shaw's expressed regret, _Cashel Byron's Profession_ found one
staunch admirer at least. This was Henry Hyde Champion, who had thrown
up a commission in the Army at the call of Socialism. This admiration
for Shaw's realistic exposure of pugilism--Mr. Shaw once told me that
he always considered admiration of _Cashel Byron's Profession_ the
mark of a fool!--had very momentous consequences. Champion, it seems,
had an “unregenerate taste for pugilism”--a pugnacious survival of
his abdicated adjutancy. “He liked 'Cashel Byron' so much that he
stereotyped the pages of _To-Day_ which it occupied, and in spite of
my remonstrances, hurled on the market a misshapen shilling edition.
My friend, Mr. William Archer, reviewed it prominently; the _Saturday
Review_, always susceptible in those days to the arts of self-defence,
unexpectedly declared it the novel of the age; Mr. W. E. Henley wanted
to have it dramatized; Stevenson wrote a letter about it ...; the other
papers hastily searched their waste-paper baskets for it and reviewed
it, mostly rather disappointedly; the public preserved its composure
and did not seem to care.” This letter of Stevenson's to William
Archer,[20] written at Saranac Lake in the winter of 1887-8, contains
some very interesting criticism, as a quotation will show:
“What am I to say? I have read your friend's book with singular
relish. If he has written any other, I beg you will let me see
it; and if he has not, I beg him to lose no time in supplying
the deficiency. It is full of promise, but I should like to
know his age. There are things in it that are very clever, to
which I attach no importance; it is the shape of the age. And
there are passages, particularly the rally in the presence
of the Zulu King, that show genuine and remarkable narrative
talent--a talent that few will have the wit to understand, a
talent of strength, spirit, capacity, sufficient vision, and
sufficient self-sacrifice, which last is the chief point in a
narrative.”
And at the end of his next letter to Mr. Archer (February, 1888), he
says “Tell Shaw to hurry up. I want another.”
Neither Shaw nor Champion earned anything from that first shilling
edition, “which began with a thousand copies, but proved immortal.”
Shortly after this first edition was exhausted, the publishing house
of Walter Scott and Company placed a revised shilling edition on
the market; and the book was also published in New York at about the
same time (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1887). Brentanos, New York,
brought out an edition in 1897, and this was followed in 1899 by an
edition of _An Unsocial Socialist_.[21]
The immediate cause of these editions was the temporary interest in
the works of Mr. Shaw, occasioned by Mr. Richard Mansfield's notable
productions of _Arms and the Man_ and _The Devil's Disciple_. The
publication of _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, in two volumes, by
H. S. Stone and Company, of Chicago, followed shortly afterwards. In
1904, when Mr. Daly's production of _Candida_ created such a stir
in America, Mr. Volney Streamer, of the firm of Brentanos, a Shaw
enthusiast of many years' standing, used his influence to have these
two books reprinted. None of Shaw's novels are copyright in America,
so that he has never, it appears, reaped the reward of the moderate,
although intermittent, vogue which his novels have enjoyed in that
country. It is a fact of common knowledge that Shaw prefers to be
judged by his later work; but the demand in America for these novels
has been so large that they are likely to be published for years yet
to come. In 1889 or 1890, it must have been, Shaw happened to notice
that his novels were “raging in America,” and that the list of book
sales in one of the United States was headed by a novel entitled _An
Unsocial Socialist_. In the preface to the “Authorized Edition” of
_Cashel Byron's Profession_, which contains the history of the life and
death of the novels, Mr. Shaw says, “As it was clearly unfair that my
own American publishers (H. S. Stone and Company) should be debarred by
delicacy towards me from exploiting the new field of derelict fiction,
I begged them to make the most of their inheritance; and with my full
approval Opus 3, called 'Love Among the Artists' (a paraphrase of the
forgotten line 'Love Among the Roses') followed.”[22]
This third act of Shaw's “tragedy,” as he calls it, is by no means the
end of the play; as with Thomas Hardy's endless dramas, the curtain
may never be rung down. One might imagine that Shaw, the Socialist,
required the patience of a Job and the self-repression of a stoic to
enable him to restrain his anger over the diversion of the rewards of
his talent from his own to the pockets of Capitalist publishers, free
of all obligation to the author. But he accepts his fate with breezy
philosophy.
“I may say,” he wrote to Harper and Brothers (who had published his
_Cashel Byron's Profession_) in November, 1899, “that I entirely
disagree with the ideas of twenty years ago as to the 'piratical'
nature of American republications of non-copyright books. Unlike most
authors, I am enough of an economist to know that unless an American
publisher acquires copyright he can no more make a profit at my expense
than he can at Shakspere's by republishing _Hamlet_. The English
nation, when taxed for the support of the author by a price which
includes author's royalties, whilst the American nation escapes that
burden, may have a grievance against the American nation, but that
is a very different thing from a grievance of the author against the
American publisher.”[23]
“Suffice it to say here that there can be no doubt now that the novels
so long left for dead in the forlorn-hope magazines of the eighties
have arisen and begun to propagate themselves vigorously throughout
the New World at the rate of a dollar and a half per copy, free of all
royalty to the flattered author.” He begs for absolution from blame “if
these exercises of a raw apprentice break loose again and insist on
their right to live. The world never did know chalk from cheese in the
matter of art; and, after all, since it is only the young and old who
have time to read--the rest being too busy living--my exercises may be
fitter for the market than my masterpieces.”
In 1883, when the last of the novels of his nonage was completed, Shaw
was still striking in the dark. He had not yet found the opening into
the light, the portal giving out from the stuffy world of imaginative
lying into the great world of real life--a life of pleasurable
activity, strenuous endeavour, and high achievement. He found his
way out by following an insistent summons--the clarion call of Henry
George. And when, having doffed the swaddling clothes of romance, he
emerged from the dim retreat of his imagination, it was to find himself
standing in the dazzling light of a new day--the day of Socialism, of
the Fabian Society, and--of George Bernard Shaw.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] These books were published by Edward Arnold.
[10] Cf. _John Bull's Other Island_; Preface for Politicians, p. xvii.
[11] _Who I Am, and What I Think_, by G. Bernard Shaw. Part I.--In the
_Candid Friend_, May 11th, 1901.
[12] _The Irrational Knot_, Preface to the American edition of 1905,
Brentanos, N. Y.
[13] _Cf._ Chapter IV., _The Fabian Society_.
[14] The _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 28th, 1888.
[15] _The Religion of the Pianoforte._ In the _Fortnightly Review_,
February, 1894.
[16] Mr. Shaw's confessions in regard to his change from “cannibalism”
to vegetarianism are perhaps best given in an article in the _Pall
Mall Gazette_ for January 26th, 1886, entitled, _Failures of Inept
Vegetarians. By an Expert._
[17] For a brief and illuminative biographical sketch of James Leigh
Joynes, compare Shaw's review of his book, _Songs of a Revolutionary
Epoch_, in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 16th, 1888.
[18] The first instalment of _An Unsocial Socialist_ appeared in
_To-Day_, a “monthly magazine of Scientific Socialism,” New Series,
Vol. I. (January-June, 1884), March number, pp. 205-220. The final
instalment appeared in New Series, Vol. II., of the same magazine
(July-December, 1884), December number, pp. 543-579. The novel appeared
under Shaw's name, and is marked at the close (page 579), “The End,”
and dated beneath, “London, 1883,” the date of composition. _Cashel
Byron's Profession_ ran in the same magazine through the years 1885 and
1886, beginning in New Series, Vol. III. (January-June, 1885), April
number, pp. 145-160, and concluding in Vol. V. (January-June, 1886),
March number, pp. 67-73.
[19] _The Irrational Knot_ began in Vol. V. (January-June, 1885), pp.
229-240, ran through Vols. VI., VII. and VIII., and was concluded in
Vol. IX. (January-June, 1887), ending on page 82. _Love Among the
Artists_ opened in Vol. X. (July-December, 1887) of the same magazine,
ran through Vol. XI., and was concluded in Vol. XII. (July-December,
1888), on page 352. It is marked at the close (page 352), “The End,
London, 1881”--the date of composition.
[20] Published, in part, in _The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson_,
Vol. II., edited by Sidney Colvin.
[21] The _New York Herald_ contained the statement that “Brentanos have
done a service to literature in reprinting two of Shaw's novels that
are strangely unfamiliar to the American public.”
[22] This book was published in 1900, followed in 1901 by the
“Authorized Edition” of _Cashel Byron's Profession_ (also published
by H. S. Stone and Co.), which contains the above-quoted remark. In
the autumn of 1901, Grant Richards, at the time the English publisher
of almost all of Mr. Shaw's works, also brought out a revised edition
of _Cashel Byron's Profession_. In the autumn of 1904 _The Irrational
Knot_ was for the first time published in book form by Archibald
Constable and Co., Mr. Shaw's English publishers at present. In 1905
_The Irrational Knot_ was published in America by Brentanos.
[23] On publishing his _Cashel Byron's Profession_, Harper and Brothers
sent Mr. Shaw ten pounds in recognition of his moral right as an
author to share any profits the book might yield. There were then no
international copyright laws in force, and the works of foreign authors
were not protected in America. When Mr. Shaw learned that this same
book had been republished by another American house, he sent back to
Harper and Brothers the ten pounds, with thanks for its use, explaining
that since the book had been republished by another firm, even his
moral claim to recognition by the original American publishers had
lapsed.
THE NOVELIST
“London was not ripe for me. Nor was I ripe for London. I was
in an impossible position. I was a foreigner--an Irishman, the
most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the
University mill. I was ... not uneducated; but, unfortunately,
what I knew was exactly what the educated Englishman didn't
know or didn't believe.”--_George Bernard Shaw: an Interview._
In _The Chap-Book_, November, 1896.
CHAPTER III
As a young man of twenty-four, Bernard Shaw began to evolve a moral
code. He perceived in those phases of contemporary existence which
either intimately touched his life or daily challenged his critical
scrutiny, a shocking discrepancy between things as they are and things
as they should be. He has never been a “whole hogger,” like Pope
or Omar Khayyam: he neither believed that whatever is is right nor
wished to shatter this sorry scheme of things _entire_. The arch-foe
of idealism, he paradoxically prefaced his attack by hoisting the
banner of an ideal. Shaw has spent more than a quarter of a century in
formulating his ideal, in attempting to concretize his individual code
into a universal ethical system.
Let us not fall into the crass error of supposing that Shaw has never
come under the spell of the fascination of idealism and romance. Shaw
the realist paid his toll to Romance before the moral passion ever
dawned upon his soul. Just as Zola always bore the brand of Hugo, just
as Ibsen worked his way through romance to real life, so Shaw found
his feet in realism only after tripping several times over the novels
of a romantic imagination. Shaw's novels are the products of a riotous
and fanciful imagination, if not, as he dubs them, the compounds of
ignorance and intuition. In a celebrated discussion with Mr. W. H.
Mallock, we have Shaw's frank confession:
“We are both novelists, privileged as such to make fancy
pictures of Society and individuals, and to circulate them
as narratives of things that have actually been; and the
critics will gravely find fault with our fictitious law, or
our fictitious history, or our fictitious psychology, if
we depart therein from perfect verisimilitude. Why have we
this extraordinary privilege? Because, I submit, we are both
natural-born tellers of the thing that is not. Not, observe,
vulgar impostors who lie for motives of gain, to extort alms,
to conceal or excuse discreditable facts in our history, to
glorify ourselves, to facilitate the sale of a horse, or to
avoid unpleasantness. All humanity lies like that, more or
less. But Mr. Mallock and I belong to those who lie for the
sheer love of lying, who forsake everything else for it, who
put into it laborious extra touches of art for which there is
no extra pay, whose whole life, if it were looked into closely
enough, would be found to have been spent more in the world of
fiction than of reality.”[24]
Shaw has somewhere placed on record his boast that such insight
as he had in criticism was due to the fact that he exhausted
romanticism before he was ten years old. “Your popular novelists,” he
contemptuously declared, “are now gravely writing the stories I told to
myself before I replaced my first set of teeth. Some day I will try to
found a genuine psychology of fiction by writing down the history of my
imagined life, duels, battles, love-affairs with queens and all. They
say that man in embryo is successively a fish, a bird, a mammal, and so
on, before he develops into a man. Well, popular novel-writing is the
fish stage of your Jonathan Swift. I have never been so dishonest as to
sneer at our popular novelists. I once went on like that myself. Why
does the imaginative man always end by writing comedy if only he has
also a sense of reality? Clearly because of the stupendous irony of the
contrast between his imaginary adventures and his real circumstances
and powers. At night, a conquering hero, an Admirable Crichton, a Don
Juan; by day, a cowardly little brat cuffed by his nurse for stealing
lumps of sugar.... My real name,” he added, “is Alnaschar.”[25]
As a matter of fact, Shaw has anticipated his exhaustion of romanticism
by some seventeen years. It was not until he finished the novels of
his nonage that he could justly boast of having “worked off” that
romanticism which always appears to be latent in every creative
imagination in the stage of incipiency. Remember what Stevenson wrote
to William Archer of _Cashel Byron's Profession_:
“As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most
feverish.... It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful; the
author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott's or Dumas's,
and then he daubs in little bits of Socialism; he soars away
on the wings of the romantic griffon--even the griffon, as
he cleaves air, shouting with laughter at the nature of the
quest--and I believe in his heart he thinks he is labouring in
a quarry of solid granite realism.
“It is this that makes me--the most hardened adviser now
extant--stand back and hold my peace. If Mr. Shaw is below
five-and-twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had
best be told that he is a romantic, and pursue romance with
his eyes open; perhaps he knows it; God knows!--my brain is
softened.”[26]
It is all very well for Shaw to say that he used Bizet's _Carmen_ as a
safety valve for his romantic impulses. But the testimony of his own
novels flatly contradicts his complacent assertion that he was romantic
enough to have come to the end of romance before he began to create in
art for himself.
These novels, in spite of their youthful romanticism, nevertheless
constitute the record of the adventures of an earnest and anarchic
young man, with a knack of keen observation and terse portraiture,
striving to give voice to and interpret the spirit of the century.
When someone, in 1892, suggested that Shaw was, of course, a follower
of Ibsen, Shaw replied with a great show of indignation: “What! _I_
a follower of Ibsen! My good sir, as far as England is concerned,
Ibsen is a follower of mine. In 1880, when I was only twenty-four, I
wrote a book called 'The Irrational Knot,' which reads nowadays like
an Ibsenite novel.” And in the postscript to the preface to the new
edition of that novel, after having declared with familiar Shavian
wiliness in the preface that he “couldn't stand” his own book, he
makes a sudden _bouleversement_ as follows: “Since writing the above
I have looked through the proof-sheets of this book, and found, with
some access of respect for my youth, that it is a fiction of the first
order.... It is one of those fictions in which the morality is original
and not ready-made.... I seriously suggest that 'The Irrational Knot'
may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the life force to
write 'A Doll's House' in English by the instrumentality of a very
immature writer aged twenty-four. And though I say it that should not,
the choice was not such a bad shot for a stupid instinctive force that
has to work and become conscious of itself by means of human brains.”
With all its immaturity, _The Irrational Knot_ is undoubtedly in
the “tone of our time.” It is the ill-chosen title, however, rather
than the contents which recalls Nora and Torvald. The institution of
marriage is not shown to be irrational; Shaw's shafts were aimed at
the code of social morality which renders marriages such as the one
described inevitable failures. Shaw not only seeks to expose the fatal
inconsistencies of this social code, but also damns the feeble shams
with which Society attempts to bolster up those inconsistencies.
Endowed with much of the bluntness of Bluntschli, but with an added
sensitiveness, the “hero” of this novel may be described as the crude
and repellent prototype of the later Shavian males. Believing more in
force than in _savoir faire_, in brutal sincerity than in conventional
graces, Conolly stands out for literal truth and violent tactlessness
as against social propriety and observance of _les convenances_. He is
acting with perfect validity to himself when he says, in answer to the
question as to what he is going to do about his wife's elopement with a
former lover: “Eat my supper. I am as hungry as a bear.” After Marian's
desertion by her lover, Conolly urges her to return to him, assuring
her that now she is just the wife he wants, since she is at last rid
of “fashionable society, of her family, her position, her principles,
and all the rest of her chains for ever.” Marian refuses, because
she cannot “respect herself for breaking loose from what is called
her duty.” Their definitive words epitomize the failure of their life
together.
“'You are too wise, Ned,' she said, suffering him to replace her gently
in the chair.
“'It is impossible to be too wise, dearest,' he said, and
unhesitatingly turned and left her.”
The subjects which inspired Shaw's maturer genius are the same subjects
which so actively, if crudely and imperfectly, struggle for expression
in this early work. Much acuteness is exhibited by the young man of
twenty-four in spying out the weak points in the armour of “that
corporate knave, Society.” When the “high-bred” wife of the “self-made”
man elopes with a “gentleman,” Society's dismay is only feigned. Like
Roebuck Ramsden, Marian's relatives are quite willing to forgive, and
even to thank, the cur if he will only marry her: by ousting a rank
outsider like Conolly, Douglas appears to Society almost in the light
of a champion of its cause. Shaw was too close an observer of life,
even at twenty-four, to attempt to make out a case against matrimony
by celebrating the success of an unblessed union. His point is turned
against Society, less for upholding traditional morality than for
making the preservation of its class distinctions its highest laws.
Society is ready enough to forgive Douglas; but Marmaduke Lind, in
setting up an unblessed union with Conolly's sister, Mademoiselle
Lalage Virtue, of the Bijou Theatre, places himself beyond the pale.
For she is socially “impossible”; and, consequently, there can be no
relenting towards Marmaduke until he return, and, in the odour of
sanctity and respectability, marry Lady Constance Carberry!
_The Irrational Knot_ cannot be called novel on account of its rather
commonplace thought that “a girl who lives in Belgravia ought not
to marry with a man who is familiar with the Mile End Road.” But
as Mr. W. L. Courtney suggestively remarks: “What is novel is the
illustration, in clever and mordant fashion, of the absurd folly and
wastefulness of social conditions which obstinately make intelligence
subservient to aristocratic prestige. Even in our much-abused country
there is, and has been for a long time, a career open for talent;
but the aspiring male must not encumber himself by taking a partner
out of ranks to which he does not belong. Thus, 'The Irrational Knot'
is nothing more nor less than an early tract in defence of Socialism
or Communism, or whatever other term should be applied to theories
which seek to equalize the chances and opportunities of human beings.”
In _The Irrational Knot_ are found the marks of that individual mode
of observing and reflecting life, which is popularly denominated
“Shavian.” Here is the first clear testimony to that rationalistic
mood in Shaw which permeates so much of his subsequent work. And yet
this book contains intimations of that deeper philosophy of life which
conceives of rationality merely as an instrumentality for carrying out
its designs. This knot is irrational only because it is too rational.
Marian shrinks from reconcilement with Conolly: she cannot breathe in
the icy atmosphere of his rationalistic cocksureness. Conolly expresses
Shaw's fundamental protestantism in his assertion that Marian's
ill-considered flight with Douglas was the first sensible action of
her whole life. It was admirable in his eyes because it was her first
vigorous assertion of will, of vital purpose. The human being can and
will find freedom only in overriding convention, repudiating “duty,”
and solving every problem in terms of its own factors. The book,
indeed, is marked less by immaturity of thought than by crudeness of
execution. The characters are deficient in the flexibility and pliancy
of human beings, and the book lacks suggestion of “the slow, irregular
rhythm of life,” of which Henry James somewhere speaks. To Shaw, the
depiction of Conolly was evidently a labour of love; and, consequently,
we have an execution of force, if not always of convincing veracity.
Elinor McQuinch, shrewd, sharp-tongued, acid--the familiar _advocatus
diaboli_, and Shaw in petticoats of the later Shavian drama--is
delightfully refreshing in her piquancy, and truly Ibsenic in her
determination to “be herself.” The nascent dramatist often speaks
out in this book--note the melodramatic Lalage Virtue--but nowhere
more characteristically than in the trenchant deliverance of the
justly-vexed Elinor:
[Illustration: =Facsimile (reduced) of first and last pages of the
original manuscript of _Love Among the Artists_.=]
_Courtesy of Mr. D. J. Rider_.
“Henceforth Uncle Reginald is welcome to my heartiest
detestation. I have been waiting ever since I knew him for an
excuse to hate him; and now he has given me one. He has taken
part--like a true parent--against you with a self-intoxicated
young fool whom he ought to have put out of the house. He has
told me to mind my own business. I shall be even with him for
that some day. I am as vindictive as an elephant: I hate people
who are not vindictive; they are never grateful either, only
incapable of any enduring sentiment.... I am thoroughly well
satisfied with myself altogether; at last I have come out of a
scene without having forgotten the right thing to say!”
Imagination lingers fondly, as Mr. Hubert Bland once remarked, over the
spectacle of Elinor standing in the middle of the stage, three-quarters
face to the audience, and firing off those acute generalizations
about people who are not vindictive. Shaw's cleverness has begun
thus early to betray him; a number of the characters are smart, but
quite unnatural. The “Literary Great-grandfather” of the present Shaw
unerringly pointed out many of the weak spots of Society; but his
fundamental Socialism, impatient of class distinctions and social
barriers, leads him occasionally into crude caricature. The book's
greatest fault lies, perhaps, in the fact that his characters employ,
not the natural, ductile speech of to-day, but the stilted diction of
Dumas and Scott.
Commonplace as is the characterization, Shaw's next novel, _Love Among
the Artists_, is a tract--less a novel than a critical essay with a
purpose, in narrative form. Shaw confesses that he wrote this book for
the purpose of illustrating “the difference between that enthusiasm
for the fine arts which people gather from reading about them, and the
genuine artistic faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting, or,
at least, unaffectedly enjoying music and pictures.”
I have often wondered if it might not be possible for one who did not
know Shaw personally to construct a quite credible biography by making
a composite of the peculiarly Shavian types presented in his novels and
plays. Without carrying the analogy to extremes, I think it mediately
true that Shaw has one by one exhibited, in semi-autobiographic
form, the distinguishing hall-marks of his individual and many-sided
character. To what extent Owen Jack is a projection of the Shaw of
this period, how graphically, if unconsciously, Shaw has revealed
in this droll original his own ideals of music and his defence of a
certain impudently exasperating assertiveness of manner in himself,
is difficult to decide. Shaw insists that Jack is partly founded on
Beethoven. And yet there is an undoubted resemblance between the real
Irishman and the imagined Welshman who plays the Hyde of Jack to the
Jekyll of Shaw. Like “C. di B.” and G. B. S., Jack is the first of the
“privileged lunatics.” He scorns the pedantry of the schools, sneers at
mechanical music of academic origin, jibes at “analytic criticism,” and
fiercely denounces the antiquated views of the musical organizations
of England, with their old fogeyism, their cowardice in the face of
novelty, their dread of innovation, and their cringing subservience
to obsolescent and outworn models. Like Shaw, Jack is always tolerant
of sincerity, always sympathetic with true effort, unrestrainedly
enthusiastic over any vital outpouring of the creative spirit; rebuking
tyranny wherever he sees it, exposing falsehood whenever he hears it,
eternally vigilant in exposing frauds and unmasking shams. And yet,
with all his offensive brusqueness, fierce intolerance, and colossal
self-sufficiency, gentle-hearted, compassionate, and, in the presence
of beauty, deeply humble.
Shaw once called _Love Among the Artists_ a novel with a purpose.
Viewed from another standpoint, it is a collection of types, a study in
temperaments. The author preaches the arrogance of genius as opposed
to a false humility in the presence of great art works. The shallow
artist, Adrian Herbert, “spends whole days in explaining to you what
a man of genius is and feels, knowing neither the one nor the other”;
Mary Sutherland never surpasses mediocrity as an artist because her
knowledge is based upon hearsay instead of upon experience. She stands
in sharp contrast to Madge Brailsford, who tersely puts her case to
Mary--the case, one might say, of the whole book--“If you don't like
your own pictures, depend upon it no one else will. I am going to be
an actress because I think I can act. You are going to be a painter
because you think you can't paint.” Mr. Huneker declares that Mary
Sutherland, “lymphatically selfish and utterly unsympathetic,” is
his prime favourite in the story. “Her taste in flaring colours,
her feet, her habit of breathing heavily when aroused emotionally,
her cowardices, her artistic failures, her eye-glasses, her treacly
sentiment--what a study of the tribe artistic! And truly British
withal.” The only other noteworthy figure in the book is the evasive,
elusive Mademoiselle Szczympliça--a study searching in the closeness
and delicacy of its observation. This charming and piquant Polish
pianist, although emanating poetry and romance, has, as she puts it,
the “soul commercial” within her. She cannot see why, even if she does
love her husband, she should therefore dispense with her piano practice!
Unlike the classic model for a play, this novel has neither beginning,
middle, nor ending; and yet it has many brilliantly executed scenes.
Who could ever forget the street fight in Paris, the humorous
“love-scene” between Madge Brailsford and Owen Jack, and the rehearsal,
so acute in its satire--fitting companion-piece to the Wagner lecture
in _Cashel Byron's Profession_?
It is noteworthy that _Love Among the Artists_ heralds a favourite
thesis of Shaw's--the natural antipathy between blood relations--a
thesis expounded many years later by John Tanner in the rather leaden
epigram “I suspect that the tables of consanguinity have a natural
basis in a natural repugnance.” Cashel Byron is always catching himself
in the act of “shying” when his mother is around--she used to throw
things at him when he was a boy! Blanche Sartorius is quite ready to
hate her father at a moment's notice; no love is lost between Julia
and Colonel Craven; Vivie Warren stands out determinedly against her
mother's authority; and Frank, with nauseating levity, takes great
delight in “jollying” his reprobate father upon the indiscretions of
his youth. Phil and Dolly are breezily disrespectful of parental rule;
and Anne uses her maudlin mother as an excuse to do just whatever
she wants. The thesis is part of Shaw's stock-in-trade, and might
be regarded as a mere comic _motif_, were it not for the “damnable
iteration” of the thing. Adrian Herbert avows his positive dislike for
his mother, because, as he affirms, their natures are antagonistic,
their views of life and duty incompatible--because they have nothing
in common. We must take Shaw's insistence upon incompatibility of
temperament between blood-relations with a good many grains of salt. It
is not even half true that every mother tries to defeat every cherished
project of her sons “by sarcasms, by threats, and, failing these,
by cajolery”; that everyone's childhood has been “embittered by the
dislike of his mother and the ill-temper of his father”; that every
man's wife soon ceases to care for him and that he soon tires of her;
that every man's brother goes to law with him over the division of the
family property; and that every man's son acts in studied defiance of
his plans and wishes. These things are only true enough to be funny;
just enough of them happen in real life to give Shaw's thesis a sort of
comic plausibility. It is the phrases, “love is eternal,” and “blood
is thicker than water,” rather than the facts themselves, which make
the iconoclastic Shaw see red. I find some explanation of his view in
pardonable revolt, as a dramatist, against that persistent superstition
of French melodrama--the _voix du sang_. Some explanation of Shaw's
views in the matter may possibly be found in the facts of his own
personal experience; at any rate, he once said that the word education
brought to his mind four successive schools where his parents got him
out of the way for half a day. Indeed, his campaign against the modern
system of education springs from his recently expressed disgust with
educators for _concealing_ the fact that “the real object of that
system is to relieve parents from the insufferable company and anxious
care of their children.” Continuing in the same strain, he says:
“Until it is frankly recognized that children are nuisances to
adults except at playful moments, and that the first social
need that arises from the necessary existence of children in
a community is that there should be some adequate defence of
the comparative quiet and order of adult life against the
comparative noise, racket, untidiness, inquisitiveness,
restlessness, fitfulness, shiftlessness, dirt, destruction and
mischief, which are healthy and natural for children, and which
are no reason for denying them the personal respect without
which their characters cannot grow and set properly, we shall
have the present pretence of inexhaustible parental tenderness,
moulding of character, inculcation of principles, and so forth,
to cloak the imprisoning, drilling, punishing, tormenting,
brigading, boy and girl farming, which saves those who can
afford it from having to scream ten times every hour, 'Stop
that noise, Tommy, or I'll clout your head for you.'”[27]
With gradual, yet unhalting steps, Shaw works his way to those
startling and topsy-turvy theories which are so delightfully credible
to the _intellectuels_ and so bewilderingly exasperating to the
Philistines. In _Love Among the Artists_, Madge Brailsford's open
avowal to Owen Jack of her love for him gives a hint that the theory
of woman as the huntress and man as the quarry is upon us. But quite
the contrary course is taken in _Cashel Byron's Profession_, Shaw's
next novel. Cashel Byron, the perfect pugilist, fights his way into the
good graces of the “high-born” heiress, Lydia Carew, by the straight
exhibition of his physical prowess. The whole book is conceived in
such broadly satirical vein that it is impossible for me to accept it
as anything except a boyishly irrepressible pasquinade. Fortunately,
the “little bits of Socialism that were daubed in” here and there at
first, were afterwards deleted; the current version is a novel, pure
and simple, with no discoverable Socialistic thesis behind it. Shaw's
explanation that the book was written as an offset to the “abominable
vein of retaliatory violence” that runs all through the literature of
the nineteenth century need not detain us here; Shaw has made out his
own case with sufficiently paradoxical cleverness in the inevitable
preface. He spends one-half of his time in explaining his actions
during the other half; and it has even been unkindly hinted that
each new book of his serves merely as an excuse for writing another
preface. And it should be remembered that the preface to _Cashel
Byron's Profession_ was written some eighteen years later than was the
book itself--ample time for Shaw to devise any excuse for representing
his book as a deliberate challenge to British ideals. Suffice it to say
that a comparison of _Cashel Byron's Profession_ with _Rodney Stone_,
for example, will make plain the distinction between the realism and
the romance of pugilism. And while Byron's exhibitions of physical
prowess are the most “howlingly funny” incidents in the book, it is
nevertheless true that Shaw has done nothing to surround the “noble art
of _sluggerei_” with any halo of fictitious romance.[28] “Its novelty,”
as Shaw himself maintains, “consists in the fact that an attempt is
made to treat the art of punching seriously, and to detach it from the
general elevation of moral character with which the ordinary novelist
persists in associating it.”
The real novelty, and, indeed, the chief charm, of the book consists
rather in the fact that no attempt is made to treat anything seriously.
So far as the prize-ring is concerned, the book's realism is veracious;
the rest is the frankest of popular melodrama. What appeals more
strongly to the popular heart than a low-born but invincible slugger
fighting his way, round after round, to the side of a noble and
fabulously wealthy heroine! What more oracularly Adelphic in its
melodrama than the “finger of fate” upon the “long arm of coincidence”
directing Cashel's mother to the mansion of Miss Lydia Carew! And what
an exquisite fulfilment of poetic justice--the ultimate discovery that
Cashel is a scion of one of the oldest county families in England, and
heir to a great estate! The thing that makes the book go, of course,
is its peculiarly Shavian cast--the combination of what Stevenson
called “struggling, overlaid original talent” and “blooming gaseous
folly.” Shaw's sense of dramatic situation continually foreshadows the
future playwright. The abounding humour of the exquisitely ludicrous
scene at the reception--the devastating comicality of the brute, with
his native “mother-wit,” turned rough-and-ready philosopher! When
Cashel is set down in the midst of this ethical-artistic circle, he
breezily excels all the professors--for he discusses art _positively_,
in the terminology of his own profession, in which he is a past
master. The sublime hardihood of elucidating Beethoven and Wagner in
terms of the pugilistic art of Jack Randall! And Bashville, over whom
Stevenson howled with derision and delight, what a brief for democratic
Socialism is Bashville--prototype for the Admirable Crichton and 'Enry
Straker--keenly conscious of his own absurdity, yet zealously standing
out in defence of his mistress and in insistence upon the truly
democratic doctrine of “equal rights for all, special privileges for
none.” Who cannot sympathize with Stevenson: “I dote on Bashville--I
could read of him for ever; _de Bashville je suis le fervent_--there
is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave; _Bashville
est magnifique, mais il n'est guère possible_.” Or when he says:
“Bashville--O Bashville! _j'en_ chortle (which is finely polyglot).”
Service is as sacred to Bashville as pugilism is to Cashel. Each is
the “ideal” professional man, who magnifies his office and measures
up to the height of his own profession. Each demands recognition for
fulfilling to the best of his ability his own special function in life.
Shaw insists that the real worth of a man is not to be measured by the
social standing of his profession, but in terms of his professional
efficiency.
Shaw's mastery of the portrayal of striking contrasts is exhibited in
the case of Cashel Byron and Lydia Carew. There is a strong hint of
the “female Yahoo” in Lydia's avowal to her aristocratic suitor: “I
practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is
frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man
strong in body and untroubled in mind is a trustworthy one. You can
understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics.” This was fun
to Stevenson--but “horrid fun.” His postscript is laconically eloquent:
“(I say, Archer, my God! what women!)” William Morris seems to have
had the rights in the matter in describing Lydia, to Shaw privately,
as a “prig-ess.” Shaw grandiloquently speaks of her as “superhuman all
through,” a “working model” of an “improved type” of womanhood. “Let me
not deny, however ...,” he remarks, “that a post-mortem examination by
a capable critical anatomist--probably my biographer--will reveal the
fact that her inside is full of wheels and springs.” The book closes on
a mildly Shavian note--the romance has dwindled to banality. “Cashel's
admiration for his wife survived the ardour of his first love for her;
and her habitual forethought saved her from disappointing his reliance
on her judgment.”
All that was needed to expose the threadbare plot of _Cashel
Byron's Profession_ was _The Admirable Bashville: or Constancy
Unrewarded_--Shaw's blank-verse stage version of the novel. This
delightful jest was perpetrated in defence of the stage-right of the
novel, which threatened to pass into unworthy hands through the malign
workings of that “foolish anomaly,” the English Copyright Law. In
Shaw's celebrated lecture on Shakespeare, at Kensington Town Hall,
section 10, as given in his abstract, reads as follows:
“That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of words,
blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions
which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts
of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical, and obscurely
technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and
to impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of
fantasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes
of literary expression, and that this is why whole oceans of
dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the heads of
England since Shakespeare's time in this form by people who
could not have written _Box and Cox_ to save their lives. Also
(this on being challenged) that I can write blank verse myself
more swiftly than prose, and that, too, of full Elizabethan
quality plus the Shakespearian sense of the absurdity of it as
expressed in the lines of Antient Pistol. What is more, that I
have done it, published it, and had it performed on the stage
with huge applause.”[29]
Liking the “melodious sing-song, the clear, simple, one-line and
two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half-closes
in an eighteenth-century symphony, in Peele, Kid, Greene, and the
histories of Shakespeare,” Shaw quite naturally “poetasted _The
Admirable Bashville_ in the rigmarole style.” After illustrating how
unspeakably bad Shakespearean blank verse is, Shaw ludicrously claims
that his own is “just as good.” Nor is it possible to deny that his
own blank verse positively scintillates with the Shakespearean--or is
it Shavian?--sense of its absurdity. The preface to _The Admirable
Bashville_ has the genuine Shavian _timbre_, with its solemn fooling,
its portentous levity, its false premises and ludicrous conclusions. In
that preface, as Mr. Archer puts it, Shaw “defends the woodenness of
his blank verse by arguing that wooden blank verse is the best. That,
at any rate, is the gist of his contention, though he does not put it
in just that way.”
The play--for despite Shaw's prefaces, the play's the thing--is a
truly admirable burlesque of rhetorical drama. Not Bashville, but
Cashel only is admirable; it is Cashel's constancy that is rewarded.
The piece is couched in a tone of the most delicious extravagance--a
hit, a palpable hit, in every line. I cannot resist the temptation
to quote from the scene in which Lydia, Lucian, and Bashville, fast
locked against intrusion, debate the question of admitting Cashel, the
presumably infuriated ruffian, who has just been successfully tripped
up by Bashville as he is trying to enter the Carew mansion.
LYDIA: We must not fail in courage with a fighter.
Unlock the door.
LUCIAN: Like all women, Lydia,
You have the courage of immunity.
To strike _you_ were against his code of honour;
But _me_, above the belt, he may perform on
T' th' height of his profession. Also Bashville.
BASHVILLE: Think not of me, sir. Let him do his worst.
Oh, if the valour of my heart could weigh
The fatal difference 'twixt his weight and mine,
A second battle should he do this day:
Nay, though outmatched I be, let but my mistress
Give me the word: instant I'll take him on
Here--now--at catchweight. Better bite the carpet
A man, than fly, a coward.
LUCIAN: Bravely said:
I will assist you with the poker.
And well worth remembering is the naïve autobiography, delivered at the
request of the Zulu king, of that celestially denominated “bruiser”
concerning whom Cashel once said: “Slave to the ring I rest until the
face of Paradise be changed.”
CETEWAYO: Ye sons of the white queen:
Tell me your names and deeds ere ye fall to.
PARADISE: Your royal highness, you beholds a bloke
What gets his living honest by his fists.
I may not have the polish of some toffs
As I could mention on; but up to now
No man has took my number down. I scale
Close on twelve stun; my age is twenty-three;
And at Bill Richardson's “Blue Anchor” pub
Am to be heard of any day by such
As likes the job. I don't know, governor,
As ennythink remains for me to say.
Those who witnessed the original production of the play by the London
Stage Society in 1903, and also the later production in 1909 at the
“Afternoon Theatre” (His Majesty's), unhesitatingly gave it that
“huge applause” of which Shaw speaks so frankly. “The best burlesque
of rhetorical drama in the language,” is Mr. Archer's sweeping
dictum. Even the most hardened of Philistines might find it easy
to agree with his statement: “Fielding's 'Tom Thumb' and Carey's
'Chrononhotonthologos' are, it seems to me, not in the running.”
Not until the appearance of _An Unsocial Socialist_, fifth of the
novels of his nonage, is the Pandora's box of Shavian theories opened.
There now begin to troop forth those startling and anarchic views with
which the name of Shaw is popularly associated. This modern “_École
des Maris_” heralds the reign of the “literature of effrontery”;
Shaw is beginning to take his stride. With all its extravagance and
waywardness, _An Unsocial Socialist_ has been declared by at least one
critic of authority to be as brilliant as anything George Meredith
ever wrote. Let us recall Stevenson's warning to Shaw: “Let him beware
of his damned century; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated
narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out like an
untimely birth by the Daemon of the Epoch.” Gone are the chivalry and
romance--the winds of Socialism have blown them all away. But the book
fairly reeks of the “damned century,” with its mad irresponsibility,
its exasperating levity, its religious and social revolt. Written
in 1883, it seethes and bubbles with the scum of the Socialist brew
just then beginning to ferment. Shaw's original design, he tells us,
was to “produce a novel which should be a gigantic grapple with the
whole social problem.... When I had finished two chapters of this
enterprise--chapters of colossal length, but containing the merest
preliminary matter--I broke down in sheer ignorance and incapacity.”
Eventually the two prodigious chapters of Shaw's _magnum opus_ were
published as a complete novel, in two “books,” under the title _An
Unsocial Socialist_. Shaw begins fiercely to sermonize humanity,
to deride all customs and institutions which have not their roots
sunk in individualism and in social justice. The Seven Deadly Sins
are: respectability, conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty,
sentiment, devotion to woman, romance. Sidney Trefusis is the
philosopher of the New Order, revolted by the rottenness of present
civilization and resolved, by any means, to set in motion some schemes
for its reformation. Discovering too late that marriage to him, as to
Tanner, means “apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of his soul,
violation of his manhood, sale of his birthright, shameful surrender,
ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat,” Trefusis deliberately
deserts his wife, _not_ because, as with Falk and Svanhild in Ibsen's
_Love's Comedy_, love seems too exquisite, too ethereal to be put to
the illusion-shattering test of marriage, but because marriage involves
the triumph of senses over sense, of passion over reason. Even after
he has ceased to love Henrietta, her love for him continues to set in
motion the mechanism of passion, and he is revolted by the fact that
she is satisfied so long as “the wheels go round.”
The millionaire son of a captain of industry, Trefusis has, by a
strange freak of fate, drunk deep of the Socialist draught of the
epoch. Respecting his dead father for his energy and bravery among
unscrupulous competitors in the struggle for existence, Trefusis curses
his memory for the inhuman means employed in his business dealings and
the social crimes concealed by the shimmer of his “ill-gotten gold.”
His most significant utterance--an outburst before the wealthy
landowner, Sir Charles Brandon--gives us a clear picture of Shaw's
Socialist views at this time:
“A man cannot be a Christian: I have tried it, and found it
impossible both in law and in fact. I am a capitalist and a
landholder. I have railway shares, mining shares, building
shares, bank shares, and stock of most kinds; and a great
trouble they are to me. But these shares do not represent
wealth actually in existence: they are a mortgage on the labour
of unborn generations of labourers, who must work to keep me
and mine in idleness and luxury. If I sold them, would the
mortgage be cancelled and the unborn generations released from
its thrall? No. It would only pass into the hands of some
other capitalist; and the working classes would be no better
off for my self-sacrifice. Sir Charles cannot obey the command
of Christ: I defy him to do it. Let him give his land for a
public park: only the richer classes will have leisure to enjoy
it. Plant it at the very doors of the poor, so that they may
at least breathe its air; and it will raise the value of the
neighbouring houses and drive the poor away. Let him endow a
school for the poor, like Eton or Christ's Hospital; and the
rich will take it for their own children as they do in the two
instances I have named. Sir Charles does not want to minister
to poverty, but to abolish it. No matter how much you give
to the poor, everything but a bare subsistence wage will be
taken away from them again by force. All talk of practising
Christianity, or even bare justice, is at present mere waste of
words. How can you justly reward the labourer when you cannot
ascertain the value of what he makes, owing to the prevalent
custom of stealing it?... The principle on which we farm out
our national industry to private marauders, who recompense
themselves by blackmail, so corrupts and paralyses us that we
cannot be honest even when we want to. And the reason we bear
it so calmly is that very few of us really want to.”
A Marx in Shaw's clothing, Trefusis devotes all his energies, all his
wealth, to the task of forming an international association--“The
International,” history gives it--of men pledged “to share the world's
work justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not
a farthing--charity apart--to any full-grown and able-bodied idler
or malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons
attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than
their share of work.” Whole-souledly committed to Socialism in its
iconoclastic aspects, Trefusis defies convention, prudery, delicacy,
good-taste, and tact in all his actions, convinced beyond reclaim that
“vile or not, whatever is true is to the purpose.” His philosophy
holds it a short-sighted policy to run away from a mistake or a
misunderstanding, instead of “facing the music” and clearing the matter
up. A licensed eccentric like his prototypic creator in real life,
Trefusis is permitted to take liberties granted to no one else; and by
the “exercise of a certain considerate tact (which, on the outside,
perhaps, seems the opposite of tact),” but which in reality consists
in the most ingenious double-dealing, he somehow or other contrives to
have his way and go scot-free.
In the early part of the story, disguised as that “terrific combination
of nerves, gall, and brains,” Smilash, he dexterously philanders to
his heart's content with several young girls at the boarding-school
where his wife was educated. The verisimilitude of the portraits,
the acute psychology exhibited in the portrayal of the feelings,
sentiments, and sentimentalities of young girls in the boarding-school
stage of evolution, testify to Shaw's remarkable gifts as a genuine
realist. That forerunner of Julia Craven, the romantic little Henrietta
Jansenius, is portrayed with insight, and not without delicacy and
restraint. The most unreal, most unhuman scene in the book is that in
which Trefusis apostrophizes the body of his dead wife. His reflections
impress me as both flippant and callous in their solemn setting. It
is with a sense of profound shock that we hear him rudely flout the
“funereal sanctimoniousness” of the family physician, mock at the
“harrowing mummeries” of religious and social observance, and “damn the
feelings” of a father and mother who regarded their daughter as their
chattel and showed no true feeling for her when she was alive. Trefusis
is devoured with the conviction that the first, if the hardest, of all
duties is one's duty to one's self. His fine Italian hand is betrayed
in his later philanderings with the whilom loves of Smilash, now grown
up into disagreeable, hard, calculating women. Trefusis's trickery of
Sir Charles Brandon, his unfeeling deception of Gertrude Lindsay, his
base flattery of Lady Brandon, his misleading promise to Erskine, are
all exhibitions of his Jesuitical policy. The exponent of Socialism and
the New Morality, Trefusis has no scruples in employing unfair means to
secure whatsoever he wants--for the cause of labour and for himself.[30]
[Illustration: =_George Bernard Shaw._=]
_From a photograph by Eduard J Steichen made at 10 Adelphi Terrace,
London, W.C. August, 1907._
Mr. W. L. Courtney has somewhere called attention to the curious
triumph achieved by “our only modern dramatist,” as he calls Bernard
Shaw, in view of the fact that Shaw has never hesitated at interpreting
women as beasts of prey. In the novels we find premonitions of Shaw's
later attitude toward women. Some suspicion of Shaw's theory that
woman “takes the initiative in sex business” dawns upon us when Madge
Brailsford openly courts Owen Jack; but Lydia Carew, that bloodless
Ibsen type, is anything but the huntress. _An Unsocial Socialist_ opens
our eyes; for Henrietta shamelessly pursues the mocking Trefusis and
exhausts every feminine wile in the effort to induce him to return
to the chains of wedlock. The idea is also uppermost in the final
scene, in which Trefusis, by means of a little diabolically-concocted
sentiment, persuades the pursuing Gertrude to give him up, and, “for
his sake,” to marry Erskine. When Shaw came to erect his theory into a
system in _Man and Superman_, he threw a flood of light upon all his
former work. There is a keynote to the philosophy of every great or
pioneer thinker: Shakespeare had his Hamlet, Wagner his Free-willing
of Necessity, Schopenhauer his Will to Live, and Nietzsche his Will
to Power. So Shaw is the apostle of the Life Force, as he calls
it; and woman is incarnate life force--potent instrument of that
irresistible, secret, blind impulse which Nature wields for her own
transcendent purposes, heedless of the feelings, welfare, or happiness
of individuals. Recognizing woman as the primal vital agency in the
fulfilment of Nature's laws, he has not unnaturally come to regard
her as “much more formidable than man, because she is, as it were,
archetypal, belonging to the original structure of things, and has
behind her activity, sometimes benevolent and more often malevolent,
the great authority of Nature herself.”[31] Under the spell of this
plausible conviction, Shaw endows woman with all the attributes of a
blind, unreasoning, unscrupulous force of nature. And for his faith
he can find ample support in the literature of an age which produced
Schopenhauer's _Essay on Woman_, _The Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_,
_The Triumph of Death_, _Gräfin Julie_, _Erdgeist_, _The Confounding of
Camellia_. With great adroitness, but with a curious inconsistency in
one who has spent years of his life in “blaming the Bard,” Shaw finds
the chief support for his claim in the plays of Shakespeare himself.
By blandishment, Rosalind accomplishes her purpose; Miranda ensnares
Ferdinand with the words, “I would not wish any companion in the world
but you. I am your wife if you will marry me.” Juliet scales Romeo's
defences one by one, and there is Desdemona with her fond “hint”;
Mariana, the strategist; Helena, pursuing the recreant Bertram; Olivia,
powerless to hide her passion; and poor, mad, melancholy Ophelia.
One has only to pass in review Shaw's work, from _An Unsocial
Socialist_ to _Man and Superman_, to discover that persistent
exemplification of his theory that “woman is the pursuer and contriver,
man the pursued and disposed of.” Indeed, in his very first play, we
find Shaw's concrete illustration of Don Juan's statement that “a woman
seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey.”
All the men in Shaw's plays seem to suffer, not from Prossy's, but
from Charteris's complaint: “At no time have I taken the initiative
and pursued women with my advances as women have persecuted me.”
All seem to labour under the conviction that the woman's need of a
man “does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her
energy to a climax, at which she dares to throw away her customary
exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses, and
claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends their
mortal personal purposes.” The quintessence of the Shavian woman is Ann
Whitefield, that “most gorgeous of all my female creatures,” as Shaw
calls her--incarnation of fecundity in Nature, wilful, unscrupulous,
immodest, aggressive, dominant--compelling Tanner to obey her
biological imperative.
The appearance of Shaw's theory in _An Unsocial Socialist_ is
responsible for this divagation of mine from the theme of the
novels, this anticipation of the feminine psychology of the plays.
It is highly unreasonable to suppose that the exploitation of such
a theory on Shaw's part is a perverse and impish trick, designed
solely _épater le bourgeois_: Shaw has driven home his theory in
countless deliberate statements. As a philosophic concept, as an
interpretation of woman by an a-priorist, little fault can be found
with Shaw in the matter. No one can question Shaw's right to his
opinion. Even as an effort to make the natural attraction of the
sexes the mainspring of the action in modern English drama, Shaw's
delineation of woman is far from being unworthy of consideration,
though it has swung wide of the mark in exaggerative reaction against
the romantic sentimentalities of the English stage. Shaw's women
are full of purpose and vitality--the most “advanced” of women in
assertion of their rights, in resolute determination to override all
the barriers of current respectability and “prurient prudery,” in
perfect readiness to forego all considerations of good taste, tact,
delicacy, modesty, conventional virtue. They ruthlessly repudiate
all those qualities which have led man to dub her his “better half.”
Shaw's mistake consists in painting woman, not as she really, normally
is, but as his preconceived philosophic system requires her to be. He
planks down for our inspection less a life-like portrait of the eternal
feminine than a philosophic interpretation of the “superior sex.”
Shaw is a remarkable critic of life. Certain phases of human nature,
unnoticed or unaccented by others, he has depicted with a veracity, a
cleverness, a sparkling brilliancy beyond all praise. But it is one
thing to portray an individual, a totally different thing to announce a
universal type. A soldier like Bluntschli, a dare-devil like Dudgeon,
a minister like Gardner, a hero like Cæsar or Napoleon, a wooer like
Valentine, a Socialist like Trefusis, a pugilist like Byron--all these
may have lived. Shaw doubtless can--indeed, sometimes does--point to
their counterparts, if not in literature, certainly in real life.
But to say that all soldiers are like Bluntschli, for example, is
little more foolish than to say that all women are like Blanche, like
Julia, like Ann. The vital defect in Shaw's women is that they are
too blatant, too obvious, too crude. They are lacking in mystery, in
finer subtlety, in the subconscious and obscurer instincts of sex, in
the arts of exquisite seduction, of keenly-felt yet only half-divined
allurement.[32] The Life Force goes about its business, one would
fain remind Mr. Shaw, not openly and with a blare of trumpets, but by
a thousand devious and hidden paths. Of course, there is always the
danger of taking Shaw too seriously. Mr. Archer wittily, but, above
all, entirely truthfully, dubbed Ann a “mythological monster.” As a
pendant to Everyman of the Dutch morality, Ann may be the Everywoman of
the Shavian morality. But even Shaw himself admits, with wily fairness,
that while, philosophically, Ann may be Everywoman according to the
Shavian dispensation, yet in practical, everyday existence there are
countless women who are not Ann.
If faith is to be placed in M. Émile Faguet's dictum that no
exceptional work of art is ever written by anyone before reaching
the age of thirty, then Shaw's novels are debarred by the Statute of
Limitations. The “ineptitude” of his novels, of which Mr. Shaw once
spoke to me, is attributable to the fact that during this early period
he fed upon his imagination. He had not yet come into any deep or
really vital communion with humanity. Produced in that impressionable
period when dreaming seems preferable to living, the novels bristle
with faults--immaturities of form, crudenesses of expression, blatant
didactics. They are often loose and disjointed, generally lacking
in closely articulated structure. With all his pretended effort at
realism, Shaw has failed to impart to his novels that one quality
without which no modern work of fictive art can take the very highest
rank--inevitableness. To Shaw, as to Zola, art is life seen through
a temperament. And I often receive the impression that Shaw's novels
are less faithful records of contemporary existence than documents
revelative of Bernard Shaw. Shaw is lacking in artistic self-restraint;
like the true propagandist, he seems almost unwilling to accept facts
as they are, so eager is he to impose upon them the stamp of his
individual predilections. It is the strangest of paradoxes that one who
claims for himself that rare and priceless gift--the abnormally normal
eyesight of the realist--should have spent his life in the endeavour to
fix the mask of Shaw upon the face of life.
“The gods know that Bernard Shaw has many sins of omission to answer
for when he reaches the remotest peak of Parnassus,” writes Mr.
Huneker; “but for no one of his many gifts will he be so sternly taken
to task as the wasted one of novelist.... There is more native talent
for sturdy, clear-visioned, character-creating fiction in the one
prize-fighting novel of Bernard Shaw than in the entire cobweb work
of the stylistic Stevenson!... Shaw could rank higher as a novelist
than as a dramatist--always selecting for judgment the supreme pages
of his tales, pages wherein character, wit, humour, pathos, fantasy,
and observation are mingled with an overwhelming effect.”[33] While
there is much of truth in what Mr. Huneker says, I should hold quite
the opposite opinion concerning Shaw's relative merits as novelist and
dramatist. Not the least significant feature of the novels, to my mind,
is their foreshadowing of the future dramatist.[34] Turning over the
pages of the novels, from first to last one cannot but observe this
recurrent trait: Shaw always sees his characters in a “situation.”
It is difficult to read one of Shaw's novels without unconsciously
looking for the stage directions. Proud as he is of his gifts as a
“fictionist,” no one is more conscious than is Shaw himself of his
deficiencies in this _rôle_. With his customary succinctness, he once
put the case to me as it really is: “My novels are very green things,
very carefully written.”
FOOTNOTES:
[24] _On Mr. Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance._ In the
_Fortnightly Review_, April, 1894.
[25] _Who I Am, and What I Think._ Part I. In the _Candid Friend_, May
11th, 1901.
[26] _The Letters of R. L. Stevenson_, Vol. II. Edited by Sidney
Colvin, pp. 107 _et seq._
[27] _Does Modern Education Ennoble?_ In _Great Thoughts_, October 7th,
1905.
[28] A dramatization of the novel, by Mr. Stanislaus Stange, was
produced with moderate success in New York several years ago. Unique
interest attached to the production because the part of Cashel Byron
was taken by Mr. James J. Corbett, some time pugilistic champion of the
world--and incidentally quite a clever actor. There is much of Cashel
in Mr. Corbett, whose popular sobriquet is “Gentleman Jim.”
[29] _Bernard Shaw Abashed._ In the _Daily News_, April 17th, 1905.
[30] “The hero is remarkable because, without losing his pre-eminence
as hero, he not only violates every canon of propriety, like Tom Jones
or Des Grieux, but every canon of sentiment as well. In an age when
the average man's character is rotted at the core by the lust to be
a true gentleman, the moral value of such an example as Trefusis is
incalculable.”--_Mr. Bernard Shaw's Works of Fiction. Reviewed by
Himself._ In the _Novel Review_, February, 1892.
[31] The words are those of Mr. W. L. Courtney.
[32] There are exceptions to this generalization, of course--Lady
Cicely, Candida, Nora, Jennifer, Barbara.
[33] _Bernard Shaw and Woman._ In _Harper's Bazaar_, June, 1905.
[34] It is worthy of remark that the conclusion of _Love Among the
Artists_, as Julius Bab has pointed out, accurately prefigures the
conclusion of _Candida_. The situation, the very words, are almost
identical.
THE FABIAN SOCIETY
“If ever there was a society which lived by its wits, and by
its wits alone, that society was the Fabian.”--_The Fabian
Society._ Tract No. 41. By G. B. Shaw.
CHAPTER IV
For the student of Shaw's work and career, there is no escape from
the resemblance, superficial or vital, between Shaw himself and the
numerous comic figures he has projected upon the stage. Like that
Byronic impostor, Saranoff, Shaw has gone through life afflicted with
a multiplicity of personalities. In _The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table_, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that when two people meet, there
are always six persons present. But Shaw needs no party of the second
part to sum up the total of personalities: he is eternally dogged with
his own ubiquitous _aliases_. Bernard Shaw, the “fictionist”; Corno di
Bassetto, the music critic of admirable fooling and pungent criticism;
G. B. S., the apostle of comic _intransigéance_ in criticism of art,
music, and drama--and life; “P-Shaw,” the Gilbertian topsy-turvyist
of essay and drama; George Bernard Shaw, Fabian, economist, public
speaker, borough councillor, reformer--all these distinct characters
is Shaw, in Maeterlinckian phrase, constantly meeting upon the highway
of fate. It is the province of the biographer to detect, among this
confusing cloud of _aliases_, the real man.
In 1883, the career of Bernard Shaw the “fictionist” came to an abrupt
and final conclusion. While this first and introductory chapter in
the book of Shaw's multiplex life was being written, the material
for another and infinitely more important chapter was slowly being
collected and arranged. With this second chapter begins the life of the
real Shaw.
As he himself has told us, his parents pulled him through the years
in which he earned nothing. But he was perpetually “grinding away”
at something, perpetually feeling his way towards confidence and
efficiency. The diversity of his interests was remarkable: nothing he
touched proved banal or unfruitful. This universality of interests--the
determination to grasp, the effort to master, every subject that came
to his hand--is little less than conclusive as an explanation of
his many-sidedness. “I did not start life with a programme. I simply
accepted every job offered to me, and I did it the best way I could.”
In this simple and straightforward statement is found the key to that
diversity of talent, that range of ability, which is perhaps the most
striking and noteworthy characteristic of this rare and eccentric
genius.
The decisive and revolutionary changes in Shaw's truly “chequered”
career were due, in almost all cases, to the adventitious or deliberate
influence of some dominant personality in literature or in life.
The crucial conjunctures in his career are closely associated with
the names of Shelley, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, Mozart and
Michelangelo, in art, music, literature and philosophy; with the names
and personalities, among others, in life of James Leigh Joynes, the
Salt family, Henry George, Sidney Webb, William Morris and William
Archer.
In Shaw's acquaintance with the late James Lecky[35] is found the
germ of that strenuous propagandist activity which may be called the
most definitive expression of Shaw's life. It was in 1879 that Shaw
first became intimate with Lecky and with those various subjects,
connected with music and languages on the scientific side, to which
Lecky devoted so much of his energy and attention. Once interested
in some pursuit, Lecky would become so enthused that he would demand
of his friends an interest therein commensurate with his own. This
pestiferously altruistic spirit of Lecky's proved of great value to
Shaw, who set his critical brain to work upon many of the problems
which Lecky brought to his attention. Through Lecky, Shaw acquired a
working knowledge of Temperament, concerning which he once boasted
that he was probably the only living musical critic who knew what it
meant; and a due appreciation of Pitman's Shorthand--which he could
write at the rate of twenty words per minute and could not read
afterwards on any terms!--as probably the worst system of shorthand
ever invented, yet the best pushed on its business side. Together
Lecky and Shaw studied and discussed Phonetics, and while Shaw's
knowledge of the subject was by no means exhaustive, his interest in
it has since served as a permanent protection against such superficial
catch-penny stuff as the reformed spellings that are invented every
six months by faddists. Shaw's individual mode of punctuation, his use
of spaced letters in place of italics, his almost total rejection, on
Biblical authority, which he accepted for once, of quotation marks,
and those numerous original rules of punctuation and phonetics which
he has from time to time formulated in magazine and daily press,[36]
find their _raison d'être_ in Shaw's early association with Lecky and
subsequent acquaintance, through Lecky's instrumentality, with the
late Alexander Ellis and Henry Sweet, of Oxford. As readers of the
notes to _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_ may gather, Shaw accepts
Sweet as his authority; indeed, he highly values his acquaintance with
that “revolutionary don,” as he calls him, and once said that, in
any other place or country in the world, Sweet would be better known
than even Shaw himself. The knowledge of phonetics, the interest in
language-reform acquired through his acquaintance with men like Lecky,
Ellis and Sweet is the explanation, Mr. Shaw once told me, of the fact
that the Cockney dialect, which so befuddles and astounds the readers
of _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_, is far more scientific in its
analysis of London coster lingo than anything that had previously
occurred in fiction.
In the winter of 1879, Lecky joined a debating club, called The
Zetetical Society, numbering among its members Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr.
Emil Garcke, and Mr. J. G. Godard. It was a sort of “junior copy” of
the once well-known Dialectical Society, which had been founded to
discuss Stuart Mill's essay on Liberty not long after its appearance
in print. Both societies were strongly Millite; in both there was
complete freedom of discussion, political, religious and sexual.
Women took a prominent part in the debates, which often dealt with
subjects concerning their rights, interests and welfare. A noteworthy
feature of these debates, particularly in relation to Shaw's future
development as a public speaker, and a critic as well, was that each
speaker, at the conclusion of his speech, might be cross-examined
on it by any one of the others in a series of questions. In this
society Malthus, Ingersoll, Darwin and Herbert Spencer were held in
especial reverence. The works of Huxley, Tyndall and George Eliot were
on the shelves of all the members. The tone of the society was very
“advanced”--individualistic, atheistic, evolutionary. Championship
of the Married Woman's Property Act was scarcely silenced by the
Act itself. The fact that Mrs. Besant's children were torn from her
like Shelley's, aroused hot indignation, as did the prosecutions for
“blasphemy” then going on. It is not without significance that, even
at this time, Shaw was Socialist enough to defend the action of the
State in both cases. Indeed, he has always been, as he once told me,
somewhat of Morris's opinion that “There may be some doubt as to who
are the best people to have charge of children; but there can be no
doubt that the parents are the worst.” Strange jest of fate, Shaw
began his career by joining a society whose members regarded Socialism
as an exploded fallacy! How little did anyone dream that, even then,
underground rumblings of the approaching revolution might be faintly
heard! That recurrent quindecennial cycle of Socialistic upheaval of
which Karl Kautsky has somewhere spoken, was well-nigh completed.
Within five years Socialism was to burst forth with fresh impetus,
sweep the younger generation along with it, and plunge the Dialectical
and Zetetical Societies into the “blind cave of eternal night.”
[Illustration: =Sidney Webb.=]
Reproduced from the original photo-drawing.
_Jessie Holliday._
_Courtesy of the artist._
One night in the winter of 1879, Lecky dragged Shaw to a meeting of the
Zetetical Society, which then met weekly in the rooms of the Woman's
Protective and Provident League in Great Queen Street, Long Acre. It
will be related elsewhere why Shaw decided to join the society at
once; suffice it to say here that he became a frequent attendant upon
the meetings of the society, entering actively, if haltingly, into
discussion and debate. The importance, in its bearing upon Shaw's
subsequent career as a man of affairs and a man of letters, of an
acquaintance he formed at this time through the accident of joining the
Zetetical Society, can scarcely be overestimated. A few weeks after
joining the society Shaw's keenest interest was aroused in a speaker
who took part in one of the debates. This speaker was a young man
of about twenty-one, rather below middle height, with small, pretty
hands and feet, and a profile that suggested, on account of the nose
and imperial, an improvement on Napoleon the Third. I well remember
the animated way in which Mr. Shaw described to me the man and the
occurrence. “He had a fine forehead, a long head, eyes that were built
on top of two highly developed organs of speech (according to the
phrenologists), and remarkably thick, strong, dark hair. He knew all
about the subject of debate; knew more than the lecturer; knew more
than anybody present; had read everything that had ever been written
on the subject; and remembered all the facts that bore on it. He used
notes, read them, ticked them off one by one, threw them away, and
finished with a coolness and clearness that, to me in my then trembling
state, seemed miraculous. This young man was the ablest man in
England--Sidney Webb.” Then a trembling novice, yet subsequently to be
known as the cleverest man in England, Shaw to-day does not hesitate to
pay full honour to the part Sidney Webb has played in his career. The
extent and value of this association will reveal itself in due course.
Shaw has said and done a thousand clever things; but, as he once freely
confessed to me, “Quite the cleverest thing I ever did in my life was
to force my friendship on Webb, to extort his, and keep it.”
After Shaw had been a member of the Zetetical Society for about a year,
he joined the Dialectical Society, and was faithful to it for years
after it had dwindled into a little group of five or six friends of
Dr. Drysdale, the apostle of Malthus. Shaw subsequently joined another
debating society, the Bedford, presided over by Stopford Brooke, who
had not then given up his pastorate at Bedford Chapel to devote himself
exclusively to literature. During these years, as we shall see more
particularly in the next chapter, Shaw was slowly perfecting himself
in the art of public speaking. The fascination of the platform grew
upon him daily. He not only spoke frequently himself, but also attended
public meetings of every sort, learning by precept, experience, and
example the secrets of the art of platform speaking. With dogged
persistence, he was surely, if slowly, acquiring what he himself has
called the coolness, the self-confidence and the imperturbability of
the statesman.
During these years he had gradually widened and deepened his knowledge
of the subjects which periodically came up for discussion in the
various debating societies he had joined. In his boyhood he had read
Mill on Liberty, on Representative Government, and on the Irish Land
Question. And he was fully the equal of his co-debaters in knowledge
and comprehension of the evolutionary ideas and theories of Darwin,
Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, George Eliot, and their school. But of
political economy he knew absolutely nothing. It was in 1882 that his
attention was first definitely directed into the economic channel.
England and Ireland were greatly stirred up at this time by the arrest
of Henry George and James Leigh Joynes as “suspicious strangers” in
Ireland (August, 1882). Joynes, a master of Eton, wishing to see
something of the popular side of the Irish movement, accompanied
George as a correspondent of the London _Times_. George was making an
investigation of the situation in Ireland preliminary to his campaign
of propaganda in behalf of his Single Tax theories, enunciated in
_Progress and Poverty_. The arrest of George and Joynes, on the
charge of being agents of the Fenians, was widely commented on in
the newspapers of Great Britain and Ireland, and resulted in a
Parliamentary questioning. _Progress and Poverty_, pronounced by Alfred
Russel Wallace “undoubtedly the most remarkable and important work
of the nineteenth century,” began to sell by the thousands; it was
prominently reviewed in the London _Times_ and dozens of other papers;
and George felt at last that he was “beginning to move the world.”
Further encouragement came from the Land Nationalization Society,
which had been founded in London early in 1882, with Alfred Russel
Wallace at its head.[37] “It contained in its membership,” says Mr.
Henry George, Jr., in his biography of his father, “those who, like
Wallace, desired to take possession of the land by purchase and then
have the State exact an annual quit-rent from whoever held it; those
who had the Socialistic idea of having the State take possession of
the land with or without compensation and then manage it; and those
who, with Henry George, repudiated all idea of either compensation
or of management, and would recognize common rights to land simply
by having the State appropriate its annual value by taxation. Such
conflicting elements could not long continue together, and soon those
holding the George idea withdrew and organized on their own distinctive
lines, giving the name of the Land Reform Union to their organization.”
While interest was at fever heat, George was invited by the Land
Nationalization Society to lecture under the auspices of a working
men's audience in Memorial Hall. The bill, a true copy of which lies
before me, reads as follows:
LAND NATIONALIZATION.
MEMORIAL HALL,
FARRINGDON STREET,
_On Tuesday, September 5th, 1882_.
Under auspices of
THE LAND NATIONALIZATION SOCIETY.
Professor
F. W. NEWMAN
will preside.
George's speech that night was the torch that “kindled the fire in
England”--a fire which he afterwards said no human power could put out.
It was the masses that George was trying to educate and arouse. It was
the masses whose ear he caught that night.
[Illustration: =Henry George.=]
From a photograph taken in 1882.
[Illustration: =Karl Marx.=]
_By special permission._
At that time, Bernard Shaw eagerly haunted public meetings of all
kinds. By a strange chance, he wandered that night into the Memorial
Hall in Farringdon Street. The speaker of the evening was Henry George:
his speech wrought a miracle in Shaw's whole life. It “kindled the
fire” in his soul. “It flashed on me then for the first time,” Shaw
once wrote, “that 'the conflict between Religion and Science' ... the
overthrow of the Bible, the higher education of women, Mill on Liberty,
and all the rest of the storm that raged round Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley,
Spencer, and the rest, on which I had brought myself up intellectually,
was a mere middle-class business. Suppose it could have produced a
nation of Matthew Arnolds and George Eliots!--you may well shudder.
The importance of the economic basis dawned on me.”[38] Shaw now
read _Progress and Poverty_; and many of the observations which the
fifteen-year-old Shaw had unconsciously made now took on a significance
little suspected in the early Dublin days of his indifference to land
agency.[39]
Shaw was so profoundly impressed by the logic of Henry George's
conclusions and suggested remedial measures that, shortly after reading
_Progress and Poverty_, he went to a meeting of the Social Democratic
Federation, and there arose to protest against their drawing a red
herring across the track opened by George. The only satisfaction he
had was to be told that he was a novice: “Read Marx's _Capital_,
young man,” was the condescending retort of the Social Democrats.
Shaw promptly went and did so, and then found, as he once said, that
his advisers were awestruck, as they had not read it themselves! It
was then accessible only in the French version at the British Museum.
William Archer has testified to the diligence with which Shaw studied
Marx's great work; he caught his first glimpse of Shaw in the British
Museum Library, where he noticed a “young man of tawny complexion and
attire” studying alternately--if not simultaneously--_Das Kapital_, and
an orchestral score of _Tristan and Isolde_!
While Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and their school left a distinct impress
upon Shaw's mind, it is nevertheless true that he never became a
Darwinian. To-day he is violently opposed to Darwinian materialism;
and yet the Shavian philosophy, historically considered, is a natural
consequence of that bitter fight against convention, custom, authority,
and orthodoxy, inaugurated by Darwin and his followers. But Shaw's
sociologic doctrine is a distillation, not of the _Descent of Man_ or
of the _Data of Ethics_, but of _Das Kapital_. At this crucial period
in Shaw's career he was exactly in the mood for Marx's reduction of
all the conflicts to the conflict of classes for economic mastery, of
all social forms to the economic forms of production and exchange. The
real secret of Marx's fascination for him, as he once said, was “his
appeal to an unnamed, unrecognized passion--a new passion--the passion
of hatred in the more generous souls among the respectable and educated
sections for the accursed middle-class institutions that had starved,
thwarted, misled, and corrupted them from their cradles.” In Marx, Shaw
found a kindred spirit; for, like Marx, his whole life had bred in
him a defiance of middle-class respectability, of revolt against its
benumbing and paralyzing influence. As Shaw once said:
“Marx's 'Capital' is not a treatise on Socialism; it is a
jeremiad against the _bourgeoisie_, supported by such a mass
of evidence and such a relentless genius for denunciation
as had never been brought to bear before. It was supposed
to be written for the working classes; but the working man
respects the _bourgeoisie_ and wants to be a _bourgeois_;
Marx never got hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting
sons of the _bourgeoisie_ itself--Lassalle, Marx, Liebknecht,
Morris, Hyndman, Bax, all, like myself, _bourgeois_ crossed
with squirearchy--that painted the flag red. Bakunin and
Kropotkin, of the military and noble caste (like Napoleon),
were our extreme left. The middle and upper classes are the
revolutionary element in society; the proletariat is the
conservative element, as Disraeli well knew.”[40]
Some such Marxist passion, one surmises, subsequently carried weight
with Shaw in influencing his choice of the Fabian Society as the fit
_milieu_ for the development and exploitation of his energy and talent.
For at heart Shaw is what his plays so abundantly prove him--the
revolted _bourgeois_.
Not only did Marx's jeremiad against the _bourgeoisie_ awaken instant
response in Shaw: it changed the whole tenor of his life. No single
book--not the Bible of orthodoxy and respectability, certainly--has
influenced Shaw so much as the “bible of the working classes.” It
made him a Socialist. Although he has since repudiated some of the
fundamental economic theories of Marx, at this time he found in _Das
Kapital_ the concrete expression of all those social convictions,
grievances and wrongs which seethed in the crater of his being. He
became that most determined, most resistless, and often most dangerous
of men to deal with, a man with a mission. “From that hour,” I once
heard Mr. Shaw say, “I became a man with some business in the world.”
During the years 1883 and 1884 Shaw threw himself heart and soul
into the exciting task of Socialist agitation and propagandism. His
dogged practice in public speaking now began to demonstrate its value
with telling effect. While he spent his days in criticizing books
in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and pictures in the _World_, he devoted
his evenings to consistent and strenuous Socialist propagandism. He
accepted invitations to address all sorts of bodies on every day in
the week, Sunday not excepted. Remember his confession that he first
caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the
blaring of brass bands. During these years, also, he was coming into
close touch with the younger generation destined soon to unite in a
solid phalanx as the Fabian Society. Probably no living man has touched
modern life at so many points as has Bernard Shaw. In his lifetime
he has traversed a very lengthy arc on the circle of modern culture,
modern thought and modern philosophy. Sovereign contempt for the
laggard is one of his prominent characteristics; he himself has ever
been an “outpost thinker” on the firing-line of modern intellectual
conflict. Essentially significant because essentially modern, Shaw
owes no small share of his ability, his versatility, and his breadth
of interests to his voraciously acquisitive, acutely inquisitive
intellect. Clever acquaintances, brimming with ideas, and overflowing
with combative zeal, furnished grist for the ceaselessly active mill
of Shaw's intelligence. No biography which failed to trace the shaping
influence exerted upon Shaw's frantically complex career by such men as
Hubert Bland, Graham Wallas, Sidney Olivier, Sidney Webb and William
Morris, could lay just claim to the title of genuine natural history.
At the Land Reform Union Shaw first met Sidney Olivier, then upper
division clerk in the Colonial Office. Sidney Webb and Sidney Olivier,
very close friends, were the two resident clerks there. When Webb, at
Shaw's persuasion, joined the Fabians, Olivier went with him. There
existed a very close relation, not only between the various members of
the Fabian Society, but also between many of the advanced societies
which came to life at this time. For example, Sidney Olivier, who
was secretary of the Fabian Society for several years, and Edward
Carpenter's brother, Captain Alfred Carpenter, of the Royal Navy,
married sisters; in this way there was a sort of family connection
between the Socialist and Humanitarian movements. Olivier had made
friends at Oxford with Graham Wallas, who was probably influenced
through this connection to become a Fabian. The very intimate relation
existing between Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas, and the consequent
marked influence upon Shaw's literary career and performance, will
be spoken of elsewhere at greater length. It is noteworthy that all
of these men possessed literary talents of no mean order. Webb's
books have a world-wide reputation. Olivier's play, _Mrs. Maxwell's
Marriage_, has been performed by the London Stage Society; and his
literary talent has displayed itself, not only in plays, but also in
verse, essay and story.[41] In addition to his ability as a facile
public speaker, Graham Wallas also possessed literary talent of no mean
order, displayed to best advantage in his book on Francis Place, with
its lucid exposition of the way in which politics are “wire-pulled” in
England by real reformers.[42]
Another man of talent, whose very opposition of belief and view-point
exerted a sort of stimulating influence upon Shaw, was William Clarke,
an Oxford M.A., who contributed the chapter on _The Industrial Basis of
Socialism_ to _Fabian Essays_. A Whitmanite, with strong feelings of
rationalist type, allied in spirit to Martineau, the Unitarians, and
their logical outgrowth, the American Ethical Society, Clarke made upon
Shaw an ineffaceable impression. Shaw first met this remarkable man at
the Bedford Society--a meeting which bore fruit in Clarke's joining
the Fabian Society. Clarke had lectured in America, known Whitman, and
is remembered as the author of several books. Although a successful
lecturer, he had by this time exhausted the interest of lecturing,
being much older than the other Fabians. A very unlucky man, he was,
in consequence, very poor. It has been often said that in the matter
of philanthropy Shaw never let his right hand know what his left was
doing; he found a way to relieve Clarke's poverty without even letting
Clarke, who quarrelled with everything and everybody, suspect that he
was the recipient of benefaction. When the _Daily Chronicle_ changed
its policy and decided to give a column in its pages to Labour, its
concerns and interests, the editor, in his search for young blood, hit
upon Shaw, who quietly substituted Clarke in his place. Had Clarke ever
discovered the truth it might have mitigated the profound moral horror
of Shaw he always entertained. How Shaw must have chuckled over the
latent comedy! The secret philanthropist regarded as a moral anarchist,
a _monstrum horrendum_, by his highly moral beneficiary! To Clarke,
an altruist and moralist to the backbone, the dawning of Ibsenism, of
Nietzscheism, of Shavianism, seemed to be the coming of chaos. “Yet
the fact that I knew his value and insisted on it, and that I could
sympathize even with his horror of me,” Mr. Shaw once told me, “kept
our personal relations remorsefully cordial. The last time I called on
him was in the influenza period. He was working madly, as usual. He
would have certainly refused to see anyone; but he was alone in the
flat, and opened the door for me. With a savage, set face that would
have made even Ibsen's mouth look soft by contrast, he said, through
his shut teeth: 'I can give you five minutes and that is _all_.' 'My
dear Clarke,' I replied, ambling idly into his study, 'I _must_ leave
in half an hour to keep an appointment; and I have just been thinking
how I am to get away from you so soon; for I know you won't let me go.'
And it turned out exactly as I said. We began to discuss the Parnell
divorce case and the Irish crisis, and I could not get away from him
until the hour was nearly doubled.”[43]
The part which the Fabian Society has played in English life, and
the share of Bernard Shaw in the task of advancing the principles of
Collectivism in the last twenty odd years, alone offer ample material
for a book. So diverse in its ramifications is the subject, that it
will be possible here to trace the evolutionary advance of Socialism
in England only in so far as it directly bears upon Shaw's career.[44]
As we know, Shaw began his real education as a pupil of Mill, Comte,
Darwin and Spencer. Converted to Socialism by Henry George and his
_Progress and Poverty_, Shaw took to insurrectionary economics after
reading _Das Kapital_. Marx's book won his support because it so
fiercely “convicted private property of wholesale spoliation, murder
and compulsory prostitution; of plague, pestilence and famine; battle,
murder and sudden death.” For some time before joining any Socialist
society, Shaw preached Socialism with the utmost zeal and enthusiasm.
The choice of a society lay between the Social Democratic Federation,
the Socialist League--both quite proletarian in their rank and file,
both aiming at being large working-class organizations--and the Fabian
Society, which was middle-class through and through. “When I myself,
on the point of joining the Social Democratic Federation, changed my
mind and joined the Fabian instead,” Shaw once wrote, “I was guided by
no discoverable difference in programme or principle, but solely by
an instinctive feeling that the Fabian, and not the Federation, would
attract the men of my own bias and intellectual habits, who were then
ripening for the work that lay before us.”
[Illustration: =Facsimile of Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2.=]
The meetings held at Thomas Davidson's rooms at Chelsea in 1881-1883
furnished the initial impulse to the ethical Socialism in England of
the last thirty years. As an immediate outcome of these meetings the
Fabian Society sprang into being. In September, 1882, Thomas Davidson,
recently returned from Italy, where he had been engaged in writing an
interpretation of the ethical philosophy of Rosmini, gathered about him
a group of people “interested in religious thought, ethical propaganda,
and social reform.” Among their number were Messrs. Frank Podmore,
Edward R. Pease, Havelock Ellis, Percival Chubb, Dr. Burns Gibson, H.
H. Champion, the late William Clarke, Hubert Bland, the Rev. G. W.
Allen and W. I. Jupp, Miss Caroline Hadden, Miss Dale Owen and Mrs.
Hinton. According to Mr. Havelock Ellis, Davidson was convinced of
“the absolute necessity of founding practical life on philosophical
conceptions; of living a simple, strenuous, intellectual life, so far
as possible communistically, and on a basis of natural religion. It was
Rosminianism, one may say, carried a step further.” The many meetings
at Mr. Pease's rooms in Osnaburgh Street and elsewhere finally bore
fruit in a series of resolutions proposed by Dr. Burns Gibson.[45]
Certain members of the circle, led by Mr. Podmore, who desired to
have a society on more general lines, purposed organizing a second
society, not necessarily exclusive of the “Fellowship,” on broader and
more indeterminate lines, leaving it open to anyone to belong to both
societies. At a meeting on January 4th, 1884, these proposals were
substantially agreed to. The original name, “The Fellowship of the
New Life,” was retained by those who originally devised it, and a new
organization constituted under the title of “The Fabian Society.”[46]
The Fabian Society, as Shaw has told us in characteristic style, was
“warlike in its origin; it came into existence through a schism in
an earlier society for the peaceful regeneration of the race by the
cultivation of perfection of individual character. Certain members of
that circle, modestly feeling that the revolution would have to wait an
unreasonably long time if postponed until they personally had attained
perfection, set up the banner of Socialism militant, seceded from the
regenerators, and established themselves independently as the Fabian
Society.” Shaw was not one of the original Fabians; in fact, he knew
nothing of the society until its first tract, _Why are the Many Poor?_
fell into his hands. For some reason the name of the society struck him
as an inspiration. His choice fell upon that society in which he could
gratify his desire to work with a few educated and clever men of the
type of Sidney Webb.
In the earliest stage of the society the Fabians were content with
nothing less than the prompt “reconstruction of society in accordance
with the highest moral possibilities.” Shaw joined the society on
September 5th, 1884, when it was about eight months old, and in the
labour-notes _versus_ pass-books stage of evolution. Shaw actually
debated with a Fabian who had elaborated a pass-book system, the
question whether money should be permitted under Socialism, or whether
labour-notes would not be a more suitable currency! The next two
tracts, numbered 2 and 3, were from Shaw's pen; and although they were,
as he now rightly regards them, mere literary _boutades_, they serve as
an important link in the history of the evolution of the society.[47]
Tract No. 4, _What Socialism Is_, answering the question both from the
Collectivist and Anarchist point of view, reveals the early Anarchistic
leanings of the society; the tract really contained nothing that had
not already been better stated in the famous Communist Manifesto of
Marx and Engels. Shaw was especially impressed by the fact that, in
_Das Kapital_, Marx had made the most extensive use of the documents
containing the true history of the leaps and bounds of England's
prosperity, _e.g._, the Blue Books. This convinced him that a tract
stuffed with facts and figures, with careful references to official
sources, was what was wanted. Incapable of making such tracts unaided,
Shaw at once bethought him of Sidney Webb. That “walking encyclopædia,”
the student who knew everything and forgot nothing, could do it,
Shaw was aware, as well as it could be done. So he brought all his
powers of persuasion to bear on Sidney Webb. Picture to yourself the
scene--two earnest, enthusiastic, revolutionary young men walking up
and down Whitehall, outside the Colonial Office door, holding long
and weighty discussions, often prolonged into the wee small hours,
concerning the future of Socialism--the keen wit and agile logic of
Shaw pitted against the sound judgment and sane conservatism of Webb.
In this crucial juncture Shaw's proved the heavier artillery, and
Webb became a Fabian. It would be difficult to lay one's finger upon
any circumstance of deeper, more permanent, or more salutary effect
upon Shaw's whole life. When Sidney Webb joined the Fabian Society
there began a new and profoundly significant chapter in the history of
Bernard Shaw. The debt Shaw owes to Webb is incalculable, and no one
is readier to affirm it than Shaw himself. On various occasions I have
heard Mr. Shaw unstintingly ascribe to Mr. Webb the greatest measure of
credit for formulating and directing the policy of the Fabian Society
for many years. “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Shaw once said to me,
“is that Webb and I are very useful to each other. We are in perfect
contrast, each supplying the deficiency in the other.” On the other
hand, Mr. Webb assigns the chief credit to Mr. Shaw; and in a personal
letter, as well as in conversation, he has assured me that Mr. Shaw
has been not simply _a_ leading member, but _the_ leading member of
the Fabian Society practically from its foundation, and that it has
always expressed his political views and work. I think we may safely
say that Mr. Shaw and Mr. Webb have been mutually complementary--and
complimentary.
The immediate result of the acquisition of Webb, the new recruit of the
Fabians, was Tract No. 5, _Facts for Socialists_, a tangible proof of
Webb's richly-stored mind and well-nourished scholarship. A comparison
of this tract with those numbered 2 and 3 is sufficient evidence of
the vast practical improvement Webb effected in the publications of
the society. From this time forth the tracts and manifestos of the
Fabian Society took on character and importance through the fortunate
conjunction of Webb's encyclopædic mind and Shaw's literary sense.
The next publication of importance was Tract No. 7, _Capital and
Land_, a survey of the distribution of property among the classes in
England. Drafted by Sidney Olivier, this tract was aimed in reality at
the Georgites, who regarded capital as sacred. It exhibits growth of
independent thought on the part of the society, and courage in breaking
away from the fetters of “mere Henry Georgism.”
Eight years later, that official organ of the Gladstonians, the
_Speaker_, defined Fabianism as a “mixture of dreary, gassy
doctrinairism and crack-brained farcicality, set off by a portentous
omniscience and a flighty egotism not to be matched outside the walls
of a lunatic asylum.” Such denunciatory invective reveals the activity
and influence the Fabian Society must have exerted, during those years,
in the direction most dreaded by the older Whigs. But many were the
lessons learned, the hard knocks received, the follies rejected, before
Fabianism was sufficiently dangerous and important to be honoured with
the scathing denunciation of the _Speaker_. The Fabian wisdom grew out
of the Fabian experience; scientific economics out of insurrectionary
anarchism. Decidedly catastrophic in their views at first, the Fabians
were not unlike the young Socialist Shaw somewhere describes, who plans
the revolutionary programme as an affair of twenty-four lively hours,
with Individualism in full swing on Monday morning, a tidal wave of the
insurgent proletariat on Monday afternoon, and Socialism in complete
working order on Tuesday. After Mrs. Wilson, subsequently one of the
Freedom Group of Kropotkinist Anarchists, joined the Fabians, a sort
of influenza of Anarchism spread through the society.[48] In regard
to political insurrectionism, the Fabians exhibited no definite and
explicit disagreement with the Social Democratic Federation, avowedly
founded on recognition of the existence of a class war. All, Fabians
and Social Democrats alike, said freely that “as gunpowder destroyed
the feudal system, so the capitalist system could not long survive the
invention of dynamite”! Not that they were dynamitards; but, as Shaw
explains: “We thought that the statement about gunpowder and feudalism
was historically true, and that it would do the capitalists good to
remind them of it.” The saner spirits did not believe the revolution
could be accomplished merely by singing the _Marseillaise_; but some
of the youthful and insurgent enthusiasts “were so convinced that
Socialism had only to be put clearly before the working classes to
concentrate the power of their immense numbers into one irresistible
organization, that the revolution was fixed for 1889--the anniversary
of the French Revolution--at latest.” Shaw was certainly not one of the
conservative forces; he was outspokenly catastrophic and alarmingly
ignorant of the multifarious delicate adjustments consequent upon a
widespread social cataclysm. “I remember being asked satirically and
publicly at that time,” Shaw afterwards wrote, “how long it would take
to get Socialism into working order if I had my way. I replied, with
a spirited modesty, that a fortnight would be ample for the purpose.
When I add that I was frequently complimented on being one of the more
reasonable Socialists, you will be able to appreciate the fervour of
our conviction and the extravagant levity of our practical ideas.”[49]
Broadly stated, the Fabians, in 1885, proceeded upon the assumption
that their projects were immediately possible and realizable, an
assumption theoretically as well as practically unsound. At the
Industrial Remunerative Conference they denounced the capitalists as
thieves; while among themselves they were vehemently debating the
questions of revolution, anarchism, labour-notes _versus_ pass-books,
and other like futile and daring projects. The tacit assumption under
which they worked, the purpose of their campaign with its watchwords:
“Educate, Agitate, Organize,” was “to bring about a tremendous smash-up
of existing society, to be succeeded by complete Socialism.” This
romantic, almost childlike faith in the early consummation of that
far-off divine event, towards which the whole of Socialist creation
moves, meant nothing more nor less, as Shaw freely admits, than that
they had no true practical understanding either of existing society
or Socialism. But the tone of the society was changing, gradually
and almost imperceptibly, from that of insurrectionary futility to
economic practicality. Their tracts and manifestos voiced, less and
less frequently, forcible-feeble expressions of altruistic concern and
humanitarian indignation. The practical bases of Socialism, the Fabians
began to realize, were in sore need of being laid. And there can be no
doubt that the frank levity and irreverent outspokenness, which are the
distinguishing traits of Shaw, the artist, were given the fullest field
for development in the early days of Fabian controversy, when no rein
was put on tongue or imagination. It was at this period, Shaw has told
us, that the Fabians contracted the invaluable habit of freely laughing
at themselves--a habit which has always distinguished them, always
saved them from being dampened by the gushing enthusiasts who mistake
their own emotions for public movements. As Shaw once expressed it:
“From the first such people fled after one glance at us,
declaring that we were not serious. Our preferences for
practical suggestions and criticisms, and our impatience of all
general expressions of sympathy with working-class aspirations,
not to mention our way of chaffing our opponents in preference
to denouncing them as enemies of the human race, repelled
from us some warm-hearted and eloquent Socialists, to whom it
seemed callous and cynical to be even commonly self-possessed
in the presence of the sufferings upon which Socialists make
war. But there was far too much equality and personal intimacy
among the Fabians to allow of any member presuming to get up
and preach at the rest in the fashion which the working-class
still tolerate submissively from their leaders. We knew that
a certain sort of oratory was useful for 'stoking up' public
meetings; but we needed no stoking up, and when any orator
tried the process on us, soon made him understand that he was
wasting his time and ours. I, for one, should be very sorry
to lower the intellectual standard of the Fabian by making
the atmosphere of its public discussions the least bit more
congenial to stale declamation than it is at present. If our
debates are to be kept wholesome, they cannot be too irreverent
or too critical. And the irreverence, which has become
traditional with us, comes down from those early days when we
often talked such nonsense that we could not help laughing at
ourselves.”[50]
No perceptible difference in the various Socialist societies in England
was apparent until the election of 1885. When the Social Democratic
Federation and that high priest of Marxism, the eloquent H. M. Hyndman,
first appeared in the field, they “loomed hideously in the guilty eye
of property.” Whilst the Fabians numbered only forty, the Federation
in numbers and influence was magnified out of all proportion by the
imagination of the public and the political parties. The Tories
actually believed that the Socialists could take enough votes from
the Liberals to make it worth their while to pay the expenses of two
Socialist candidates in London.[51] The Social Democrats committed a
huge tactical blunder in accepting Tory gold to pay the expenses of
these elections, to say nothing of making the damaging exposure that,
as far as voting power was concerned, the Socialists might be regarded
as an absolutely negligible quantity. A more serious result of the
“Tory money job” to the Federation was the defection of many of its
adherents. The Socialist League, in the language of American National
Conventions, viewed with indignation and repudiated with scorn the
tactics of “that disreputable gang,” the S. D. F., as it was currently
designated; while the Fabians, more parliamentary in tone, passed the
following resolution: “That the conduct of the Council of the Social
Democratic Federation in accepting money from the Tory party in payment
of the election expenses of Socialist candidates is calculated to
disgrace the Socialist movement in England.” Certain members of the
Federation, under the leadership of C. L. Fitzgerald and J. Macdonald,
seceded from it, and in February, 1886, formed a new body called “The
Socialist Union,” which eked out a precarious existence for barely two
years. Far from being reinforced by the secessionists, the Fabians
were, on the contrary, only the more inevitably forced to formulate
their own principles, to mature their own individual policy. From this
time forward, they were classed by the Federation as a hostile body.
And, as Shaw says, “We ourselves knew that we should have to find a way
for ourselves without looking to the other bodies for a trustworthy
lead.”
During the years 1886 and 1887, which mark the high tide and recession
of Insurrectionism in recent English Socialist history, the sane
tacticians, the Fabians, took little or no hand in the revolutionary
projects for the relief of the unemployed. The budding economists were
not wedded to street-corner agitations; nor was their help wanted
by the men who were organizing church parades and the like. These
were years of great distress among the labouring classes, not only
in England, but in Holland, in Belgium, and especially in the United
States. “These were the days when Mr. Champion told a meeting in London
Fields that if the whole propertied class had but one throat he would
cut it without a second thought if by doing so he could redress the
injustices of our social system; and when Mr. Hyndman was expelled
from his club for declaring on the Thames Embankment that there would
be some attention paid to cases of starvation if a rich man were
immolated on every pauper's tomb.” After the 8th of February, 1886,
that mad Monday of window-breaking, shop-looting, and carriage-storming
memory, Hyndman, Champion, Burns, and Williams were arrested and tried
for inspiring the agitation, but were acquitted. “The agitation went
on more violently than ever afterwards; and the restless activity of
Champion, seconded by Burns' formidable oratory, seized on every public
opportunity, from the Lord Mayor's Show to services for the poor in
Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's, to parade the unemployed and force
their claims upon the attention of the public.” Champion gave up in
disgust when, impatient of doing nothing but marching hungry men about
the streets and making speeches to them, he encountered only refusal of
his two proposals to the Federation: either to empower him to negotiate
some scheme of relief with his aristocratic sympathizers, or else go to
Trafalgar Square and stay there until something should happen. Matters
reached a crisis when the police, alarmed by the occasional proposals
of incendiary agitation to set London on fire simultaneously at the
Bank, St. Paul's, the House of Commons, the Stock Exchange, and the
Tower, cleared the unemployed out of the Square. But the agitation for
right of meeting grew universal among the working-classes; and finally
Mr. Stead, with the whole working-class organization at his back, gave
the word “To the Square!”[52] To the Square they all went, therefore,
Shaw tells us, with drums beating and banners waving, in their tens
of thousands, nominally to protest against the Irish policy of the
Government, but really to maintain the right of meeting in the Square.
With the new Chief Commissioner of Police, however, it was, as one of
Bunyan's Pilgrims put it, but a word and a blow. “That eventful 13th
of November, 1887, has since been known as 'Bloody Sunday.' The heroes
of it were Burns and Cunninghame Graham, who charged, two strong, at
the rampart of policemen round the Square and were overpowered and
arrested. The heroine was Mrs. Besant, who may be said without the
slightest exaggeration to have all but killed herself with overwork
in looking after the prisoners, and organizing in their behalf a 'Law
and Liberty League' with Mr. Stead. Meanwhile, the police received the
blessing of Mr. Gladstone; and Insurrectionism, after a two years'
innings, vanished from the field and has not since been heard of. For,
in the middle of the revengeful growling over the defeat at the Square,
trade revived; the unemployed were absorbed; the _Star_ newspaper
appeared to let in light and let off steam; in short, the way was clear
at last for Fabianism. Do not forget, though, that Insurrectionism will
reappear at the next depression in trade as surely as the sun will rise
to-morrow morning.”[53]
Being “disgracefully backward” in open-air speaking, the Fabians
had been somewhat overlooked in the excitements of the unemployed
agitations. They had only Shaw, Wallas and Mrs. Besant as against
Burns, Hyndman, Andrew Hall, Tom Mann, Champion and Burrows, of the
Federation, and numerous representative open-air speakers of the
Socialist League. The sole contribution of the Fabians to the agitation
was a report, printed in 1886, recommending experiments in tobacco
culture, and even hinting at compulsory military service as a means of
absorbing some of the unskilled unemployed. Drawn up by Bland, Hughes,
Podmore, Stapleton and Webb, this was the first Fabian publication
that contained any solid information. In June, 1886, the temper of the
society over the social question having cooled to some extent, the
Fabians “signalized their repudiation of Sectarianism” by inviting the
Radicals, the Secularists, and anyone else who would come, to a great
conference, modelled upon the Industrial Remunerative Conference, and
dealing with the Nationalization of Land and Capital. Fifty-three
societies sent delegates, and eighteen papers were read during the
three afternoons and evenings the conference lasted. Among those who
read papers were two Members of Parliament, William Morris and Dr.
Aveling, of the Socialist League, Mr. Foote and Mr. Robertson, of the
National Secular Society. Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Stuart Headlam, Dr.
Pankhurst, Mrs. Besant, Edward Carpenter and Stuart-Glennie represented
various other shades of Socialist doctrine and belief. The main
result of the conference was to make the Fabians known to the Radical
clubs and to prove that they were able to manage a conference in a
business-like way.
By this time the Fabians had definitely rejected Anarchism, and were
agreed as to the advisability of setting to work by the ordinary
political methods. The revolutionary hue of the society, however,
was not obliterated without many wordy duels with that section of
the Socialist League which called itself Anti-Communist, chiefly
represented by Mr. Joseph Lane and William Morris.[54] It finally
became necessary to put the matter to a vote in order to determine how
many adherents Mrs. Wilson, the one avowed Anarchist among the Fabians,
could muster. There ensued a spirited debate over the advisability of
the Socialists organizing themselves as a political party “for the
purpose of transferring into the hands of the whole working community
full control over the soil and the means of production, as well as
over the production and distribution of wealth”--a debate in which
Morris, Mrs. Wilson, Davis and Tochatti were pitted against Burns,
Mrs. Besant, Bland, Shaw, Donald and Rossiter. The resolution of Mrs.
Besant and Bland, in favour of the organization of such a party, was
finally carried, while Morris's “rider,” discountenancing as a false
step the attempt of the Socialists to take part in the Parliamentary
contest, was subsequently rejected. The Fabian Parliamentary League,
an organization within the society itself, to which any Fabian might
belong, was now formed in order to avoid a break with the Fabians who
sympathized with Mrs. Wilson. The preliminary manifesto of this body,
dated February, 1887, gives the first sketch of the Fabian policy of
to-day.[55] The League, Shaw tells us, first faded into a Political
Committee of the society, and then merged silently and painlessly into
the general body. The few branches of the League which Mrs. Besant
formed in the provinces had but a short life, quite to be expected at
this time, for, outside Socialistic circles in London, the society
remained unknown.
In connection with Shaw's own individual development, we shall soon
see how the Fabians received their training for public life and
became “equipped with all the culture of the age.” Suffice it to
state here that the Fabians had now thoroughly grounded themselves
in the historic, economic and moral bearings of Socialism. Their
rejection of Anarchism and Insurrectionism was not accomplished
without the expenditure of many words, was not unattended by ludicrous
results. The minutes of the tumultuous meeting, signalized by the
Besant-Bland-Morris resolutions and attendant heated debate, closed
with the significant words:
“Subsequently to the meeting, the secretary received notice
from the manager of Anderton's Hotel that the Society could not
be accommodated there for any further meetings.”
[Illustration: =The Socialist.=]
From a photograph taken in July, 1891.
At any rate, even at the cost of being refused a meeting-place, the
Fabians had finally demolished Anarchism in the abstract “by grinding
it between human nature and the theory of economic rent.” They now
began to train the artillery of their culture and economic equipment
upon practical politics. The Fabian Conference of 1886, attesting the
repudiation of sectarianism by the Fabians, had been boycotted by
the S. D. F. In 1888, the Fabians adopted a policy which severed the
last link between the Fabian Society and the Federation. The Fabians
began to join the Liberal and Radical, or even the Conservative,
Associations, to become members of the nearest Radical Club and
Co-operative Store, and, whenever possible, to be delegated to the
Metropolitan Radical Federation and the Liberal and Radical Union.
By making speeches and moving resolutions at the meetings of these
bodies, and using the Parliamentary candidate for the constituency
as a catspaw, the Fabians succeeded in “permeating” the party
organizations. So adroitly did the Fabians manage their machinery of
political wire-pulling that in 1888 they gained the solid advantage of
a Progressive majority full of ideas “that would never have come into
their heads had not the Fabians put them there,” on the first London
County Council. In Shaw's words, in 1892:
“The generalship of this movement was undertaken chiefly by
Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring tricks with
the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas, that to this day
both the Liberals and the Sectarian Socialists stand aghast at
him. It was exciting whilst it lasted, all this 'permeation of
the Liberal party,' as it was called; and no person with the
smallest political intelligence is likely to deny that it made
a foothold for us in the press and pushed forward Socialism in
municipal politics to an extent which can only be appreciated
by those who remember how things stood before our campaign.
When we published 'Fabian Essays' at the end of 1889, having
ventured with great misgiving on a subscription edition of a
thousand, it went off like smoke; and our cheap edition brought
up the circulation to about twenty thousand. In the meantime,
we had been cramming the public with information in tracts, on
the model of our earliest financial success in that department,
namely, _Facts_ _for Socialists_, the first edition of which
actually brought us a profit--the only instance of the kind
then known. In short, the years 1888, 1889, 1890 saw a Fabian
boom....”[56]
In the _Political Outlook_, last of the _Fabian Essays_, Hubert Bland
wisely predicted that the moment the party leaders had unmasked the
Fabian designs, they would rally round all the institutions the Fabians
were attacking. They might either put off the Fabians by raising false
issues, such as Leaseholds Enfranchisement and Disestablishment of the
Church, or, in order to defeat the Fabian candidates, coalesce with
their rivals for office--just as, for example, the Republicans and
Democrats united in the defeat of Henry George for mayor of New York
City. In less than two years, Bland's prediction was verified. When
Sidney Webb sought to force to political action a certain “Liberal
and Radical” London Member of Parliament, who had unwarily expressed
views virtually identical with Socialism, the startled politician
discovered that he was not a Socialist and that Webb was. Although
the word to “close up the ranks of Capitalism against the insidious
invaders” was promptly given, it came too late, for the permeation had
gone on too long. But the result was the “show-down” of the Fabian
hand, and the call for a “new deal.” In fact, the Conference of the
London and Provincial Fabian Societies at Essex Hall on February 6th,
1892, was called together, not to celebrate the continuance of the
permeation boom, but to face the fact that it was over. The time had
come for a new departure. In his address before that conference, Shaw
unhesitatingly said: “No doubt there still remains, in London, as
everywhere else, a vast mass of political raw material, calling itself
Liberal, Radical, Tory, Labour, and what not, or even not calling
itself anything at all, which is ready to take the Fabian stamp if
it is adroitly and politely pressed down on it. There are thousands
of thoroughly Socialized Radicals to-day who would have resisted
Socialism fiercely if it had been forced on them with taunts, threats,
and demands that they should recant all their old professions and
commit what they regard as an act of political apostasy. And there
are thousands more, not yet Socialized, who must be dealt with in the
same manner. But whilst our propaganda is thus still chiefly a matter
of permeation, that game is played out in our politics.... We now
feel that we have brought up all the political laggards and pushed
their parties as far as they can be pushed, and that we have therefore
cleared the way to the beginning of the special political work of the
Socialist--that of forming a Collectivist party of those who have more
to gain than to lose by Collectivism, solidly arrayed against those who
have more to lose than to gain by it.” And his final words project no
absurdly Utopian dream of striking the shackles from the white slaves
of Capital. While expressing undiminished hope for the possibilities
of a distant, yet realizable, future, they reveal the sanity of the
practical man of affairs, of the realist Shaw has so often magnified
and celebrated. “You know what we have gone through, and what you
will probably have to go through. You know why we believe that the
middle-classes will have their share in bringing about Socialism, and
why we do not hold aloof from Radicalism, Trade-Unionism, or any of
the movements which are traditionally individualistic. You know, too,
that none of you can more ardently desire the formation of a genuine
Collectivist political party, distinct from Conservative and Liberal
alike, than we do. But I hope you also know that there is not the
slightest use in merely expressing your aspirations unless you can
give us some voting power to back them and that your business in the
provinces is, in one phrase, to create that voting power. Whilst our
backers at the polls are counted by tens, we must continue to crawl and
drudge and lecture as best we can. When they are counted by hundreds
we can permeate and trim and compromise. When they rise to tens of
thousands we shall take the field as an independent party. Give us
hundreds of thousands, as you can if you try hard enough, and we will
ride the whirlwind and direct the storm.”
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Author of the article on Temperament (systems of tuning keyed
instruments) in the first edition of Grove's _Dictionary of Music_.
[36] Among Shaw's many articles on these topics, may be cited the
following: _A Plea for Speech Nationalization_, in the _Morning
Leader_, August 16th, 1901; _Phonetic Spelling: a Reply to Some
Criticisms_, _ibid._, August 22d, 1901; _Notes on the Clarendon Press
Rules for Compositors and Readers_, in _The Author_, April, 1902, pp.
171-2. See also Mr. William Archer's two articles: _Spelling Reform v.
Phonetic Spelling_, in the _Daily News_, August 10th, 1901; and _Shaw's
Phonetic World-English_, in the _Morning Leader_, August 24th, 1901.
[37] Compare _Land Nationalization: Its Necessity and Its Aims_, by
Alfred Russel Wallace. Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., 1892.
[38] Compare Chapter VI. for Shaw's own account of his conversion by
Henry George.
[39] No more significant contradiction between practice and conviction
can be found in Shaw's career than lies inherent in the fact that he
began life by collecting Irish rents! “These hands have grasped the
hard-earned shillings of the sweated husbandman, and handed them over,
not to the landlord--he, poor devil! had nothing to do with it--but to
the mortgagee, with a suitable deduction for my principal who taught me
these arts.” Not without its spice of humour, also, is the fact that
Shaw is to-day an absentee landlord, having derived from his mother
an estate on which her family lived for generations by mortgaging. No
wonder that Mr. Shaw contemplates with mingled feelings that process,
which he has condemned from a thousand platforms, being carried on in
his name between his agents and his mortgagees!
[40] _Who I Am, and What I Think._--Part I. In the _Candid Friend_, May
11th, 1901.
[41] Entering the Colonial Office twenty-five years ago, he served as
Colonial Secretary of the Island of Jamaica from 1899 to 1904, and on
three occasions served as Acting Governor. From 1905 to 1907 he was
principal clerk in the West African Department; in April, 1907, he was
appointed Governor of Jamaica, to succeed Sir Alexander Swettenham, and
he was made a K.C.M.G. on King Edward's birthday in 1907.
[42] _Life of Francis Place._ Longmans, 1898.
[43] Peculiarly sad are the subsequent details of Clarke's life.
After saving about a thousand pounds by frenziedly working away for
several years as a journalist, he lost it all again in an unfortunate
investment in the Liberator Building Society--the enterprise of the
notorious Jabez Balfour. With an assured reputation as a journalist
and author, Clarke might have repaired his fortunes. But the first
great influenza epidemic almost killed him; and each year thereafter
the epidemic laid upon him its increasingly tenacious grip. At last
he sought to regain his health by foreign travel, only to die in
Herzegovina. Clarke was the first leading Fabian to fall.
[44] In this connection, compare _Socialism in England_, by Sidney
Webb. Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., 1890.
[45] The society was entitled “The Fellowship of the New Life,” and
its first manifesto was entitled _Vita Nuova_. The following was its
original basis, as drawn up by Mr. Maurice Adams, and adopted on
November 16th, 1883:
“We, recognizing the evils and wrongs that must beset men so long as
our social life is based upon selfishness, rivalry and ignorance,
and desiring above all things to supplant it by a life based upon
unselfishness, love and wisdom, unite, for the purpose of realizing the
higher life among ourselves, and of inducing and enabling others to do
the same.
“And we now form ourselves into a Society, to be called the Guild of
the New Life, to carry out this purpose.”
[46] Compare _Memorials of Thomas Davidson, the Wandering Scholar_,
collected and edited by William Knight. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1907.
[47] Tract No. 2, dated 1884, which is now very rare, has for motto the
words of the late John Hay:
“For always in thine eyes, O Liberty! Shines that high light whereby
the world is saved; And, though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.”
Certain sections of this manifesto deserve quotation as illustrative of
Shaw's original and characteristic mode of expression:
“That, under existing circumstances, wealth cannot be enjoyed without
dishonour, or forgone without misery.
“That the most striking result of our present system of farming out the
national land and capital to private individuals has been the division
of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at
one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other.
“That the State should compete with private individuals--especially
with parents--in providing happy homes for children, so that every
child may have a refuge from the tyranny or neglect of natural
custodians.
“That men no longer need special political privileges to protect
them against women; and that the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal
political rights.
“That the established Government has no more right to call itself the
State than the smoke of London has to call itself the weather. “That we
had rather face a civil war than such another century of suffering as
the present one has been.”
Tract No. 3, addressed “To Provident Landlords and Capitalists,”
urged the proprietary classes to support “all undertakings having for
their object the parcelling out of waste or inferior lands among the
labouring class, and the attachment to the soil of a numerous body of
peasant proprietors.” Among the probable results of such a reform was
mentioned (section 5): “The peasant proprietor, having a stock in the
country, will, unlike the landless labourer of to-day, have a common
interest with the landlord in resisting revolutionary proposals.”
[48] Compare Fabian Tract No. 41.
[49] _The Transition to Social Democracy_, an address delivered on
September 7th, 1888, to the Economic Section of the British Association
at Bath. Printed in _Fabian Essays_, but first published in _Our
Corner_, November, 1888, edited by Annie Besant.
[50] Tract No. 41, _The Fabian Society: Its Early History_, by G.
Bernard Shaw.
[51] The main facts of the history of the Fabian Society as here
recorded are derived chiefly from Fabian Tract, No. 41, _The Fabian
Society: Its Early History_, by Mr. Shaw, and from conversations with
Mr. Shaw. Compare, also, _The Fabian Society_, by William Clarke;
Preface to _Fabian Essays_. Ball Publishing Co., Boston, 1908.
[52] For an interesting account of the early movements of Socialistic
consciousness in England, compare _An Artist's Reminiscences_, by the
artist, Walter Crane; Chapter “Art and Socialism,” pp. 249-338. Methuen
and Co., 1907.
[53] Shaw's mother was never able to persuade herself, so strong were
her aristocratic instincts, that in becoming a Socialist, George had
not allied himself with a band of ragamuffins. One day, while walking
down Regent Street with her son, she inquired who was the handsome
gentleman on the opposite side. On being told that it was Cunninghame
Graham, the distinguished _Socialist_, she protested: “No, no, George,
that's impossible. Why, that man's a gentleman!”
[54] Compare _To-Day_, edited by Hubert Bland, for the year 1886.
[55] This manifesto, in full, is to be found in Fabian Tract No. 41,
pp. 13-14.
[56] Tract No. 41: _The Fabian Society: Its Early History_, by G.
Bernard Shaw.
THE CART AND TRUMPET
“I leave the delicacies of retirement to those who are
gentlemen first and literary workmen afterwards. The cart and
trumpet for me.”--_On Diabolonian Ethics._ In _Three Plays for
Puritans_, p. xxii.
CHAPTER V
“If the art of living were only the art of dialectic! If this world
were a world of pure intellect, Mr. Shaw would be a dramatist.” Mr.
Walkley damns the dramatist to deify the dialectician. Many would
deny Shaw the possession of a heart; few can deny him the possession
of a remarkable brain and a phenomenal faculty of telling speech. The
platform orator of to-day--easy, nonchalant, resourceful, instantaneous
in repartee, unmatched in _hardiesse_, sublime in audacity--Shaw was
once a trembling, shrinking novice. The veteran of a thousand verbal
combats was once afraid to raise his voice; the _blagueur_, the
“quacksalver” of a thousand mystifications, was once afraid to open
his mouth! After all, the “brilliant” and “extraordinary” Shaw is only
a self-made man. The sheer force of his will, exerted with tremendous
energy ever since he came to man's estate, is the great motor
which has carried him in his lifetime “from the seventeenth to the
twenty-first century.” A scientific natural history of Bernard Shaw's
extraordinary career should make clear to all young aspirants that
the extraordinariness of that career lies in its ordinariness. “Like
a green-grocer and unlike a minor poet,” as Mr. Shaw once put it to
me, “I have lived instead of dreaming and feeding myself with artistic
confectionery. With a little more courage and a little more energy I
could have done much more; and I lacked these because in my boyhood I
lived on my imagination instead of on my work.”
Bernard Shaw has unravelled life's tangles with infinite patience. No
cutting of Gordian knots for him. To ignore his training, his dogged
persistence, his undaunted “push, pluck and perseverance,” is unduly
to magnify his natural capacity. Sacrifice the phenomenon and you find
the personality; off with the marvel and on with the man. In a letter
to me, written in 1904, Mr. Shaw gave due, almost undue, credit to the
influence of training:
“It has enabled me to produce an impression of being an
extraordinarily clever, original and brilliant writer,
deficient only in feeling, whereas the truth is that, though I
am in a way a man of genius--otherwise I suppose I could not
have sought out and enjoyed my experiences and been simply
bored by holidays, luxury and money--yet I am not in the least
naturally 'brilliant,' and not at all ready or clever. If
literary men generally were put through the mill I went through
and kept out of their stuffy little coteries, where works
of art breed in and in until the intellectual and spiritual
product becomes hopelessly degenerate, I should have a thousand
rivals more brilliant than myself. There is nothing more
mischievous than the notion that my works are the mere play of
a delightfully clever and whimsical hero of the _salons_: they
are the result of perfectly straightforward drudgery, beginning
in the ineptest novel-writing juvenility, and persevered in
every day for twenty-five years.”
The combination of supreme audacity with a sort of expansive and
ludicrous self-consciousness has enabled Shaw to secure many of his
most comic effects. And yet he once said with unreasonable modesty that
anybody could get his skill for the same price, and that a good many
people could probably get it cheaper. He wrested his self-consciousness
to his own ends, transforming it from a serious defect into a virtue
of genuine comic force. The apocryphal incident of Demosthenes
and the pebbles finds its analogue in the case of Shaw. Only the
most persistent and long-continued efforts enabled him to acquire
that sublime hardihood in platform speaking which he deprecatingly
denominates “ordinary self-possession.” When Lecky, in 1879, first
dragged him to a meeting of the Zetetical Society, Shaw knew absolutely
nothing about public meetings or public order. I remember a talk with
Mr. Shaw one day at Ayot St. Lawrence over the morning meal. “I had
an air of impudence, of course,” said Mr. Shaw, “but was really an
arrant coward, nervous and self-conscious to a heartrending degree.
Yet I could not hold my tongue. I started up and said something in
the debate, and then felt that I had made such a fool of myself (mere
vanity; for I had probably done nothing in the least noteworthy) that
I vowed I would join the society, go every week, speak every week,
and become a speaker or perish in the attempt. And I carried out this
resolution. I suffered agonies that no one suspected. During the speech
of the debater I resolved to follow, my heart used to beat as painfully
as a recruit's going under fire for the first time. I could not use
notes; when I looked at the paper in my hand I could not collect myself
enough to decipher a word. And of the four or five wretched points
that were my pretext for this ghastly practice of mine, I invariably
forgot three--the best three.” Yet in some remarkable way Shaw managed
to keep his nervousness a secret from everyone except himself, for
at his third meeting he was asked to take the chair. He bore out the
impression he had created of being rather uppish and self-possessed
by accepting as off-handedly as if he were the Speaker of the House
of Commons. He afterwards confessed to me that the secretary probably
got the first inkling of his hidden terror by seeing that his hand
shook so that he could hardly sign the minutes of the previous meeting.
There must have been something provocative, however, even in Shaw's
nervous bravado. His speeches, one imagines, must have been little
less dreaded by the society than they were by Shaw himself, yet it is
significant that they were seldom ignored. The speaker of the evening,
in replying at the end, usually paid Shaw the questionable compliment
of addressing himself with some vigour to Shaw's remarks, and seldom
in an appreciative vein. Conversant with the political theories of
Mill and the evolutionary theories of Darwin and his school, Shaw was,
on the other hand, “horribly ignorant” of the society's subjects.
He knew nothing of political economy; moreover, he was a foreigner
and a recluse. Everything struck his mind at an angle that produced
reflections quite as puzzling as at present, but not so dazzling. His
one success, it appears, was achieved when the society paid to Art,
of which it was stupendously ignorant, the tribute of setting aside
an evening for a paper on it by a lady in the “æsthetic” dress of the
period. “I wiped the floor with that meeting,” Shaw once told me, “and
several members confessed to me afterwards that it was this performance
that first made them reconsider their first impression of me as a
discordant idiot.”
Shaw persevered doggedly, taking the floor at every opportunity. Like
the humiliated, defiant Disraeli, in his virgin speech in the House
of Commons, Shaw resolved that some day his mocking colleagues should
hear, aye, and heed him. He haunted public meetings, so he says, “like
an officer afflicted with cowardice, who takes every opportunity of
going under fire to get over it and learn his business.” After his
conversion to Socialism, he grew increasingly zealous as a public
speaker. He was so full of Socialism that he made the natural mistake
of dragging it in by the ears at every opportunity. On one occasion
he so annoyed an audience at South Place that, for the only time in
his life, he was met with a demonstration of impatience. “I took the
hint so rapidly and apprehensively that no great harm was done,” Mr.
Shaw once said to me; “but I still remember it as an unpleasant and
mortifying discovery that there is a limit even to the patience of
that poor, helpless, long-suffering animal, the public, with political
speakers.” Such an incident had never occurred before; and although
Shaw has spent his life in deriding the public, he has taken care
that such a mortifying experience never occur again. Shaw now began
to devote most of his time to Socialist propagandism. An eventful
experience came to him in 1883, when he accepted an invitation to
address a workmen's club at Woolwich. At first he thought of writing
a lecture and even of committing it to memory; for it seemed hardly
possible to speak for an hour, without text, when he had hitherto
spoken only for ten minutes in a debate. He now realized that if he
were to speak often on Socialism--as he fully meant to do--writing and
learning by rote would be impossible for mere want of time. He made a
few notes, being by this time cool enough to be able to use them. He
found his feet without losing his head: the sense of social injustice
loosened his tongue. The lecture, called “Thieves,” was a demonstration
of the thesis that the proprietor of an unearned income inflicted on
the community exactly the same injury as a burglar. Fortified by _sæva
indignatio_, Shaw spoke for an hour easily. From that time forth he
considered the battle won.
In March, 1886, Shaw participated in a series of public debates held at
South Place Institute, South Place, Finsbury, E.C. Here for the first
time he tried his hand, in a fairly large hall, on an audience counted
by hundreds instead of scores. “Socialism and Individualism” was the
general title of this series of Sunday afternoon lectures.[57] This
was a daring undertaking for Shaw, who had neither the experience nor
the _savoir faire_ of his colleagues. It was perhaps for this reason
that he did not particularly distinguish himself, his opponent giving
him as good as he sent. Mrs. Besant, a born orator, was interesting
and eloquent, while Webb quite eclipsed Shaw, positively annihilating
his adversary. One who knew him well at this initial stage, however,
said that if Bernard Shaw knew nothing, he invented as he went along.
The lightness of touch, the nimbleness of intellect, lacked complete
development. At this time the clever young Irishman had neither memory
enough for effective facts, nor presence of mind enough to be an easy
winner in debate.
No one has yet measured the all-important influence Sidney Webb
has exerted upon Shaw's career, dating from that memorable evening
at the Zetetical Society when Shaw gazed in open-mouthed wonder at
that miracle of effectiveness and model of self-possession. Shaw's
admiration has waxed, not waned, with the passage of time. To-day he
regards Webb as one of the most extraordinary and capable men alive.
The critic who, in Disraelian phrase, regards Shaw as “one vast
appropriation clause,” will find some support for this belief in Shaw's
statement that the difference between Shaw with Webb's brains and
knowledge at his disposal, and Shaw by himself, is enormous. “Nobody
has as yet gauged it,” Mr. Shaw once said in a letter to me, “because
as I am an incorrigible mountebank, and Webb is one of the simplest of
geniuses, I have always been in the centre of the stage whilst Webb
has been prompting me, invisible, from the side.” Shaw's faculties of
acquisitiveness and appropriation are enormously developed, a fact
once comically accentuated by him in the frank avowal he once made
to me: “I am an expert picker of other men's brains, and I have been
exceptionally fortunate in my friends.”
[Illustration: =Program of Sunday Afternoon Lectures. South Place
Institute, South Place, Finsbury, E. C. March, 1886.=]
It was not without severe training and incessant work that Shaw
and his fellow Fabians acquired the equipment in the historic and
economic weapons of Social Democracy, comparable to that which
Ferdinand Lassalle in his day so defiantly flaunted in the faces of
his adversaries. While Stead, Hyndman and Burns were organizing the
unemployed agitation in the streets, the Fabians were diligently
training themselves for public life. Frank Podmore, a Post Office civil
servant, and Edward Reynolds Pease, present secretary of the Fabian
Society, two original Fabians, were great friends, and the earliest
Fabian meetings were held alternately at Pease's rooms in Osnaburgh
Street, and at Podmore's, in Dean's Yard, Westminster.[58] Certain of
the Fabians sadly felt the need of solid information and training,
in addition to that afforded by the meetings of the society. Thrown
upon their individual resources, those most scholarly inclined of the
Fabians, a veritable handful, founded the Hampstead Historic Club.
First established as a sort of mutual improvement society for those
ambitious Fabians wishing to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest Marx
and Proudhon, this club was afterwards turned into a systematic history
class, in which each student took his turn at being professor. Thus
they taught each other what they themselves wished to learn, acquiring
the most thorough and minute knowledge of the subject under discussion.
In these days Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas were the bravoes of
advanced economics--the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan. As Olivier
and Wallas were men of very exceptional character and attainments,
Shaw was enabled, as he once expressed it in my presence, to work
with a four-man-power equal to a four-hundred-ordinary-man-power,
which made his _feuilletons_ and other literary performances “quite
unlike anything that the ordinary hermit-crab could produce.” Mr.
Shaw thus explained very quaintly the secret of his success at this
period. “In fact the brilliant, extraordinary Shaw _was_ brilliant and
extraordinary; but then I had an incomparable threshing machine for my
ideas--a machine which contributed heaps of ideas to my little store;
and when I seemed most original and fantastic, I was often simply an
amanuensis with a rather exceptional literary knack, cultivated by
dogged practice.” And of his three warm friends he freely confessed:
“They knocked a tremendous lot of nonsense, ignorance and vulgarity out
of me, for we were on quite ruthless terms with one another.”
Another associate, one of the Fabian essayists and now a journalist,
Hubert Bland, was--and is still--of great value to Shaw and his
colleagues, by reason of his strong individuality and hard common
sense, and on account of the fact that his views ran counter to
Webb's on many lines. Bland lived at Blackheath, on the south side
of the river, at this time; and his wife, the very clever woman
and distinguished author, “E. Nesbit,” was a remarkable figure at
the Fabian meetings during the first seven or eight years of its
existence. During the era of the Hampstead Historic Club, Bland had a
circle of his own at Blackheath; and although Hampstead, lying north
of London, was quite out of Bland's district, Shaw and his friends
used sometimes to descend on his evening parties. Bland had an utter
contempt for the Bohemianism of Shaw and his companions, evincing it
by wearing invariably an irreproachable frock-coat, tall hat, and a
single eyeglass which infuriated everybody. Mrs. Bland graciously
humoured the reckless Bohemianism of the _insouciant_ Fabians, and on
one memorable occasion stopped them at her door, went for needle and
thread, and--perhaps with a faint hope of preserving the _haut ton_
of her social evening--then and there sewed up the sleeve of Sidney
Olivier's brown velveteen jacket. A _dernier ressort_, for the sleeve
was all but torn out! There was some compensation in the fact that,
even then, Olivier fully looked the dignified part he was one day to
fill. But it is not easy to doubt that the arrant Bohemianism of the
luckless Fabians, their reckless disregard of evening dress, must have
been very trying to the decorum of Blackheath.
Of fierce Norman exterior and great physical strength, Bland dominated
others by force of sheer size. Pugnacious, powerful, a skilled
pugilist, and with a voice which Mr. Shaw once accurately described as
being exactly “like the scream of an eagle,” he made such a formidable
antagonist that no one dared be uncivil to him. Just as William Clarke
always combated and consequently stimulated Shaw by a diametrically
opposite point of view, so Bland exerted a like influence upon Sidney
Webb, and indirectly upon Shaw. Strongly Conservative and Imperialist
by temperament, Bland stood in sharp contrast to the Millite,
Benthamite recruits of the Fabian Society. There were many other clever
fellows, many other good friends in Shaw's circle at this time; but
through circumstances of time, place and marriage--the changes and
chances of this mortal life--they could not be in such close touch with
Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas as were these four with one another.
It is not, of course, to be supposed that Shaw was merely the
recipient, like Molière always taking his material where he found it.
In his own peculiar and, at times, vastly irritating way, he made his
personality strongly felt, exerting great influence by sheer force
of a sort of perverse common sense. To employ Poe's apt descriptive,
he was the Imp of the Perverse made flesh. In the circle of the
Fabians there was room for considerable strife of temperaments, and
in the other Socialist societies, quarrels and splits and schisms
were rather frequent. Unquestionably Shaw's quintessential service
to the Fabians lay in his pioneering ideas and his knack of drafting
things in literary form and arranging his colleagues' ideas for them
with Irish lucidity. A somewhat less conspicuous, yet little less
important, service consisted in clearing the atmosphere, in easing
off the personal friction which not infrequently produced smoke and
at times threatened to kindle a conflagration. This personal friction
Shaw managed to eliminate in a most characteristic way: by a sort of
tact which superficially looked like the most outrageous want of it.
Whenever there was a grievance, instead of trying to patch matters
up, Shaw would deliberately betray everybody's confidence after the
fashion of Sidney Trefusis, by stating it before the whole set in the
most monstrously exaggerated terms. What would have been the result
among acquaintances less closely linked by ties of personal friendship
it is easy to imagine. The usual result, however, of Shaw's hazardous
and tactless outspokenness was that everybody repudiated his monstrous
exaggerations, and whatever of grievance there was in the matter was
fully explained. Of course, Shaw was first denounced as a reckless
mischief-maker, and afterwards forgiven as a privileged lunatic.
Once every fortnight, for a number of years, Shaw attended the meetings
of the Hampstead Historic Club; and in the alternate weeks he spent a
night at a private circle of economists which subsequently developed
into The Royal Economic Society. Fabian, and especially Shavian,
Socialism is strictly economic in character, a circumstance due in no
small measure to the fact that in this circle of economists the social
question was left out and the work kept on abstract economic lines. In
speaking of this period, Shaw afterwards confessed:
“I made all my acquaintances think me madder than usual by
the pertinacity with which I attended debating societies
and haunted all sorts of hole-and-corner debates and public
meetings and made speeches at them. I was President of the
Local Government Board at an amateur Parliament where a Fabian
ministry had to put its proposals into black-and-white in the
shape of Parliamentary Bills. Every Sunday I lectured on some
subject I wanted to teach to myself; and it was not until I had
come to the point of being able to deliver separate lectures,
without notes, on Rent, Interest, Profits, Wages, Toryism,
Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Trade-Unionism,
Co-operation, Democracy, the Division of Society into Classes,
and the Suitability of Human Nature to Systems of Trust
Distribution, that I was able to handle Social Democracy as it
must be handled before it can be preached in such a way as to
present it to every sort of man from his own particular point
of view. In old lecture lists of the Society you will find my
name down for twelve different lectures or so. Nowadays (1892),
I have only one, for which the secretary is good enough to
invent four or five different names.”[59]
The only opponents who held their own against the Fabians in debate,
men like Levy and Foote, had learned in the harsh school of experience;
like the Fabians, they had found pleasure and profit in speaking, in
debating, and in picking up bits of social information in the most
out-of-the-way places. It was this keen Socialistic acquisitiveness
of the Fabians, their readiness to eschew the conventional amusements
for the pleasure to be derived from speaking several nights each week,
which prepared them for the strenuous platform campaigns of the future.
And such fun it was to the Fabian swashbucklers! After being “driven
in disgrace” out of Anderton's Hotel, and subsequently out of a chapel
near Wardour Street in which they had sought sanctuary, the Fabians
went to Willis's Rooms, the most aristocratic and also, as it turned
out, the cheapest place of meeting in London. “Our favourite sport,”
says Shaw, “was inviting politicians and economists to lecture to us,
and then falling on them with all our erudition and debating skill, and
making them wish they had never been born.” On one occasion the Fabians
confuted Co-operation in the person of Mr. Benjamin Jones on a point
on which, as Shaw afterwards confessed, they subsequently found reason
to believe that they were entirely in the wrong and he entirely in the
right. The 16th of March, 1888, commemorates the most signal victory
of the Fabians in this species of guerrilla warfare. On that night of
glorious memory a well-known member of Parliament, now the Secretary
of State for War, lured into the Fabian ambuscade, was butchered to
make a Fabian holiday. The following ludicrous account of the incident
was written by the Individualist, Mr. G. Standring, in _The Radical_,
March 17th, 1888. Picture to yourself the scene--a spacious and lofty
apartment, brilliantly lighted by scores of wax candles in handsome
candelabra, and about eighty ladies and gentlemen, seated around on
comfortable chairs, lying in wait for the unsuspecting M.P. The company
is composed almost exclusively of members of the Fabian Society--“A
Socialist body whose motto is: Don't be in a hurry; but when you _do_
go it, go it thick!”
“Such were the surroundings when, on March 16th, Mr. R. B.
Haldane, M.P., was brought forth to meet his fate. The hon.
gentleman, who is a lawyer and Member for Haddingtonshire, was
announced to speak on 'Radical Remedies for Economic Evils,'
but one could easily see that this was a mere ruse of war.
The Fabian fighters were drawn up in battle array before the
Chairman's table, ready for the fatal onslaught.
“Truth to tell, Mr. Haldane did not appear at all alarmed at
the prospect of his impending butchery. Erect and manly, he
stood at the table, and in calm, well-chosen language showed
cause for his belief that Radical principles and Radical
methods are sufficient to cure the evils of society. He then
critically examined a Fabian pamphlet, 'The True Radical
Programme,' and put in demurrers thereto. The hon. and learned
gentleman spoke for an hour, and as I sat on my cushioned
chair, encompassed round about by Socialists, breathing an
atmosphere impregnated with Socialism, I listened, and softly
murmured: 'Verily, an angel hath come down from heaven!'
“As the last words of Mr. Haldane died away, the short, sharp
tones of the Chairman's voice told that the carnage was about
to commence. After some desultory questioning, Mr. Sidney Webb
sprang to his feet, eager, excited and anxious to shake the
life out of Mr. Haldane before anyone else could get at him. He
spoke so rapidly as to become at times almost incoherent. Mr.
Webb seemed to be charged with matter enough for a fortnight,
and he was naturally desirous to fire as much of it as possible
into the body of the enemy. At length the warning bell of the
Chairman was heard, and the attack was continued by Mrs. Annie
Besant, who, standing with her back to the foe, occasionally
faced round to emphasize a point. Then up rose George Bernard
Shaw, and as he spoke, his gestures suggested to me the idea
that he had got Mr. Haldane impaled upon a needle, and was
picking him to pieces limb by limb, as wicked boys disintegrate
flies. Mr. Shaw went over the Radical lines as laid down by
his opponent, and this was the burden of his song: That is no
good, this is no good, the other is no good--while you leave
nine hundred thousand millions, in the shape of Rent and
Interest, in the hands of an idle class. Let us nationalize the
nine hundred thousand millions, and all these (Radical) things
shall be added unto you. Mr. Shaw fired a Parthian shot as he
sat down. Mr. Haldane had spoken of education, elementary and
technical, as a means of advancing national welfare. Shaw met
this with open scorn, and declared that the most useful and
necessary kind of education was the education of the Liberal
party! With that he subsided in a rose-water bath of Fabian
laughter.
“The massacre was completed by two other members of the
Society, and then the Chairman called upon Mr. Haldane to
reply. Hideous mockery! the Chairman knew that Haldane was
_dead_! He had seen him torn, tossed and trampled underfoot.
Perhaps he expected the ghost of the M.P. to rise and conclude
the debate with frightful gibberings of fleshless jaws and
gestures of bony hands. Indeed, I heard a rustling of papers,
as if one gathered his notes for a speech; but I felt unable to
face the grisly horror of a phantom replying to its assassins,
so I fled.”
The three great influences, formative and determinative, whose
importance in their bearing upon Shaw's career can scarcely be
overestimated, are: first, minute and exhaustive researches into
the economic bases of society; second, his persevering efforts as a
public man toward the practical reformation of patent social evils;
and, third, his strenuous activity persisted in for many years, as a
public speaker and Socialist propagandist. His plays are so permeated
with the spirit of economic and social research that they may be
called, with little exaggeration, clinical lectures upon the social
anatomy of our time. Shaw, the public man, the man of affairs, never
the literary recluse of the ivory tower, stands revealed alike in
criticism and drama. There is more truth than jest in Shaw's statement,
generally greeted with derisive scepticism, that his plays differ from
those of other dramatists because he has been a vestryman and borough
councillor. And there is scarcely a play of Shaw's which does not bear
the hall-mark of the facile debater. His weekly _feuilletons_, his
literary criticisms, provocative, argumentative, controversial, smack
of the arena and the public platform.
This close touch with actual life, this vital association with
public effort and social reform, have imparted to Shaw's literary
productions a rare, an unique flavour. He has gone down unflinchingly
into the pitiless and dusty arena to joust against all comers. Shaw
has never lived the literary life, never belonged to a literary club.
He has never lived “_l'auguste vie quotidienne d'un Hamlet_,” who,
as Maeterlinck asserts, has time to live because he does not act.
Shaw has found life in action, action in life. Although he brought
all his powers unsparingly to the criticism of the fine arts, he
never frequented their social surroundings. When he was not actually
writing or attending performances, his time was fully taken up by
public work, in which he was fortunate enough to be associated with
a few men of exceptional ability and character. From 1883 to 1888,
he was criticizing books in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and pictures in
the _World_. This left him his evenings free; consequently he did a
tremendous amount of public speaking and debating--speaking in the
open air, in the streets, in the parks, at demonstrations--anywhere
and everywhere. While he never belonged to a literary club, so called,
he was a member of several literary societies in London. His intimate
acquaintance with Shakespeare was improved by his quiet literary
off-nights at the New Shakespeare Society under F. J. Furnival.
Elected a member of the Browning Society by mistake, Shaw stood by
the mistake willingly enough, and spent many breezy and delightful
evenings at its meetings. “The papers thought that the Browning Society
was an assemblage of long-haired æsthetes,” Shaw once remarked to me;
“in truth, it was a conventicle where pious ladies disputed about
religion with Furnival, and Gonner and I egged them on.”[60] When
Furnival founded the Shelley Society, Shaw, of course, joined that,
and became an extremely enthusiastic and energetic member. It was at
the Shelley Society's first large meeting that Shaw startled London
by announcing himself as, “like Shelley, a Socialist, an atheist,
and a vegetarian.”[61] Shaw was afterwards active in forwarding
the fine performance of _The Cenci_, given by the Shelley Society,
before it succumbed to its heavy printer's bills. Such were Shaw's
recreations; but his main business was Socialism. It was first come
first served with Shaw. Whenever he received an invitation for a
lecture, like his own character Morell, he gave the applicant the
first date he had vacant, whether it was for a street corner, a
chapel, or a drawing-room. He spoke to audiences of every description,
from University dons to London washerwomen. From 1883 to 1895,
with virtually no exception, he delivered a harangue, with debate,
questions, and so on, every Sunday--sometimes twice or even thrice--and
on a good many weekdays. This teeming and tumultuous life was passed
on many platforms, from the British Association to the triangle at the
corner of Salmon's Lane in Limehouse.
In 1888, when he became a critic of music, Shaw was restricted solely
to lectures on Sundays, as he could not foresee whether he should have
the opera or a concert to attend on week-nights. It is remarkable how
much he managed to do, even with this handicap, especially as he had
to speak usually on short notice.[62] At last, as was inevitable with
a man burning the candle at both ends, the strain began to tell; Shaw
found it impossible to deal with all the applications he received.
For an advanced and persistently progressive thinker like Shaw, the
unavoidable repetition of the old figures and the old demonstrations
in time grew irksome. He felt the danger of becoming, like Morell,
a windbag--what George Ade calls a “hot-air machine.” By 1895, the
machine was no longer by any means in full blast; the breakdown of
Shaw's health, in 1898, finished him as a systematic and indefatigable
propagandist. His work went on almost uninterrupted, however, although
it was no longer explicit propagandism. Indeed, he worked more
strenuously than ever on the St. Pancras Vestry, now the St. Pancras
Borough Council. Since 1898, Shaw has lectured only occasionally, but
often enough for a man who wishes to preserve his health and strength.
His labour as head of the Fabian Society, during the years 1906-7, in
giving form and definiteness to the policy of that society, was one of
the greatest works of his life--a work to which he gave his time and
energy without stint. Many of his Fabian colleagues assured me that no
one but Bernard Shaw could have accomplished so signal and so sweeping
a victory. Within a year or two, he will doubtless resign his arduous
duties as head and centre of the Fabian Society. And it is probable, he
recently told me, that he will never again undertake another platform
campaign.
Shaw's “knack of drafting things,” as he calls it, has played
no inconsiderable figure in his career. Simultaneously with his
desperate attack on the platform, Shaw was acquiring what he
denominates the “committee habit.” Whenever he joined a society--even
the Zetetical--his marked executive ability soon placed him on
the committee. In learning the habits of public life and action
simultaneously with the art of public speaking, he gained a great
deal of valuable experience--experience which cannot be acquired
in conventional grooves. The constant and unceremonious criticism
of men who were at many points much abler and better informed than
himself, developed in Shaw two distinctive traits--self-possession and
impassivity. It is certain that his experience as a man of affairs
actively engaged in public work, municipal and political, gave him that
behind-the-scenes knowledge of the mechanism and nature of political
illusion which seems so cynical to the spectators in front.
According to the current view, Shaw has always been a voracious
man-eater, like a lion going about seeking whom he might devour. On
the contrary, instead of flinging down the gauntlet to any and every
one, Shaw never challenged anyone to debate with him in public. To
Shaw, it seemed an unfair practice for a seasoned public speaker,
and no test at all of the validity of his case--a duel of tongues,
of no mort value than any other sort of duel. In the eighties, the
Socialist League, of which William Morris was the leading figure, made
an effort to arrange a debate between Shaw and Charles Bradlaugh, who
had graduated from boy evangelism to the rank of the most formidable
debater to be found in the House of Commons. In more than one place,
but notably in _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, Shaw has paid the
highest tribute to the remarkable qualities of Bradlaugh as thinker
and dialectician. The Socialist League challenged Bradlaugh to debate,
and chose Shaw as their champion, although he was not even a member of
that body. Bradlaugh made it a condition that Shaw should be bound by
all the pamphlets and utterances of the Social Democratic Federation, a
strongly anti-Fabian body. Had Shaw been richer in experience in such
matters, he would undoubtedly have let Bradlaugh make what conditions
he pleased, and then said his say without troubling about them. As
it was, Shaw proposed a simple proposition, “Will Socialism benefit
the English people?” with a simple, general definition of Socialism.
But Bradlaugh refused this; and the debate--as Bradlaugh probably
intended--did not come off. At the time, Shaw was somewhat relieved
over the issue, being very doubtful of his ability to make any great
showing against Bradlaugh; he has since privately expressed his regret
that the debate did not take place. Bradlaugh was a tremendous debater,
and in point of “personal thunder and hypnotism” Shaw would have been,
in sporting parlance, outclassed. But to Shaw, whose _forte_ is always
offence, it would have been a great gratification to tackle Bradlaugh
in his own hall--the Hall of Science, in Old Street, St. Luke's. At
least Shaw could have had his say.
At a later time, Bradlaugh debated the question of the Eight-Hours'
Day with H. M. Hyndman--their second platform encounter. But both
sides were dissatisfied, as neither of them stuck to his subject,
and the result was inconclusive. A debate on the same question was
then arranged between Shaw and G. W. Foote, Bradlaugh's successor as
President of the National Secular Society. In this, Shaw's only public
set debate with the exception of one in earlier days at South Place
chapel, the question was ably and carefully argued by both parties,
without rancour, bitterness, or personal abuse.[63] The debate lasting
two nights, and presided over by Mr. G. Standring and Mr. E. R. Pease
in turn, was held at the Hall of Science, London, on January 14th and
15th, 1891. The verbatim report, which is still procurable, exhibits
the best qualities of Shaw as a cool-headed, logical debater. His two
speeches, markedly ironical in tone, are frequently punctuated by
the bracketed (applause). Mr. Foote closed one of his speeches with
the rather effulgent peroration, “Every question must be threshed
out by public debate. Let truth and falsehood grapple--whichever be
truth and whichever be falsehood; for, as grand old John Milton said,
'Whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?'”--a
sentiment greeted with loud applause. To which Shaw delightfully
responded: “I do not know, gentlemen, what a free and open encounter
might bring about; but if John Milton asks me whoever saw truth put
to shame in such an encounter with falsehood as it has a chance of
having in the present condition of society, then I reply to John Milton
that George Bernard Shaw has seen it put to shame very often.” Shaw
maintained that a reduction of hours would raise wages, not prices, and
that doing it by law was the only possible way of doing it. His closing
words clearly mirror his view of the mission of Socialism, the reason
of its existence.
“I can only say, for myself, that the debate has been a
pleasant one to me, because of the friendly terms on which Mr.
Foote and I stand. I even imagine there is a bond between Mr.
Foote and myself that may serve a little to explain this. Mr.
Foote and I, on a certain subject--the established religion of
this country--entertain the same views. Now, those views have
directed our attention very strongly towards the necessity
of maintaining the freedom of the individual to hold what
views he likes, to have freedom of speech and association
for the purpose of following out all his conclusions, and
establishing a genuine culture founded on facts, and not on
the dogmas of any church whatsoever. I confess that in the
days before I had studied economic questions I was filled with
the necessity of individual freedom on these points, and that
I also had that strong distrust of the State which Mr. Foote
has expressed here to-night. But when my attention was turned
to the economic side of the question, I soon became convinced
that the real secret of the State's hostility to the advance
of reasonable views was that Reason condemned the propertied
institutions of this country. Property is the real force that
hypocritically expresses itself as Religion. I therefore came
to the conclusion that we shall never get out of the mess we
are in until the workers come to understand that they are
already deprived of individual freedom by the irresistible
physical force of the State, and that they can escape from its
oppression only by seizing on the political power, and using
that very State force to emancipate themselves, and impose
their will on the minority which now enslaves them. That is
the reason that, just as I urge the importance of individual
freedom of speech, so I also urge on the workers that they
cannot possibly help themselves by individual action so long as
this terrible State is outside them, and ready to cut them down
at every point. I believe that they can, by concerted action,
not merely in trade unions, but in a united democracy, get
complete control of the State, and use its might for their own
purposes; and when they once come to understand this, I believe
their emancipation will only be delayed until they have learned
from experience the true conditions of social freedom.”[64]
There is another feature of Shaw's career as a public speaker which
exhibits his attitude towards the work in life he had set before him.
Shaw fights for what seems to many less like liberty than licence of
speech. He never submitted his intelligence, his will, or his power
to alien domination. He has never belonged to any political party,
rightly considered, never cringed under any lash, never realized in his
own experience what he himself has called the only real tragedy: “the
being used by personally-minded men for purposes which you recognize
as base.” It was the determination to remain untrammelled in thought
and action which forbade his ever accepting payment for speaking. Very
often provincial Sunday Societies invited him to come down for the
usual ten guineas fee and give the usual sort of lecture, avoiding
politics and religion. Shaw's invariable answer to such requests was
that he never lectured on anything but politics and religion, and
that his fee was the price of his railway ticket third-class, if the
place was further off than he could afford to go at his own expense.
The Sunday Society would then “come around” and assure Shaw that he
might, on these terms, lecture on anything he liked; and he always
_did_. Occasionally, to avoid embarrassing other lecturers who lived
by lecturing, the thing was done by a debit and credit entry: that is,
Shaw took the usual fee and expenses, and gave it back as a donation
to the society. Shaw once related to me the circumstances of a most
interesting _contretemps_, which alone would suffice to justify his
desire for freedom of speech, his wisdom in arming himself against
the accusation of being a professional agitator. “At the election of
1892, I was making a speech in the Town Hall of Dover, when a man
rose and shouted to the audience not to let itself be talked to by
a hired speaker from London. I immediately offered to sell him my
emoluments for five pounds. He hesitated; and I came down to four
pounds. At last I offered to take five shillings--half-a-crown--a
shilling--sixpence--for my fees, and when he would not take them at
that, claimed that he must know perfectly well that I was there at my
own expense. If I had not been able to do this, the meeting, which
was a difficult and hostile one (Dover being a hopeless, corrupt Tory
constituency) would probably have been broken up.”
As Mr. Clarence Rook has remarked, London first opened her eyes in
wonder over the versatile “G. B. S.” when she discovered that in the
daytime he preached revolt to the grimy East from a tub, and in
the evening sent William Archer and the cultured West into peals of
merriment over his _Arms and the Man_. In those halcyon transpontine
days London began to take pains to be present at Shaw's delightful
dialectical performances at Battersea. Shaw lectured often in Battersea
because it was John Burns' stronghold. Never was Shaw's skyrocketing
brilliance more effectively displayed than in one of his orations
at the Washington Music Hall, with Clement Edwards in the chair.
In this oration he proved that no conclusion could be drawn from a
bare profession of Socialism as to what side a man would take on any
concrete political issue. In speaking of this remarkable effort, Mr.
Shaw recently told me the following incident: “I remember hearing a
workman say to his wife as I came up behind them on my way to the
station: 'When I hear a man of intellect talk like that for a whole
evening, it makes me feel like a WORM.' Which made me feel horribly
ashamed of myself. I felt the shabbiest of impostors, somehow, though
really I gave him the best lecture I could.” With the exception of his
two nights' wrestle with G. W. Foote, Shaw's most sustained effort--an
oration lasting about four hours--was delivered in the open air on a
Sunday morning at Trafford Bridge, Manchester. Shaw takes pleasure in
declaring that one of his best speeches, about an hour and a half long,
was delivered in Hyde Park in the pouring rain to six policemen sent
to watch him, and the secretary of the little society that had invited
him to speak. “I was determined to interest those policemen, because
as they were sent there to listen to me, their ordinary course, after
being once convinced that I was a reasonable and well-conducted person,
would be to pay no further attention. But I quite entertained them. I
can still see their waterproof capes shining in the rain when I shut my
eyes.”
Courage and daring, as well as fertility and inventiveness, often
enabled Shaw to carry his point or to have his say, in the face of
violent and almost invincible opposition. He has more than once
actually voted against Socialism in order to forward the motion in
hand. And once, in St. James's Hall, London, at a meeting in favour of
Woman's Suffrage, he ventured with success upon a curious trick, the
details of which he once related to me:
“Just before I spoke a hostile contingent entered the room, and
I saw that we were outnumbered, and that an amendment would be
carried against us. They were all Socialists of the anti-Fabian
sort, led by a man whom I knew very well, and who was at that
time worn out with public agitation and private worry, so that
he was excitable almost to frenzy. It occurred to me that if
they, instead of carrying an amendment, could be goaded to
break up the meeting and disgrace themselves, the honours would
remain with us. I made a speech that would have made a bishop
swear and a sheep fight. My friend the enemy, stung beyond
endurance, dashed madly to the platform to answer me then
and there. His followers, thinking he was leading a charge,
instantly stormed the platform, and broke up the meeting. Then
the assailants reconstituted the meeting and appointed one of
their number chairman. I then demanded a hearing, which was
duly granted me as a matter of fair play, and I had another
innings with great satisfaction to myself. No harm was done and
no blow struck, but the papers next morning described a scene
of violence and destruction that left nothing to be desired by
the most sanguinary schoolboy.”
Like Ibsen, Shaw has barely escaped the honour of being imprisoned--an
honour which, it is needless to say, he never sought. Fortunately for
Shaw, the religious people always joined with the Socialists to resist
the police. Twice, in difficulties raised by attempts of the police to
stop street meetings, Shaw was within an ace of going to prison. The
first time, the police capitulated on the morning of the day when Shaw
was the chosen victim. The second time Shaw was so fortunate as to have
in a member of a rival Socialist society a disputant for the martyr's
palm. One can sympathize with Shaw's secret relief when, on a division,
his rival defeated him by two votes!
One of the most remarkable speakers in England to-day, Bernard Shaw
is not simply a talent, a personality: he is a public institution.
People flock to his lectures and addresses, and his _bons mots_ are
quoted in London, New York, Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg. He is
the most universally discussed man of letters now living. Not since
Byron has any British author enjoyed an international audience and
vogue comparable to that enjoyed by Bernard Shaw. No one in our time
is Shaw's equal in searching analysis and trenchant exposition of the
ills of modern society. His ability to see stark reality and to know it
for his own makes of him the most powerful pamphleteer, the most acute
journalist-publicist since the days of Swift. His indictments of the
fundamental structure of contemporary society prove him the greatest
master of comic irony since the days of Voltaire. Inferior to Anatole
France in artistry and urbanity, Shaw excels him in the strenuousness
of his personal sincerity and in the scope of his purpose. Shaw's
manner of speaking is as individual, as distinctive, as is his style
as an essayist or his fingering as a dramatist. That priceless and
inalienable gift which has helped to make Jean Jaurès the leader of
modern Socialists--the power of touching the emotions--is a quality
which Shaw, like Disraeli before him, wholly lacks. In Shaw there is
no spark of the mesmeric force, the hypnotic power of the born orator;
he lacks that romance, that power of dramatic visualization, which
is a quality of all true oratory. While it is true that people do
not “orate” in England as they do in America, still there is a vast
difference between the born orator, like Jaurès or Mrs. Besant, and the
practised public speaker, like Shaw. All that could be acquired, Shaw
acquired. Not Charles Bradlaugh himself had a more thorough training
than had Shaw. He is facile, fluent and fertile; he does not leave all
his qualities behind him when he mounts the platform. In fine, Shaw
has fulfilled to the letter his early vow, solemnly taken the night he
joined the Zetetical Society. He has delivered considerably more than
a thousand public addresses, and the best of them were masterpieces of
their kind. And yet Shaw has only a very ordinary voice; and in order
to make himself comfortably heard by a large audience he has to be very
careful with his articulation and to speak as though he were addressing
the auditor furthest from him.
[Illustration: =The Cart and Trumpet.=]
Shaw addressing the dockyard men outside dockyard gate on behalf of
Alderman Sanders. G. B. S. is annoyed with the interrupter, but is
ready with an instant retort.
_Courtesy of_ Stephen Cribb, Southsec.
With his long, loose form, his baggy and rather _bizarre_ clothes, his
nonchalant, quizzical, extemporaneous appearance; with his red hair
and scraggly beard, his pallid face, his bleak smile, his searching
eyes flashing from under his crooked brows; with his general air of
assurance, privilege and impudence--Bernard Shaw is the jester at the
court of King Demos. Startling, astounding, irrepressible, he fights
for opposition, clamours for denial, demands suppression. Shaw was
once completely floored by a workman, who rose after he had completed
a magnificent pyrotechnic display, and said: “I know quite well that
Bernard Shaw is very clever at argument, and that when I sit down he
will make mincemeat of everything I say. But what does that matter to
me? I still have my principles.” Shaw had to admit, as he once told me
in speaking of the incident, that this was unanswerable and thoroughly
sound at bottom. “Call me disagreeable, only call me something,”
clamours Shaw; “for then I have roused you from your stupid torpor
and made you think a new thought.” The incarnation of intellect,
not of hypnotism, of reason, not of oratory, this strange image of
Tolstoy as he was in his middle years has always made his audience
think new thoughts. He has never given the audience what it liked; he
has always given it what he liked, and what he thought it needed: a
bitter and tonic draught. The successes of the orator who is the mere
mouthpiece of his audience have never been his. But he has achieved a
more enviable and more arduous distinction; I have heard him say with
genuine pride that more than once he has been the most unpopular man
in a meeting, and yet carried a resolution against the most popular
orator present by driving home its necessity. For the transports which
the popular orator raises by voicing popular sentiment Shaw has no
use. Of the orator's power of entrancing people and having his own
way at the same time he has never had a trace. He is the arch-foe of
personal hypnotism, of romance, of sensuous glamour. He has sought the
accomplishment of the demand of his will; he never practised speaking
as an art or an accomplishment. The desire for that, he once told me,
would never have nerved him to utter a word in public. Just as Zola
used his journalistic work as a hammer to drive his views into the
brain of the public, Shaw used his dialectical skill as a weapon, as
a means to the end of making people think. One might truly say of
all the things that he has either spoken or written: “_Ils donnent à
penser furieusement_.” As a speaker, he first startled and provoked
his audience to thought, and then annihilated their objections with
the sword of logic and the rapier of wit. His ready answer for every
searching query, his instantaneous leap over every tripping barrier,
seemed to the novice a proof of very genius. To strange audiences,
his readiness in answering questions and meeting hostile arguments
seemed astonishing, miraculous. On several different occasions I have
heard Mr. Shaw modestly give the explanation of this apparently magic
performance. “The reason was that everybody asks the same questions and
uses the same arguments. I knew the most effective replies by heart.
Before the questioner or debater had uttered his first word I knew
exactly what he was going to say, and floored him with an apparent
impromptu that had done duty fifty times before.” Shaw always carefully
thought out the thing for himself in advance, and, which is far more
important, had thought out not only an effective, but also a witty
answer to the objections that were certain to be raised. This is the
secret of Shaw's success in every task which he has undertaken: to
think each thing out for himself, and to couch it in terms of scathing
satire and fiery wit. His is the sceptical Socratic method pushed to
the limit.
Confronted with the point-blank question: “To what do you owe your
marvellous gift for public speaking?” Shaw characteristically replied:
“My marvellous gift for public speaking is only part of the G. B. S.
legend. I am no orator, and I have neither memory enough nor presence
of mind enough to be a really good debater, though I often seem to be
when I am on ground that is familiar to me and new to my opponents. I
learned to speak as men learn to skate or to cycle--by doggedly making
a fool of myself until I got used to it. Then I practised it in the
open air--at the street corner, in the market square, in the park--the
best school. I am comparatively out of practice now, but I talked a
good deal to audiences all through the eighties, and for some years
afterwards. I should be a really remarkable orator after all that
practice if I had the genius of the born orator. As it is, I am simply
the sort of public speaker anybody can become by going through the same
mill. I don't mean that he will have the same things to say, or that
he will put them in the same words, for, naturally, I don't leave my
ideas or my vocabulary behind when I mount the tub; but I _do_ mean
that he will say what he has to say as movingly as I say what I have
to say--and more, if he is anything of a real orator. Of course, as an
Irishman, I have some fluency, and can manage a bit of rhetoric and a
bit of humour on occasion, and that goes a long way in England. But
'marvellous gift' is all my eye.”[65]
FOOTNOTES:
[57] On March 6th, Mrs. Annie Besant (Fabian Society) spoke _versus_
Mr. Corrie Grant, subject: “That the existence of classes who live
upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the community,
and ought to be put an end to by legislation.” On March 13th, Mr. G.
B. Shaw (Fabian Society) _versus_ Rev. F. W. Ford, subject: “That the
welfare of the community necessitates the transfer of the land and
existing capital of the country from private owners to the State.” On
March 20th, Mr. Sidney Webb (Fabian Society) _versus_ Dr. T. B. Napier,
subject: “That the main principles of Socialism are founded on, and
in accordance with, modern economic science.” On March 27th, Mr. H.
H. Champion _versus_ Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe (Liberty and Property
Defence League), subject: “That State interference with, and control
of, industry is inevitable, and will be advantageous to the community.”
[58] At this time, it is interesting to recall, Pease and Podmore
were deeply interested in the Psychical Research Society, which had
its office in the Dean's Yard rooms. In this way the Fabians, Shaw
in particular, were brought in close touch with the exploits of
this society at its most exciting period, when Madame Blavatsky was
exposed by the American, R. Hodgson. Compare, for example, Shaw's
two book-reviews in the _Pall Mall Gazette_: _A Scotland Yard for
Spectres_, being a notice of the _Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research_ (January 23d, 1886), and _A Life of Madame
Blavatsky_ (January 6th, 1887). On one eventful evening Shaw attended
a Fabian meeting, then went on to hear the end of a Psychical Research
_séance_, and ended by sleeping in a haunted house with a committee
of ghost-hunters. Picture, if you can, Shaw's deep mortification, his
intense disgust over having a nightmare on that night of all nights,
and waking up in a corner of the room struggling desperately with the
ghost.
[59] Tract No. 41, _The Fabian Society: Its Early History_, by G.
Bernard Shaw.
[60] The Gonner here referred to is E. C. K. Gonner, M.A., now Brunner
Professor of Economic Science at the University College, Liverpool.
[61] While Shaw has stated publicly numbers of times that he was an
atheist, an explanation here is necessary. Shaw has always had a strong
sense of spiritual things; his declarations of atheism should always be
taken with the context. “If this be religion,” he has virtually said
in reply to someone's exposition of religion, “then I am an atheist.”
In the case of Shelley, it is perfectly plain that Shaw meant that he
was all these things--a Socialist, an atheist and a vegetarian--in the
Shelleyan sense.
[62] “Take the amusing, cynical, remarkable George Bernard Shaw, whose
Irish humour and brilliant gifts have partly helped, partly hindered
the (Fabian) Society's popularity. This man will rise from an elaborate
criticism of last night's opera or Richter concert (he is the musical
critic of the _World_), and after a light, purely vegetarian meal, will
go down to some far-off club in South London or to some street corner
in East London, or to some recognized place of meeting in one of the
parks, and will there speak to poor men about their economic position
and their political duties.”--William Clarke, in _The Fabian Society
and Its Work_. Preface to _Fabian Essays_. Ball Publishing Co., Boston,
1908.
[63] In a long contemporary account of the debate, a French newspaper
commented approvingly on the high tone maintained throughout, placing
the English in sharp contrast with French debates on similar subjects,
which were not regarded as unqualified successes unless they broke up
in personal encounters, with the attendant imprecations: “_Assassins! A
bas les Socialistes! A la lanterne!_”
[64] _The Legal Eight Hours Question._ A two-nights' public debate
between Mr. G. W. Foote and Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Verbatim Report.
London: R. Forder, 28, Stonecutter Street, E.C. 1891.
[65] _Who I Am, and What I Think._ Part I. The _Candid Friend_, May
11th, 1901.
SHAVIAN SOCIALISM
“Of course, people talk vaguely of me as an Anarchist, a
visionary, and a crank. I am none of these things, but their
opposites. I only want a few perfectly practical reforms which
shall enable a decent and reasonable man to live a decent
and reasonable life, without having to submit to the great
injustices and the petty annoyances which meet you now at
every turn.”--_George Bernard Shaw: an Interview._ In _The
Chap-Book_, November, 1896.
“Economy is the art of making the most of life.
The love of economy is the root of all virtue.”
--_The Revolutionist's Handbook._ In _Man and Superman_.
CHAPTER VI
I once heard a Socialist of world-wide renown accuse Bernard Shaw of
an inconsistency which, to him, was little short of inexplicable. To
every charge of inconsistency, Shaw is always ready with the effective
rejoinder: “_l'homme absurde est celui qui ne change jamais_.” To
Shaw, the stationary is the stagnant, evolution is progress. That rare
literary phenomenon, a master of the comic spirit, Shaw is not only
willing to admit for the nonce the inconsistencies in his own make-up:
he is positively eager to make thereof genuine comic capital.
To the public, Shaw is his own greatest paradox. What defence, they
ask, can be devised for a man rooted in Nietzscheism, who champions the
Socialism which Nietzsche mocked? Reconcile the ardent apostle of the
levelling democracy of a Social-Democratic Republic with the avowed
advocate of the doctrines of Ibsen and Nietzsche, the intellectual
aristocrats of this distinctly social era? Identify the agitation for
international disarmament, for universal peace, with one who sings
of arms and the superman? The Irish Nietzsche, the daring pilgrim in
search of a moral Ultima Thule, with one who has forcibly declared the
impossibility of anarchism? The evangelist preaching the brotherhood
of man with one who repudiates the pacifying sedative: “Sirs, ye are
brothers,” in the statement that he has no brothers, and if he had, he
would in all probability not agree with them? What faith is to be put
in the economic grounding of one who, in the course of two or three
years, turned from vigorous defence of Marx's value theory to its
“absolute demolition, on Jevonian lines, with his own hand”?
It is very difficult to understand Shaw's fundamental philosophy of
Socialism without a thorough knowledge of the evolutionary course of
his thought. The particular brand of Socialism denominated Shavian is
not a bundle of prejudices of an immature youth, but the integration
of years of day-by-day observations of life and character, as well
as of political and economic science. The diversities of Socialistic
faith have been wittily exhibited by Shaw in the opening scenes of the
third act of _Man and Superman_. Roughly speaking, there are three
kinds of Socialists: theoretical, Utopian and practical. Lassalle and
Marx, Liebknecht and Bebel, Guèsde and Jaurès, Hyndman and Kropotkin,
Shelley and Morris, George and Bellamy, Shaw and Webb, carry the stamp
of the cobweb-spinner, the dreamer, or of the man of affairs. It is
Shaw's supreme distinction that, beginning as doctrinaire, he has
ended as practical opportunist. He has sought to traverse the chasm
between democracy and social-democracy, by the aid of a solid economic
structure, rather than by the rainbow bridge of sentimentality and
Utopism. No scheme finds favour in his eyes which does not irresistibly
commend itself to his intelligence. He has found the “true” doctrine of
Socialism in repudiation of the follies of Impossibilism.
Shaw has unhesitatingly given credit to Henry George for the great
impetus he gave to Socialism in England, and, in particular, for the
important part George played in his own career. In speaking of the
memorable evening in 1882, when, under the inspiration of George's
stirring and eloquent words, he first began to realize the importance
of the economic basis, Shaw recently wrote:[66]
“One evening in the early eighties I found myself--I forget
how and cannot imagine why--in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon
Street, London, listening to an American finishing a speech
on the Land Question. I knew he was an American, because he
pronounced 'necessarily'--a favourite word of his--with the
accent on the third syllable instead of the first; because he
was deliberately and intentionally oratorical, which is not
customary among shy people like the English; because he spoke
of Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law, and other strange
eighteenth-century superstitions; and because he explained with
great simplicity and sincerity the views of the Creator, who
had gone completely out of fashion in London in the previous
decade and had not been heard of there since. I noticed, also,
that he was a born orator, and that he had small, plump, pretty
hands.
“Now at that time I was a young man not much past twenty-five,
of a very revolutionary and contradictory temperament, full of
Darwin and Tyndall, of Shelley and De Quincey, of Michelangelo
and Beethoven, and never having in my life studied social
questions from the economic point of view, except that I had
once, in my boyhood, read a pamphlet by John Stuart Mill
on the Irish Land Question. The result of my hearing the
speech, and buying from one of the stewards of the meeting
a copy of 'Progress and Poverty' for sixpence (Heaven only
knows where I got that sixpence!), was that I plunged into
a course of economic study, and at a very early stage of it
became a Socialist and spoke from that very platform on the
same great subject, and from hundreds of others as well,
sometimes addressing distinguished assemblies in a formal
manner, sometimes standing on a borrowed chair at a street
corner, or simply on the kerbstone. And I, too, had my
oratorical successes; for I can still recall with some vanity
a wet afternoon (Sunday, of course) on Clapham Common, when I
collected as much as sixteen and sixpence in my hat after my
lecture, for the Cause. And that all the work was not mere gas,
let the feats and pamphlets of the Fabian Society attest!
“When I was thus swept into the great Socialist revival of
1883, I found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with
me had been converted by Henry George. This fact would have
been far more widely acknowledged had it not been that it was
not possible for us to stop where Henry George stopped.... He
saw only the monstrous absurdity of the private appropriation
of rent, and he believed that if you took that burden off
the poor man's back, he could help himself out as easily as
a pioneer on a pre-empted clearing. But the moment he took
an Englishman to that point, the Englishman saw at once that
the remedy was not so simple as that, and that the argument
carried us much further, even to the point of total industrial
reconstruction. Thus George actually felt bound to attack
the Socialism he had created; and the moment the antagonism
was declared, and to be a Henry Georgeite meant to be an
anti-Socialist, some of the Socialists whom he had converted
became ashamed of their origin and concealed it; whilst others,
including myself, had to fight hard against the Single Tax
propaganda.”
However carefully other English Socialists have endeavoured to minimize
or deny outright the momentous influence of Henry George, certainly
Shaw has neither denied nor belittled their debt. “If we outgrew
'Progress and Poverty' in many ways, so did he himself too; and it
is perhaps just as well that he did not know too much when he made
his great campaign here; for the complexity of the problem would have
overwhelmed him if he had realized it; or, if it had not, it would have
rendered him unintelligible. Nobody has ever got away, or ever will
get away, from the truths that were the centre of his propaganda: his
errors anybody can get away from.” And yet Shaw's insularity and sense
of British superiority sticks out in the statement that certain of the
English Socialists, including himself, regretted that George was an
American, and, therefore, necessarily about fifty years out of date in
his economics and sociology from the point of view of an older country!
The absurdity of such a contention is glaringly patent on comparison
of _Progress and Poverty_ with the tracts of the Fabian Society during
its early period: George was at least fifty years ahead of the English
Socialists, instead of the reverse. With that grandiose conceit which
is an essential item of his “stock in trade,” Shaw has expressed his
eagerness to play the part of Henry George to America. “What George
did not teach you, you are being taught now by your great Trusts and
Combines, as to which I need only say that if you would take them over
as national property as cheerfully as you took over the copyrights of
all my early books, you would find them excellent institutions, quite
in the path of progressive evolution, and by no means to be discouraged
or left unregulated as if they were nobody's business but their own.
It is a great pity that you all take America for granted because you
were born in it. I, who have never crossed the Atlantic, and have taken
nothing American for granted, find I know ten times as much about your
country as you do yourselves; and my ambition is to repay my debt to
Henry George by coming over some day and trying to do for your young
men what Henry George did nearly a quarter of a century ago for me.”
While Henry George and his _Progress and Poverty_ were the prime
motors in directing Shaw to Socialism, it was Karl Marx and his
_Capital_ that first shunted Shaw on to the economic tack. In 1884,
the Unitarian minister, Mr. Philip H. Wicksteed, contributed to
_To-Day_ a criticism of Marx from the point of view of the school
of mathematician-economists founded in England on the treatise on
Political Economy published by the late Stanley Jevons in 1871.[67] Mr.
Wicksteed, whose writings on Dante and Scandinavian literature are well
known, was a remarkable linguist, a popular preacher, and an excellent
man. To the fact, however, that he was a mathematician is largely
attributable his deep interest in Jevons' theory of value, which
scientifically demolished the classical theory of Adam Smith, Ricardo
and Cairnes, with its adaptation to Socialism by Hodgskin and Marx.
To his mathematical training, also, may be ascribed the lucidity and
logical clarity of his application of the Jevonian machinery to Marxian
theory. So abject was the deification of Marx by English Socialists at
that time that Hyndman, whom Shaw thought should answer the article,
pooh-poohed Wicksteed as beneath his notice. But the Omniscience and
Infallibility of Marx were rudely shaken: Mr. Wicksteed's article had
to be answered. Some years later Hyndman accused Shaw of having “rushed
in” to defend Marx; but the question here is not of what Mr. Hyndman
thinks: it is a question of fact. Shaw was earnestly requested by the
proprietors of _To-Day_ to answer Mr. Wicksteed; but he replied at
once that though he had read _Das Kapital_ he was not an economist,
and that the reply should come from someone with a real mastery
of the subject. At last, after a discussion one day in St. Paul's
Churchyard, Frost disconsolately remarked to Shaw that if he wouldn't
do it, he supposed he, Frost, must. Suddenly Shaw realized, as he very
recently told me, that none of the others, so far as he could see,
knew any more about the subject than he himself did; and he consented
on the solemn condition that Wicksteed was to be allowed space for a
rejoinder. Shaw was not so blind as not to be deeply impressed by his
own ignorance of what Carlyle called the “dismal science”; he realized
the importance to himself of getting a sound theoretic basis. “I read
Jevons,” he afterwards wrote, “and made a fearful struggle to guess
what his confounded differentials meant; for I knew as little of the
calculus as a pig does of a holiday.” In his article entitled _The
Jevonian Criticism of Marx_, which was more of a counterblast than
a thorough analysis and discussion of Mr. Wicksteed's epoch-making
article, Shaw had not a word to say in defence of Marx's oversight
of “abstract utility.”[68] Quite clever in its Shavian way, Shaw's
article did not get at the root of the matter at all, which was not
unnatural, considering that he was a novice, and, as he afterwards
freely admitted, completely wrong in the bargain. After the appearance
of Mr. Wicksteed's brief rejoinder on pages 177-179 of the same volume,
the incident was, for some time, closed.
The discussion only whetted Shaw's interest and left him determined to
get to the bottom of the economic question. He had been tremendously
impressed by the first volume of _Das Kapital_, “the real European
book,” as he called it, which he had read in the French translation.
Even when he was under this first tremendous impression, his
misgivings found expression in a published letter, in which he
jocularly pointed out that what Marx had proved was that we were all
robbing each other, and not that one class was robbing another. A joke,
founded on clever ignorance, may be a poor beginning for a career;
yet in this way was Shaw's career as an economist begun. Shaw never
doubted, so green was he, that Hyndman or some other leader would at
once expose the fallacy in his letter, and teach him something thereby.
The fact that nobody did probably started the misgiving that led him to
devote so much time and thought to economics.
It was not without many struggles, however, that Shaw was eventually
persuaded to see the fallacies in Marx's economics. In the Hampstead
Historic Society, that mutual aid association, and in long private
discussions with Sidney Webb, Shaw kept at the subject of Marx,
defending him by every shift he could think of. All the time, at
bottom, Shaw was satisfied neither with his own position nor with
Webb's, which was that of John Stuart Mill. He had always mistrusted
mathematical symbols since the time of his school days, when a
plausible schoolboy used to prove to him by algebra that one equals
two--presumably by one of the inadmissible division-by-zero proofs. The
boy always began by saying: “Let x = a.” Shaw saw no harm in admitting
that, and the proof followed with apparently rigorous exactness. “The
effect was not to make me proceed habitually on the assumption that one
equals two,” I once heard him say with a boyish laugh; “but to impress
upon me that there was a screw loose somewhere in the algebraic art,
and a chance for me to set it right some day when I had time to look
into the subject.” And so, when he saw Jevons' x's, his differentials
and his infinitesimals, Shaw at once thought of the plausible boy,
and was fired to find that loose screw in Jevonian economics. The
difficulty he felt most was that he could not, among Socialists, get
into a sufficiently abstract atmosphere to arrive at the pure theory of
the thing. It was essential to divorce the discussion absolutely from
the social question. Fortunately, yet oddly enough, it was Wicksteed
himself who helped Shaw to what he wanted. One of Wicksteed's friends,
a prosperous stockbroker named Beeton, began inviting a circle of
friends interested in economics to his house. The _To-Day_ discussion
had established friendly relations between Shaw and Wicksteed;
and Shaw secured an entry to this circle and “held on to it like
grim death” until after some years it blossomed out into The Royal
Economic Society, founded the _Economic Journal_, and outgrew Beeton's
drawing-room. Mr. Shaw once remarked to me that his great difficulty
was to see through Marx's fallacy in assuming that abstract labour
was the unique factor by which the celebrated equation of Value was
divisible. “I couldn't, for the life of me,” said Mr. Shaw, “see any
sense in the equation 2a + 3b = 8c. I actually bought an Algebra and
tried to recapture any early knowledge I might have had, but it was all
gone.” And only the other day I ran across this book, _The Scholar's
Algebra_, by Lewis Hensley, at a second-hand book-shop in London. Under
date “22-8-87” appears the following, written in Shaw's remarkably neat
stenography: “What sudden freak induced me to purchase this book? I saw
it offered at a second-hand book-shop in Holborn for one and sixpence.
For a time I was puzzled by a notion that the symbols referred to
things instead of to numbers. For instance, 2a + 3b appeared to me as
absurd as 2 wrens + 3 apples.”
In a letter to me Mr. Shaw once related the following story of his
economic education--a story which gives the lie to his own strictures
on University education. And in conversation he recently admitted to me
that this economic training corresponded closely to the highest form
of University instruction.[69] “During those years Wicksteed expounded
'final utility' to us with a blackboard except when we got hold of some
man from the 'Baltic' (The London Wheat Exchange), or the like, to
explain the markets to us and afterwards have his information reduced
to Jevonian theory. Among university professors of economics Edgeworth
and Foxwell stuck to us pretty constantly, and W. Cunningham turned
up occasionally. Of course, the atmosphere was by no means Shavian;
but that was exactly what I wanted. The Socialist platform and my
journalistic pulpits involved a constant and most provocative forcing
of people to face the practical consequences of theories and beliefs,
and to draw mordant contrasts between what they professed or what their
theories involved and their life and conduct. This made dispassionate
discussion of abstract theory impossible. At Beeton's the conditions
were practically university conditions. There was a tacit understanding
that the calculus of utilities and the theory of exchange must be
completely isolated from the fact that we lived, as Morris's mediæval
captain put it, by 'robbing the poor.'”
In the heated discussions over Marx's economic theories which followed
during the next few years, Shaw enjoyed an immense advantage in that
nobody else in the Socialist movement had gone through this discipline,
which required considerable perseverance and deep scientific
conviction. It ended, as Shaw maintains, in his finding out Marx and
Hyndman completely as economists. In Shaw's present view Marx was
less an economist than a revolutionary Socialist, employing political
economy as a weapon against his adversaries: to Marx, the economic
theory of Ricardo was simply a “stick to beat the capitalist dog.” To
Hyndman, doubt of any part of the “Bible of the working classes” was
Socialist heresy: the whole issue resolved itself into the question
whether Jevons was a Socialist or an anti-Socialist.[70] No doubt the
influence which moved Shaw to devote himself to economic studies was
his need of a weapon; but he did not stop to ask whether the steel came
from a Socialist foundry or not. “The Marxian steel was always snapping
in my hand,” he once remarked to me. “The Jevonian steel held and
kept its edge, and fitted itself to every emergency. And then, just as
one loves a good sword for its own sake, so one loves a sound theory
for its own sake.” As a literary artist also, accustomed to express
himself in terse and pointed phrase, Shaw was fired with determination
to extricate the theory from its “damned shorthand” of mathematical
symbols, and put it into human language.[71]
On the appearance of the English translation from the third German
edition of _Das Kapital_, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, in 1887,
Shaw reviewed it in three consecutive articles.[72] These articles of
Shaw's show that in 1887 his conversion by Wicksteed was complete. In
Shaw's article, _Stanley Jevons: His Letters and Journal_, a review
of the _Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons_, which appeared in
the _Pall Mall Gazette_, May 29th, 1886, he says: “He (Jevons) was
far too orthodox in his practical conclusions for those materialists
of the science--the revolutionary Socialists--who saw in him a mere
'bourgeois economist,' as their phrase goes. He does not seem to have
had any suspicion that Mr. Hyndman and his friends made any economic
pretensions at all; but it is remarkable that the most successful
attack so far on the value theory of Karl Marx has come from Mr. Philip
Wicksteed, a well-known Unitarian minister, who is an able follower of
Jevons in economics.” Shaw was now the complete Jevonian, had thrown
the Marxian theory completely over, and exactly located the step Marx
missed. Shaw himself readily admits that Marx came within one step of
the real solution. Whilst Marx left Shaw unconvinced as to Marxian
economics, he left him profoundly imbued with Marxian convictions. In
Marx, Shaw discerned one who “wrote of the nineteenth century as if it
were a cloud passing down the wind, changing its shape and fading as
it goes; whilst Ricardo the stockbroker and De Quincey the high Tory,
sat comfortably down before it in their office and study chairs as if
it were the Great Wall of China, safe to last until the Day of Judgment
with an occasional coat of whitewash.” While refusing to deify Marx as
a god, Shaw lauds him with what is, for him, the rarest of panegyrics.
“He (Marx) never condescends to cast a glance of useless longing at
the past: his cry to the present is always, 'Pass by: we are waiting
for the future.' Nor is the future at all mysterious, uncertain, or
dreadful to him. There is not a word of hope or fear, nor appeal to
chance or providence, nor vain remonstrance with Nature, nor optimism,
nor enthusiasm, nor pessimism, nor cynicism, nor any other familiar
sign of the giddiness which seizes men when they climb to heights
which command a view of the past, present and future of human society.
Marx keeps his head like a god. He has discovered the law of social
development, and knows what must come. The thread of history is in his
hand.”
The point to be grasped, however, is contained in Shaw's admonition:
“Read Jevons and the rest for your economics, and read Marx for the
history of their working in the past, and the conditions of their
application in the present. And never mind the metaphysics.” Shaw stood
upon the shoulders of giants, for Jevons had laid the foundations, and
Wicksteed it was who first pointed out to English Socialists the flaw
in Marx's analysis of wares.[73] But in that remarkably succinct and
lucid style for which he is justly famous, Shaw elaborately analyzed
the questionable points in the Marxian structure and explained the
latent errors involved, for the comprehension, not simply of the
economist, but of the man-in-the-street. It is neither possible, nor
even desirable, here to give the steps by which Shaw controverted
Marx; reference to Shaw's numerous articles on the subject will give
these to the curious. But the conclusions he reached are worthy of
enumeration.[74] In the first place, Shaw objected to Marx's dogmatic
assertion of the generally accepted Ricardian theory that “wares in
which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced
in the same time, have the same value”; and for the simple reason that
the Jevonian theory called this dogma into question. In the second
place, following Wicksteed, Shaw takes Marx to task for first insisting
that the abstract labour used in the production of wares does not
count unless it is useful, and then contradicting himself by stripping
the wares of the abstract utility conferred upon them by abstractly
useful work. The logical consequence of admitting abstract utility as a
quality of wares produced by abstract human labour is conclusively to
disconnect value from mere abstract human labour. Marx thus adroitly
begs the question: as Shaw says: “It is as if he (Marx) had proved by
an elaborate series of abstractions that liquids were fatal to human
life, and had finished by remarking: 'Of course, the liquids must be
poisonous.'” Armed with the fact of abstract utility, and the Jevonian
weapons of “the law of indifference” and “the law of the variation
of utility,” Shaw was enabled to prove with mathematical rigour that
value does not represent the specific utility of the article, but
its abstract utility; and not its total abstract utility, but its
final abstract utility--at the “margin of supply,” in Wicksteed's
phrase--_i.e._, the utility of the final increment that is worth
producing. Translated into terms of labour, this means that the value
of the ware represents, not the quantity of human labour embodied in
it, but the “final utility,” in Jevonian phrase, of the abstract human
labour socially necessary to produce it. As Shaw puts it: “Instead of
wares being equal in value because equal quantities of labour have been
expended on them, equal quantities of labour will have been expended on
them because they are of equal value (or equally desirable), which is
quite another thing. That slip in the analysis of wares whereby Marx
was led to believe that he had got rid of the abstract utility when
he had really only got rid of the specific utility, was the first of
his mistakes.” Under certain ideal conditions, there is a coincidence
between “exchange value” and “amount of labour contained”; but as these
ideal conditions seldom, if ever, occur in practice, no scientific
validity attaches to the Marxian statement that “commodities in which
equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in
the same time, have the same value.” Lastly, Shaw insists that if
Marx's theory of value were correct, it would refute, not confirm,
Marx's theory of “surplus value.” The proprietor's monopoly completely
upsets those ideal conditions on which Marx's theory of value is
based. It can be demonstrated by Jevonian principles that Marx's
assumption, that the subsistence wage is the value of the labour force,
is untenable, even on Marxian principles. Marx did not see that it is
impossible, according to the “law of indifference,” for one part of the
stock of a commodity available at any given time to have value whilst
another part has none, since no man will give a price for that which
he can obtain for nothing. Moreover, when he attempts to differentiate
labour power from steam power, Marx's logic breaks down. As Shaw says:
“Marx's whole theory of the origin of surplus value depends on the
accuracy of his demonstration that steam power, machinery, etc., cannot
possibly produce surplus value. If Marx were right then a capital of
ten thousand pounds, invested in a business requiring nine thousand
pounds for machinery and plant, and one thousand pounds for wages (or
human labour power), would only return one-ninth of the surplus value
returned by an equal capital of which one thousand pounds was in the
form of plant and nine thousand pounds in wage capital. As a matter of
fact, the 'surplus value' from both is found to be equal.”[75]
[Illustration: =A Study of Six Socialists.=]
From a drawing by H. G. Wells, here reproduced by his permission.
Shaw saw plainly enough that the theory of value did not matter in the
least so far as the soundness of Socialism was concerned. For, as he
once expressed it in a letter to me, “if you steal a turnip the theory
of the turnip's value does not affect the social and political aspect
of the transaction.” But, of course, Hyndman and the few Socialists who
had read Marx and nothing else, were furious over Shaw's iconoclastic
articles in the _National Reformer_. In view of the fact that the
opponents of Socialism continually damaged the cause of the Socialists
by alleging that the Socialists' economic basis was Marx's theory
and was untenable, with the result that the Socialists persisted in
accepting the allegation and defending Marx, Shaw resolutely forced the
quarrel into publicity as far as he could. His prime object was to make
it clear that the Fabians were quite independent of the Marxian value
theory. A heated controversy on the subject in the _Pall Mall Gazette_
of May, 1887, engaged in by Shaw, Hyndman, and Mrs. Besant, did not
down the ghost of the value theory; for the controversy was reopened in
_To-Day_ two years later. _An Economic Eirenicon_, by Graham Wallas,
was followed by _Marx's Theory of Value_, contributed by H. M. Hyndman,
in which, it seems, he merely repeated the old Marxian demonstration
without making any attempt to meet the Jevonian attack. Whereupon Shaw
“went for” Hyndman in his most aggravating style in an article entitled
_Bluffing the Value Theory_, which finished the campaign except for a
series of letters in _Justice_ by various hands, the tenth of which,
in July, 1889, was written by Shaw. There were other letters by Shaw
on the same subject, written at different times, which appeared in the
_Daily Chronicle_. William Morris never made any pretence of having
followed the controversy on its abstract technical side; and perhaps
the most amusing feature of the entire campaign was a sort of manifesto
which Belfort Bax induced Morris to sign, in which Hyndman, Bax,
Aveling and Morris declared that all good Socialists were Marxites!
Shaw was once denounced in public meeting by a Marxian Socialist for
pooh-poohing Marx as an idiot. His own position, as he himself once
remarked to me, lay somewhere between this and that of worshipping Marx
as a god. In one of the most remarkable essays ever written by Shaw,
entitled _The Illusions of Socialism_, Shaw pointed out why it was that
a difficult and subtle theory like that of Jevons could never be as
acceptable as a crude and simple labour theory like that of Marx, which
seemed to imply that wealth rightly belonged to the labourer.[76]
From the standpoint of the Marxian religionist, the second heresy
of which Shaw is guilty consists in his recognition of the Class
War doctrine as a delusion and a suicidal political policy. To
Shaw, the form of organization deduced from the Class War doctrine
is always the same. “All you have to do is to form a working-class
association, declare war on property, explain the economic situation
from the platform and at the street corner, and wait until the entire
proletariat (made 'class-conscious' by your lucid lectures) joins
you. This being done simultaneously in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid,
Rome, Vienna, etc., etc., nothing remains but a simultaneous movement
of the proletarians of all countries, and the sweeping of capitalism
into the sea because 'ye are many: they are few.' What can be easier
or more scientific?” But a study of the history of Socialism led
Shaw to the discovery that the Class War theory had gone to pieces
every time it had been invoked. Lassalle attempted to organize the
imaginary class-conscious proletariat, only to be disillusioned before
the end of the first year by the “damned wantlessness” of the real
proletariat. Owen before him likewise had failed, after apparently
converting all Trade-Unionism to his New Moral World. When Marx
planned the Socialist side of “The International” in the sixties,
he showed his contempt for the trade-union side, with the result:
“On the trade-union side a great success.... On the Socialist side,
futility and disastrous failure, culminating, in 1871, in one of the
most appalling massacres known to history.” Marx can scarcely be said
to have tried to organize the class-conscious proletariat; but the
moment his useless vituperation of Thiers, “brilliant as a sample of
literary invective, but useless for the buttering of parsnips,” made
known to English workmen his real opinion of bourgeois civilization,
they abandoned him in horror and left the International memberless.
In Germany, “Liebknecht made no serious headway until he became a
parliamentarian, playing the parliamentary game more pliably than
Parnell did, though always 'old-soldiering' his way with the greenhorns
by prefacing each compromise with the declaration that Social Democracy
never compromised.” In France, Jaurès and Millerand have not so much
abandoned the Class War doctrine as wholly neglected and ignored it,
thus reducing the old Guèsdist Marxism to absurdity. In England, “the
once revolutionary Social-Democratic Federation has been forced by
the competition of the quite constitutional Independent Labour Party
to give up all its ancient Maccabean poetry, and, after a period of
uselessness and surpassing unpopularity as an anti-Fabian Society with
a speciality for abusing Mr. John Burns, to settle down into a sort of
Ultra-Independent Labour Party, ready to amalgamate with its rival if
only an agreement can be arrived at as to which is to be considered as
swallowing the other.”
Not merely a study of the Class War doctrine from the historical
standpoint, but also an examination into the assumptions upon which it
rests, have thoroughly convinced Shaw that Socialists have for long
been making overdrafts upon their _Capital_. Shaw has never sought
to shirk the real point at issue by the quibble of substituting the
sort of class-consciousness called snobbery, mighty as is that social
force, for the economic class-consciousness of the German formula. In
Shaw's interpretation, Hyndman and the Marxists use the term “Class
War” to denote a war between all the proletarians on one side and all
the property-holders on the other--in Schaeffle's phrase “a definite
confrontation of classes”--which will be produced when the workers
become conscious that their economic interests are opposed to those of
the property-holders. Shaw's position is effectively summed up in his
words:
“The people understand their own affairs much better than Marx
did, and the simple stratification of society into two classes
... has as little relation to actual social facts as Marx's
value theory has to actual market prices. If the crude Marxian
melodrama of 'The Class War; or, the Virtuous Worker and the
Brutal Capitalist,' were even approximately true to life, the
whole capitalist structure would have tumbled to pieces long
ago, as the 'scientific Socialists' were always expecting it
to do, instead of consolidating itself on a scale which has
already made Marx and Engels as obsolete as the Gracchi had
become in the time of Augustus. By throwing up fabulous masses
of 'surplus value,' and doubling and trebling the incomes of
the well-to-do middle classes, who all imitate the imperial
luxury and extravagance of the millionaires, Capitalism
has created, as it formerly did in Rome, an irresistible
proletarian bodyguard of labourers whose immediate interests
are bound up with those of the capitalists, and who are, like
their Roman prototypes, more rapacious, more rancorous in their
Primrose partisanship, and more hardened against all the larger
social considerations, than their masters, simply because they
are more needy, ignorant and irresponsible. Touch the income of
the rich, and the Conservative proletarians are the first to
suffer.”[77]
In Shaw's opinion, the social struggle does not follow class lines at
all, because the people who really hate the capitalist system are,
like Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy, Hyndman, Marx and Lassalle, themselves
capitalists, whereas the fiercest defenders of it are the masses of
labourers, artisans, and employees whose trade is at its best when the
rich have most money to spend. Socialists like Shaw, who “do not accept
the class war,” are simply expressing “first, a very natural impatience
of crying 'War, War!' where there is no war; and, second, their despair
at seeing Socialism, like Liberalism, perishing because it is trying
to live on the crop of home-made generalizations so plentifully put
forth during the great Liberal boom of 1832-80 by middle-class paper
theorists like Malthus, Cobden, Marx, Comte and Herbert Spencer--fine
fellows, all of them, but stupendously ignorant of the industrial
world.” The basic divergence between the Fabian and the “S. D. F.”
policy is epitomized in Shaw's words: “There is a conflict of interests
between those who pay wages and those who receive them; and this is
organized by the trade unions. There is another conflict of interests
between those workers and proprietors whose customers live on rent (in
its widest economic sense), and those whose customers live on wages;
but the lines of this conflict run, not between the classes, but right
through them, and do not coincide with the lines of the trade union
conflict. And any form of Socialist organization, or any tactics
toward the trade union movement, based on the theory that the lines
of battle _do_ run between the classes and not through them, or _do_
coincide with the trade union lines of battle, will prove, and always
has proved, disastrously impracticable.” Shaw exasperatingly said in
a recent article[78] that he refused to agree with anybody on any
subject whatsoever. “Let them agree with me if my arguments convince
them. If not, let them plank down their own views. I will not have my
mouth stopped and my mind stifled.” And those mystic forces--historical
development and Progress with a large P--in which the Marxists
rest their firmest hope, Shaw regards in the spirit of Ingoldsby's
sacristan:
“The sacristan he said no word to indicate a doubt;
But he put his thumb unto his nose, and he spread his fingers out.”
There are two factors which strongly militate against the progress of
Socialism; the resolute adherence of Socialists to those theories and
policies of Marx which time, experience, and modern economic science
have combined to discredit; and the tendency of the popular mind to
confuse Socialism with Anarchism.[79] Shaw's most important negative
and destructive achievements consist in those amazingly clever and
interesting papers in which he attempts to expose Marx's theory of
value as an exploded fallacy, to show that the Class War will never
come, and to demonstrate the impossibilities of Anarchism. In the
_technical_ sense of Socialist economics, Shaw occupies the opposite
pole to Individualism and Anarchism. And yet in a very definite and
general sense, Shaw is a thorough-paced individualist and anarchist.
If individualist means a believer in the Shakespearean injunction “To
thine own self be true!”, in the Ibsenic doctrine “Live thine own
life!”, then Shaw is an individualist heart and soul. If anarchist
means an enemy of convention, of tradition, of current modes of
administering justice, of prevailing moral standards, then Shaw is
the most revolutionary anarchist now at large. If, on the other hand,
Individualist means one who distrusts State action and is jealous
of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one
and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, then Shaw is
most certainly not an Individualist. If Anarchist means dynamitard,
incendiary, assassin, thief; champion of the _absolute_ liberty of
the individual and the removal of all governmental restraint; or even
a believer, as Communist, in a profound and universal sense of high
moral responsibility present in all humanity, then Shaw is a living
contradiction of Anarchism.
Shaw opposes Individualist Anarchism since, under such a social
arrangement, the prime economic goal of Socialism: the just
distribution of the premiums given to certain portions of the
general product by the action of demand, would never be attained.
As this system not only fails to distribute these premiums justly,
but deliberately permits their private appropriation, Individualist
Anarchism is, in Shaw's view, “the negation of Socialism, and is, in
fact, Unsocialism carried as near to its logical completeness as any
sane man dare carry it.” The Communist Anarchism of Kropotkin, Shaw
also opposes because of his own lack of faith in humanity at large, in
the present state of development of the social conscience. If bread
were communized, the common bread store obviously would become bankrupt
unless every consumer of the bread contributed to its support as much
labour as the bread he consumed cost to produce. Were the consumer
to refuse thus to contribute, there would be two ways to compel him:
physical force and the moral force of public opinion. If physical force
is resorted to, then the Anarchist ideal remains unattained. If moral
force, what will be the event? The answer reveals Shaw as a confirmed
sceptic in regard to the value of public opinion as a moral agent.
“It is useless,” he avers, “to think of man as a fallen angel. If the
fallacies of absolute morality are to be admitted into the discussion
at all, he must be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil
who is being slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize
that in disregarding his neighbours' happiness, he is taking the surest
way to sacrifice his own.” Under Anarchistic Communism, public opinion
would no doubt operate as powerfully as now. But, in Shaw's opinion,
public opinion cannot for a moment be relied upon as a force which
operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men to act morally. Keen,
incisive, pitiless, his words descriptive of _public opinion_ show how
little he is tinged with the poetry, the passion, and the religion
which are the very life blood of Socialism.
“Its operation is for all practical purposes quite arbitrary,
and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile to the
reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and worships
Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall hat and going
to church, on his marrying the woman he lives with, and on his
pretending to believe whatever the rest pretend to believe....
But there is no sincere public opinion that a man should work
for his daily bread if he can get it for nothing. Indeed, it
is just the other way; public opinion has been educated to
regard the performance of daily manual labour as the lot of
the despised classes. The common aspiration is to acquire
property and leave off working. Even members of the professions
rank below the independent gentry, so-called because they are
independent of their own labour. These prejudices are not
confined to the middle and upper classes: they are rampant
also among the workers.... One is almost tempted in this
country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the
snob, until you get down to those who are so oppressed that
they have not enough self-respect even for snobbery, and thus
are able to pluck out of the heart of their misery a certain
irresponsibility which it would be a mockery to describe as
genuine frankness and freedom. The moment you rise into the
higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy,
ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty
titles, precedence and dignities, and all the detestable fruits
of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly among those who
lose as among those who gain by it. In fact, the notion that
poverty favours virtue was clearly invented to persuade the
poor that what they lost in this world they would gain in the
next.”[80]
When Shaw attended the International Socialist Congresses in Zurich
and in London, he reported them in the _Star_ as unsparingly as he
would have reported a sitting of Parliament. The Socialists, amazed
and indignant at their first taste of real criticism, concluded that
Shaw was going over to the enemy. This Fabian policy of unsparing
criticism, inaugurated and carried out ruthlessly by Shaw, ended
in freeing the Fabians, in great measure, from the illusions of
Socialism, and in imparting to their Society its rigidly constitutional
character. An incident, which Mr. Shaw once described in a letter
to me, gives one some insight into the causes of his reaction
against the German Socialists' policy of playing to the galleries by
spouting revolutionary rant and hinting catastrophically of impending
revolutions.
“At the Zurich Congress I first became acquainted with the
leaders of the movement on the Continent. Chief among them was
the German leader Liebknecht, a '48 veteran who, having become
completely parliamentarized, still thought it necessary to
dupe his younger followers with the rhetoric of the barricade.
After a division in which an attempt to secure unanimity by
the primitive method of presenting the resolution before the
Congress to the delegates of the different nations in their
various languages in several versions adapted to their views,
so that whilst they believed they were all saying 'Yes' to the
same proposition, the wording was really very different in the
different translations, and sometimes highly contradictory,
it turned out that the stupidity of the English section had
baffled the cleverness of the German-Swiss bureau, because
the English voted 'No' when they meant 'Yes,' and upset the
apple-cart. Happening to be close to Liebknecht on the platform
at the luncheon adjournment, I said a few words to him in
explanation of the apparently senseless action of the English.
He looked wearily round at me; saw a comparatively young
Socialist whom he did not know; and immediately treated me to a
long assurance that the German Social Democrats did not shrink
from a conflict with the police on Labour Day (the 1st of May);
that they were as ready as ever, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
I turned away as soon and as shortly as I could without being
rude; and from that time I discounted the German leaders as
being forty years out of date, and totally negligible except
as very ordinary republican Radicals with a Socialist formula
which was simply a convenient excuse for doing nothing new.
“When the German leaders visited London in the eighties they
treated the Fabian Society as a foolish joke. Later on they
found their error; and Liebknecht was entertained at a great
Fabian meeting; but to this day the German Socialist press does
not dare to publish the very articles it asks me to write,
because of my ruthless criticism of Bebel, Singer, and the old
tradition of the 'old gang' generally. My heresy as to Marx is,
of course, another horror to the Germans who got their ideas of
political economy in the '48-'71 period.”
After 1875, let us recall, the old pressure and discontent of the
eighteen-thirties descended upon England with renewed force. In 1881,
“as if Chartism and Fergus O'Connor had risen from the dead,” the
Democratic Federation, with H. M. Hyndman at its head, inaugurated the
revival of Socialist organization in England. Like those other haters
of the capitalist system--the capitalists Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy,
Marx and Lassalle--Hyndman “had had his turn at the tall hat and was
tired of it.” Shortly after the formation of the Democratic Federation,
the Fabian Society, a revolting sect from the Fellowship of the New
Life, founded by Professor Thomas Davidson, came into being. Hyndman
and his Marxists, Kropotkin and his Anarchists, did not realize, with
Shaw, that the proletariat, instead of being the revolutionary, is in
reality the conservative element of society. They refused to accept
this situation, not realizing that they were confronted by a condition,
not a theory. “They persisted in believing that the proletariat was an
irresistible mass of Felix Pyats and Ouidas.” On the point of joining
the Democratic Federation, Shaw decided to join the Fabian Society
instead. He did accept the situation, helped, perhaps, as he once said,
by his inherited instinct for anti-climax. “I threw Hyndman over,
and got to work with Sidney Webb and the rest to place Socialism on a
respectable _bourgeois_ footing; hence Fabianism. Burns did the same
thing in Battersea by organizing the working classes there on a genuine
self-respecting working-class basis, instead of on the old romantic
middle-class assumptions. Hyndman wasted years in vain denunciation of
the Fabian Society and of Burns; and though facts became too strong for
him at last, he is still at heart the revolted bourgeois.” Prior to
the year 1886, there had been no formal crystallization of the Fabian
Society into a strictly economic association, avowedly opportunist in
its political policy; after September 17th of that year the thin edge
of the wedge went in. The Manifesto of the Fabian Parliamentary League
contains the nucleus of the Fabian policy of to-day.[81] The Fabian
Society was a dead letter until Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas joined
it; from that moment, it became a force to be reckoned with in English
life. Almost from the very first, as Mr. Sidney Webb once wrote me,
the Society took the colour of Shaw's mordantly critical temperament,
and bore the stamp of his personality. The promise of the Fabians lay
in their open-mindedness, their diligence in the study of advanced
economics, and their resolute refusal of adherence to any formula,
however dear to Socialist enthusiasts, which did not commend itself
unreservedly to their intelligence. By 1885, it had only forty members;
and in 1886, it was still unable to bring its roll of members to a
hundred names. In 1900, it boasted a membership of eight hundred, and
at present about twenty-six hundred names are found upon its rolls.[82]
It is neither possible nor advisable for me to record the history of
the Fabian Society--that may be found in the numerous publications of
the Society. But I cannot refrain from stating that the membership
increased by forty-three per cent, in the year 1906-7, that this was
a year of unprecedented activity; and that the Society has recently
been greatly strengthened by the accession of many well-known men in
English public life. There were then _eight_ Fabians in the London
County Council; and in Parliament, Labour and Socialism have in the
last five years been better represented, I believe, than ever before
in the history of that body. I have recently talked at length with
many of the ablest Socialists in England. The remarkable growth of the
Fabian Society and the Socialist representation in English literature,
I was told again and again, is not due to any sudden and untrustworthy
inflation of Socialist values, but is largely due to the fact that
Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland, and their coterie have been
planting the seeds for twenty years. Such ideas as are embodied in Mr.
Lloyd George's budget and the Old Age Pension Bill are unmistakable
marks of that gradual Socialist leavening of English political
thought upon which the Fabians have been engaged ever since 1884.
“The recent steady influx into the Fabian Society,” Mr. Bland said to
me energetically, “is a clear proof to my mind that the ideas which
have been lurking in the air for a long, long time are at last taking
definite shape simultaneously in the minds of a great many people. Such
men as Bernard Shaw have brought this thing to pass.”[83]
During the years from 1887 to 1889, the years we are especially
concerned with at present, compensation for its paucity of numbers was
found not only in the intellectual capacity, but also in the economic
inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness of the leaders in the Fabian
Society. This is best revealed in Shaw's sketch of this period:
“By far our most important work at this period was our renewal
of that historic and economic equipment of Social-Democracy of
which Ferdinand Lassalle boasted, and which has been getting
rustier and more obsolete ever since his time and that of his
contemporary, Karl Marx.... In 1885 we used to prate about
Marx's theory of value and Lassalle's Iron Law of Wages as if
it were still 1870. In spite of Henry George, no Socialist
seemed to have any working knowledge of the theory of economic
rent: its application to skilled labour was so unheard of that
the expression 'rent of ability' was received with laughter
when the Fabians first introduced it into their lectures and
discussions; and as for the modern theory of value, it was
scouted as a blasphemy against Marx.... As to history, we
had a convenient stock of imposing generalizations about the
evolution from slavery to serfdom and from serfdom to free wage
labour. We drew our pictures of society with one broad line
dividing the _bourgeoisie_ from the proletariat, and declared
that there were only two classes really in the country. We
gave lightning sketches of the development of the mediæval
craftsman into the manufacturer and finally into the factory
hand. We denounced Malthusianism quite as crudely as the
Malthusians advocated it, which is saying a great deal; and we
raged against emigration, national insurance, co-operation,
trade-unionism, old-fashioned Radicalism, and everything
else that was not Socialism; and that, too, without knowing
at all clearly what we meant by Socialism. The mischief was,
not that our generalizations were unsound, but that we had no
detailed knowledge of the content of them: we had borrowed
them ready-made as articles of faith; and when opponents like
Charles Bradlaugh asked us for details we sneered at the demand
without being in the least able to comply with it. The real
reason why Anarchist and Socialist worked then shoulder to
shoulder as comrades and brothers was that neither one nor the
other had any definite idea of what he wanted, or how it was
to be got. All this is true to this day of the raw recruits
of the movement, and of some older hands who may be absolved
on the ground of invincible ignorance; but it is no longer
true of the leaders of the movement in general. In 1887 even
the British Association burst out laughing as one man when an
elderly representative of Philosophic Radicalism, with the
air of one who was uttering the safest of platitudes, accused
us of ignorance of political economy; and now not even a
Philosophical Radical is to be found to make himself ridiculous
in this way. The exemplary eye-opening of Mr. Leonard Courtney
by Mr. Sidney Webb lately in the leading English economic
review surprised nobody, except perhaps Mr. Courtney himself.
The cotton lords of the north would never dream to-day of
engaging an economist to confute us with learned pamphlets as
their predecessors engaged Nassau Senior in the days of the Ten
Hours' Bill, because they know that we should be only too glad
to advertise our Eight Hours' Bill by flattening out any such
champion. From 1887 to 1889 we were the recognized bullies and
swashbucklers of advanced economics.”[84]
Not without reason have the Fabians been called the Jesuits of the
Socialist evangel in England. The “waiting” of the Fabian motto is
synonymous, not with inaction, but with unflagging energy.[85] The
Fabians eschewed pleasures and recreations of every kind in favour of
public speaking and public instruction; their policy has always been
one of education and permeation. In the year ending April, 1889, to
take a single example, the number of lectures delivered by members of
the Fabian Society alone was upwards of seven hundred. In addition
to writing or editing many publications of the Fabian Society, Shaw
has delivered, in the last twenty-odd years, considerably more
than a thousand public lectures and addresses. Until the close of
1889, the Fabians had confined their propagandist campaign to three
directions: publication of manifestos and pamphlets; delivery of public
addresses and holding of conferences, and exciting efforts towards
the permeation of the Liberal party. In December, 1889, the Fabian
Society published the well-known book, _Fabian Essays in Socialism_,
edited by Shaw, and containing, in addition to two essays of his own,
essays by Sidney Olivier, William Clarke, Hubert Bland, Sidney Webb,
Annie Besant and Graham Wallas.[86] The authors, constituting the
Executive Council of the Fabian Society, made no claim to be more than
communicative learners: the book was the outcome of their realization
of the lack of anything like authoritative, and at the same time
popular, presentations of the political, economic, and moral aspects of
contemporary Socialism.
[Illustration: =Facsimile of Cover Design of Fabian Essays (1890).=]
In general, it may be said that the Fabians, while strenuously avowing
themselves strict evolutionists, are in reality highly revolutionary.
The boast of the Fabian Society is freedom from the illusions and
millennial aspirations of the great mass of Socialists. It is a society
of irreverence and scientific iconoclasm, bowing to the fetishism
neither of George nor of Marx. Towards Marx and Lassalle, some of
whose views must now be discarded as erroneous or obsolete, the
Fabian Society insists on the necessity of maintaining as critical an
attitude as these eminent Socialists themselves maintained towards
their predecessors St. Simon and Robert Owen. In origin anarchistic
and revolutionary as could be desired, in spirit the Fabians remain
anarchistic and revolutionary. In principle avowedly orderly and
constitutional, in policy frankly opportunist, in practice strictly
scientific and economic, the Fabians may be called the realists of the
Socialist movement. They have ruthlessly snatched the masks from the
faces of the Utopian dreamers and romancers.[87] While the rank and
file of the “S. D. F.” have been the very good friends of the Fabians,
the radical differences in their respective policies have precluded all
possibility of amalgamation. As succinctly stated by Shaw: “The Fabian
Society is a society for helping to bring about the socialization
of the industrial resources of the country. The Social-Democratic
Federation is a society for enlisting the whole proletariat of
the country in its own ranks and itself socializing the national
industry.” The policy of the one is fundamentally opportunist; of the
other, implacably sectarian. The Federation counts no man a Socialist
until he has joined it, and supports no man who is not a member; the
Fabians advise concentration of strength to elect that candidate, be
he Socialist or not, who gives the greatest promise of advancing,
in greater or less degree, the general cause of Socialism. The
Federation persistently claims to be the only genuine representative
of working-class interests in England; the Fabians have never advanced
the smallest pretensions in that direction. Its policy finds ample
justification in the recent history of Continental Socialism. The
tactics of the German Socialist Party, in the last few years, have been
“Fabianized” by sheer force of circumstances; to-day, this party is, in
great measure, both opportunist and constitutional, the two essential
features of Fabian policy. Sharpened in wit by rigorous persecution,
Liebknecht and his successor Bebel have learned the art of politics
through experience and exigency. In contemporary France is witnessed
the signal triumph of Fabian Socialism. The policy of Jaurès, although
under the frown of the “International,” will be continued in France;
and Guèsde, despite his barren victory at the International Socialist
Congress at Amsterdam in 1904, will remain only _vox clamantis in
deserto_. The history of the Fabian Society, which is the history of
Shaw, in the last twenty years, bears evidence that the Fabians have
stood in the very forefront of the battle for collectivist measures,
municipal reforms, civic virtue and social progress. As Shaw wrote in
1900:
“In 1885 we agreed to give up the delightful ease of
revolutionary heroics and take to the hard work of practical
reform on ordinary parliamentary lines. In 1889 we published
'Fabian Essays' without a word in them about the value
theory of Marx. In 1893 we made the first real attack
made by Socialists on Liberalism, on which occasion the
Social-Democratic Federation promptly joined in the Liberal
outcry against us. In 1896 we affirmed that the object of
Socialism was not to destroy private enterprise, but only
to make the livelihood of the people independent of it by
socializing the common industries of life, and driving private
enterprise into its proper sphere of art, invention and new
departures. This year we have led the way in getting rid
of the traditional association of our movement with that
romantic nationalism which is to the Pole and the Irishman
what Jingoism is to the Englishman.... In short, the whole
history of Socialism during the past fifteen years in England,
France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and America, has been
its disentanglement from the Liberal tradition stamped on
Marx, Engels and Liebknecht in 1848, and its emergence in
a characteristic and original form of its own, modified by
national character, and, in England, calling itself Fabianism
when it is self-conscious enough to call itself anything at
all.”[88]
Strangely enough, in view of all the facts, it is customary to regard
Shaw as a purely destructive and negative spirit. The truth is that
Shaw stands for certain definite beliefs, certain undoubted principles.
His is the belief of the unbeliever, the principle of the unprincipled,
the faith of the sceptic.
Not less important than his destructive achievements has been his
constructive work in practical affairs as Vestryman and Borough
Councillor. Prior to 1895, roughly speaking, the vestries were
ignorantly boasted of as the truest products of a representative
democratic government. “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Shaw once
remarked to me, “is that the vestry, as it was actually elected in
those days--a few people getting together when nobody knew of it and
at some place of which the public was not notified, and electing
themselves members--could scarcely be called a representative
democratic body. We Socialists finally began to realize that the way
to get at the vestry was to put a programme into their hands. So we
sent them all a pamphlet, requesting replies--a pamphlet entitled,
'Questions for Vestrymen,' or something of the sort. The vestrymen were
thus forced to the wall and driven to decide upon issues. They actually
began to make up their minds on many subjects of which hitherto they
had had no conception. Slowly the vestries, under this discipline,
began to take on a truly representative character. The _personnel_ of
the vestry was now permanently altered for the better. Men were elected
who not only took an interest in municipal affairs, but likewise were
willing to do any amount of hard work. I was 'co-opted'--_i.e._, chosen
by the committee, by agreement with the opposite party, obviously
beaten if a vote were taken. So that I was fortunate enough to escape
the terrors of a popular election.”
It is quite beyond the scope of this book to enter into the details of
Shaw's work as Vestryman, afterwards Borough Councillor. Suffice it to
say, that he was chosen in 1897, entered at once upon the performance
of his duties, and prosecuted them for several terms with great zeal
and tireless energy. His various letters to the Press during that
period, and occasional reminiscences, show that he was always outspoken
and vehement in behalf of all reforms which tended to the betterment of
the poorer classes, equalization of public privileges of men and women,
better sanitary conditions, and the municipalization of such industries
as promise to give the people at large better service and greater value
for their money than privately operated concerns. The most tangible
result of his work as Vestryman and Borough Councillor is his book,
_Municipal Trading_, which he once told me he regarded as one of the
best and most useful things he had ever done.[89]
At the expiration of his career as Borough Councillor, he stood as
the candidate for the Borough of St. Pancras in the London County
Council--the seat afterwards occupied by the well-known actor, Mr.
George Alexander. “I was beaten,” Mr. Shaw recently told me, “because I
alienated the Nonconformist element by favouring the improvement of the
Church schools. I was convinced that such improvement would lead to the
betterment of the education of the children. The Nonconformists were
enraged beyond measure by the proposal, looking with the utmost horror
upon any measure which tended to strengthen the Church. I remember
one rabid Nonconformist coming to me one day, almost foaming at the
mouth, and protesting with violent indignation that he would not pay a
single cent towards the maintenance of the schools of the Established
Church. 'Why, my dear fellow,' I replied, 'don't you know that you pay
taxes now for the support of the Roman Catholic Church in the Island of
Malta?' Although this staggered the irate Nonconformist for the moment,
it did not reconcile his element to the extension of the principle to
London. My contention was that under the conditions prevailing at the
time, the children were poorly taught and poorly housed, the schools
badly ventilated, and the conditions generally unsatisfactory. 'Improve
all the conditions,' I said; 'appoint your own inspectors, and in the
course of time you will control the situation. Pay the piper and you
can call the tune.' But I could not override the tremendous prejudice
against the Church, and I was badly beaten.” One of Shaw's intimate
friends told me not long ago that what lost the seat in the L. C. C.
for Shaw was his intrepid assertion, repeated throughout the campaign,
that he and Voltaire were the only two truly religious people who had
ever lived! Shaw's own account of this, when I taxed him with it,
was that he had often pointed out that the religious opinions of the
Free Churches (the Nonconformist sects) in England to-day were exactly
those of Voltaire, and that what I had been told was quite as near his
meaning as most people contrived to get without reading him. And only
the other day a well-known politician and a friend of Shaw's made the
remark to me that Shaw was an “impossible political candidate,” too
rash and individualistic in his assertions to avoid alienating many
people--even some of the very men who under ordinary circumstances
might confidently be relied upon to support a progressive and energetic
reformer.
And yet it is noteworthy that as far back as the year 1889 Shaw was
asked to stand as a Member of Parliament. Below is given the text
of a letter, from Shaw, at 29, Fitzroy Square, W., London, dated
March 23rd, 1889, to Mr. W. Sanders, then Secretary of the Election
Committee of the Battersea branch of the S. D. F., now a prominent
Fabian and recently member of the London County Council. This letter,
a copy of which was most kindly given me by Mr. Sanders, was sent in
reply to a letter from him to Mr. Shaw asking him to allow his name
to be put forward as a candidate for the parliamentary representation
of Battersea subsequent to a conference between the Battersea L. and
R. Association and the Battersea branch of the S. D. F. Mr. Shaw was
mistaken in addressing Mr. Sanders as the Secretary of the Election
Committee of the Battersea L. and R. Association.
“DEAR SIR,--
“I wish it were possible for me to thank the Battersea L.
and R. Association for their invitation, and accept it
without further words. But there is the old difficulty which
makes genuine democracy impossible at present--I mean the
money difficulty. For the last year I have had to neglect
my professional duties so much, and to be so outrageously
unpunctual and uncertain in the execution of work entrusted
to me by employers of literary labour, that my pecuniary
position is worse than it was; and I am at present almost
wholly dependent on critical work which requires my presence
during several evenings in the week at public performances.
Badly as I do this at present, I could not do it at all if
I had parliamentary duties to discharge; and as to getting
back any of the old work that could be done in the morning, I
rather think the action I should be bound to take in Parliament
would lead to closer and closer boycotting. As to the serious
literary work that is independent of editors and politics, I
have never succeeded in making it support me; and in any case
it is not compatible with energetic work in another direction
carried on simultaneously. You must excuse my troubling you
with these details; but the Association, consisting of men
who know what getting a living means, will understand the
importance of them. As a political worker outside Parliament I
can just manage to pay my way and so keep myself straight and
independent. But you know, and the Association will know, how
a man goes to pieces when he has to let his work go, and then
to run into debt, to borrow in order to get out of debt by
getting into it again, to beg in order to pay off the loans,
and finally either to sell himself or to give up, beaten.
“If the constituency wants a candidate, I see nothing for it
but paying him. If Battersea makes up its mind to that, it can
pick and choose among men many of whom are stronger than I. And
since it is well to get so much good value for the money as can
be had, I think poor constituencies (and all real democratic
constituencies are poor) will for some time be compelled to
kill two birds with one stone, and put the same man into both
County Council and Parliament. This, however, is a matter which
you are sure to know your own minds about, and it is not for me
to meddle in it.
“Some day, perhaps, I may be better able to take an extra duty;
for, after all, I am not a bad workman when I have time and
opportunity to show what I can do; and I need scarcely say that
if the literary employers find that there is money to be made
out of me, they will swallow my opinions fast enough,
“I am, dear Sir,
“Yours faithfully,
“G. BERNARD SHAW.
“Mr. W. Sanders.”
In many quarters, even among his Socialist _confrères_, Bernard Shaw
is regarded as primarily destructive in his proposals. And yet, at
different times and in various places, he has constructively outlined
his programme of complete Socialism. In essential agreement with such
Collectivists as Émile Vandervelde, Jean Jaurès and August Bebel,
Shaw differs from them only in regard to the successive mutations
in the process of Socialist evolution. The gradual extension of the
principle of the income tax--_e.g._, a “forcible transfer of rent,
interest, and even rent of ability from private holders to the State,
without compensation,” is the scheme of capitalistic expropriation the
Collectivists have in mind. By a gradual process of development, the
imposition of gradually increased taxes, the State will secure the
means for investment in industrial enterprises of all sorts. Instead of
forcibly extinguishing private enterprises, the State would extinguish
them by successfully competing against them. Thus, as Proudhon said,
competition would kill competition; in America, Mr. Gaylord Wilshire
never tires of exclaiming: “Let the Nation own the Trusts.” If, as
Shaw claims, the highest exceptional talent could be had, in the open
market, for eight hundred pounds, say, nearly half the existing wages
of ability and the entire profits of capital would be diverted from
the pockets of the able men and the present possessors of capital, and
would find its way into the pockets of the State. The vast sum thus
accruing to the State would swell the existing wages fund, and would
be employed in raising the wages of the entire community. After the
means of production have been Socialized, and the State has become the
employer, products or riches will be distributed roughly, “according to
the labour done by each man in the collective search for them.” In his
celebrated tilt with Shaw, Mr. W. H. Mallock attacked the validity of
the economics which furnish the substructure of _Fabian Essays_.[90]
Mr. Mallock's contention resolves itself into the assertion that
exceptional personal ability, and not labour, is the main factor in
the production of wealth. Far from repudiating this assertion, Shaw
embraced it, he said, in the spirit of Mrs. Prig: “Who deniges of it,
Betsy?” We support and encourage ability, Shaw contends, in order that
we may get as much as possible out of it, not in order that it may get
as much as possible out of us. Give men of ability and their heirs the
entire product of their ability, so that they shall be enormously rich
whilst the rest of us remain as poor as if they had never existed,
and “it will become a public duty to kill them, since nobody but
themselves will be any the worse, and we shall be much the better for
having no further daily provocation to the sin of envy.” Accordingly,
the business of Society is “to get the use of ability as cheaply as
it can for the benefit of the community, giving the able man just
enough advantage to keep his ability active and efficient. From the
Unsocialist point of view this is simply saying that it is the business
of Society to find out exactly how far it can rob the able man of the
product of his ability without injuring itself, which is precisely
true (from that point of view),” though whether it is a “reduction of
Socialism to dishonesty or of Unsocialism to absurdity” may be left
an open question. “If Mr. Mallock will take his grand total of the
earnings of Ability,” Shaw asserts, “and strike off from it, first,
all rent of land and interest on capital, then all normal profits,
then all non-competitive emoluments attached to a definite status in
the public service, civil or military, from royalty downwards, then
all payments for the advantages of secondary or technical education
and social opportunities, then all fancy payments made to artists and
other professional men by very rich commonplace people competing for
their services, and then all exceptional payments made to men whose
pre-eminence exists only in the imaginative ignorance of the public,
the remainder may with some plausibility stand as genuine rent of
ability.” And to Mr. Mallock's assertion that “men of ability will not
exert themselves to produce income when they know that the State is
an organized conspiracy to rob them of it,” Shaw characteristically
retorts, “Mr. Mallock might as well deny the existence of the Pyramids
on the general ground that men will not build pyramids when they know
that Pharaoh is at the head of an organized conspiracy to take away the
Pyramids from them as soon as they are made.”
Shaw holds the fundamentally sound view that “as to the entire
assimilation of Socialism by the world, the world has never yet
assimilated the whole of any ism, and never will.” In that most subtle
and distinguished of all his contributions to the Socialist literature
of our time, _The Illusions of Socialism_, Shaw has expressed his
firm conviction that it is not essential for the welfare of the world
to carry out Socialism in its entirety. Unfettered by the dogmas of
a political creed, unhampered by the bonds of a narrow partisanship,
Bernard Shaw stands forth as a great and free spirit in his prophetic
declaration that, long before it has penetrated to all corners of
the political and social organization, Socialism will have relieved
the pressure to which it owes its elasticity, and will recede before
the next great social movement, leaving everywhere intact the best
survivals of individualistic liberalism. And far from agreeing with
Ibsen in his impossibilist declaration that the State must go, Shaw not
only asserts that we must put up with the State, but also expresses no
doubt whatsoever that under Social-Democracy the few will still govern.
It is a mark of Shaw's British practicality and clear-sightedness that
he recognizes in the State a practical instrumentality for effecting
and directing social reform. The State is indispensable as a means
for making possible one great consummation: the development of the
strong, sound, creative personality. The unsocial man he regards as a
“hopelessly private person.” The opportunity for the free development
of the individual he regards as the fundamental prerequisite and
condition for the individual's social and material well-being.[91]
“That great joint-stock company of the future, the Social-Democratic
State, will have its chairman and directors as surely as its ships
will have captains.” But this admission involves no endorsement, on
Shaw's part, of the State as at present constituted, “Bakounine's
comprehensive aspiration to destroy all States and Established
Churches, with their religious, political, judicial, financial,
criminal, academic, economic and social laws and institutions, seems
to me perfectly justifiable and intelligible from the point of view
of the ordinary 'educated man,' who believes that institutions make
men instead of men making institutions.” The State, as at present
constituted, Shaw views as simply a huge machine for robbing and
slave-driving the poor by brute force. While he laughs at the
Individualism expressed in Herbert Spencer's _The Coming Slavery_, at
the Anarchy expressed in the word _Liberty_, and in those “silly words”
of John Hay on the title-page of Benjamin Tucker's paper, Shaw is,
nevertheless, both an individualist and an intellectual anarchist. The
alleged opposition between Socialism and Individualism, Shaw has always
strenuously maintained, is false and question-begging. “The true issue
lies between Socialism and Unsocialism, and not between Socialism and
that instinct in us that leads us to Socialism by its rebellion against
the squalid levelling down, the brutal repression, the regimenting and
drilling and conventionalizing of the great mass of us to-day, in order
that a lucky handful may bore themselves to death for want of anything
to do, and be afraid to walk down Bond Street without a regulation hat
and coat on.” Like Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkin, Shaw sees the whole
imposture through and through, “in spite of its familiarity, and of the
illusions created by its temporal power, its riches, its splendour, its
prestige, its intense respectability, its unremitting piety, and its
high moral pretension.”
At bottom, it was a deeply religious, a fundamentally humanitarian
motive, which drew Shaw into Socialism. The birth of the social passion
in his soul finds its origin in the individual desire to compass the
salvation of his fellow man. A burning sense of social injustice, a
great passion for social reform, directed his steps. In his inmost
being he felt his complicity in the social ills of the world. He
realized that only by personally seeking to effect the salvation of
society could he achieve the salvation of his own soul. The Will to
Socialism was thus grounded in a profound individualism: he felt their
organic connection. Socialism was the need of the age; and it could
only be achieved through the freedom and development of the individual.
That other wit and paradoxer, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, told the very
truth itself when he said that Bernard Shaw “has done something that
has never been done in the world before. He has become a revolutionist
without becoming a sentimentalist. He has revolted against the cant
of authority, and yet continued in despising the cant of revolt.” To
Shaw, the middle-class origin of the Socialist movement is in nothing
so apparent as in the persistent delusions of Socialists as to an
ideal proletariat, forced by the brutalities of the capitalist into
an unwilling acquiescence in war, penal codes, and other cruelties
of civilization. “They still see the social problem,” Shaw wittily
remarks, “not sanely and objectively, but imaginatively, as the plot of
a melodrama, with its villain and its heroine, its innocent beginning,
troubled middle, and happy ending. They are still the children and the
romancers of politics.”[92]
Shaw finds a sort of sly gratification in the reflection that the world
is becoming so familiar with the Socialist, that it no longer fears,
but only laughs at him. “I, the Socialist, am no longer a Red Spectre.
I am only a ridiculous fellow. Good: I embrace the change. It puts the
world with me.... All human progress involves, as its first condition,
the willingness of the pioneer to make a fool of himself. The sensible
man is the man who adapts himself to existing conditions. The fool is
the man who persists in trying to adapt the conditions to himself.
Both extremes have their disadvantages. I cling to my waning folly as
a corrective to my waxing good sense as anxiously as I once nursed my
good sense to defend myself against my folly.” Shaw is the very man
of whom his own Don Juan said: “He can only be enslaved whilst he is
spiritually weak enough to listen to reason.”
FOOTNOTES:
[66] Letter to Hamlin Garland, as Chairman of the Committee, the
_Progress and Poverty_ dinner, New York, January 24th, 1905. The
letter, dated December, 1904, was kindly lent me by Mr. Henry George,
Jr.
[67] In the early eighties the monthly magazine _To-Day_ was purchased
by three Socialists: Henry Hyde Champion, Percy Frost and James Leigh
Joynes. Mr. Wicksteed's article, entitled _Das Kapital: a Criticism_,
appeared in _To-Day_, New Series, Vol. II., pages 388-409, 1884;
publishers, The Modern Press, a printing business conducted by Messrs.
H. H. Champion and J. C. Foulger.
[68] This article appeared in _To-Day_, New Series, Vol. III., pages
22-26, 1885.
[69] The leading members of this club were Beeton, Wicksteed, Foxwell,
Graham Wallas, F. Y. Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall, Edward Cunningham,
Charles Wright and Armitage Smith. The club met monthly--from November
to June--during the years 1884 to 1889 inclusive, when it came to an
end through the formation of what was formally entitled _The Economic
Club_, organized mainly at the instance of Alfred Marshall. It may be
worthy of mention that Wicksteed dedicated his _Alphabet of Economics_
to this club. Shaw joined the club because he wanted to learn abstract
economics, and he occasionally contributed something to the programme
himself. On November 9th, 1886, for example, he read a paper before the
society on the subject of _Interest_.
[70] As late as 1905 Mr. E. Belfort Bax is found maintaining that
Jevons was the mere tool of capitalism, seeking to undermine the
Marxian theory of value in the interests of social order and political
stability. Compare his article, _Socialism and Bourgeois Culture_, in
_Wilshire's Magazine_, 1905.
[71] This Shaw achieved with great success in his review, in three
parts, of _Das Kapital_, English translation, which appeared in the
_National Reformer_.
[72] The _National Reformer_, now extinct, then the weekly organ of
the National Secular Society, editors, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie
Besant; policy, Atheism, Malthusianism and Republicanism. These
articles, three in number, under the general heading _Karl Marx and
'Das Kapital,'_ appeared in Vol. I., pages 84-86, 106-108, 117, 118. On
receiving a cheque for these articles at a rate which he felt sure the
_National Reformer_ could not afford, Shaw found that the beneficent
Mrs. Besant had made a contribution from her private purse, which Shaw
characteristically hurled back with indignant gratitude.
[73] These ideas seem to have found expression simultaneously in
England and Austria. Compare _The Theory of Political Economy_, by W.
S. Jevons, London, 1871; _Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre_, by
Anton Menger, Vienna, 1871.
[74] The question of the validity of the Marxian theory is not now a
live subject in England. Mr. Hyndman's defence of the Marxian position
is to be found in his _Economics of Socialism_, in which he attempts
to demonstrate the “final futility of final utility.” It is still a
mooted question on the Continent; compare, for example, the works of
Böhm-Bawerk, perhaps the most eminent of the “Austrian School” of
political economists.
[75] These conclusions were reached before the third volume of
_Capital_ appeared. The editor of the first volume, Mr. Frederick
Engels, promised that the third volume, when it appeared, would
reconcile these and other seeming contradictions. Marx does seem to
have modified certain of his theories in the third volume.
[76] In the _Pall Mall Gazette_ the following articles appeared: _Marx
and Modern Socialism_, by Shaw, May 7th, 1887, page 3; Hyndman's
reply, May 11th, page 11; Shaw's rejoinder--_Socialists at Home_
(this heading doubtless a jibe of the editor), May 12th, page 11;
Hyndman's rejoinder, May 16th, page 2; Mrs. Besant's article on the
same subject, May 24th, page 2. In _To-Day_, Vol. XI., New Series,
1889, appeared: _An Economic Eirenicon_, by Graham Wallas, pages
80-86; _Marx's Theory of Value_, by Hyndman, same volume, pages
94-104; Shaw's reply, _Bluffing the Value Theory_, following Hyndman,
May, 1889, pages 128-135, was lately reprinted by Eduard Bernstein in
_Sozialistische Monatshefte_. Shaw's letter in _Justice_ appeared on
page 3 of the issue of July 20th, 1889. The fine essay, entitled _The
Illusions of Socialism_, quite penetrating in its psychology, although
caviare to the ordinary reviewer, originally appeared in German in
_Die Zeit_ (Vienna), in 1896: No. 108, October 24th, and No. 109,
October 31st; later it appeared in English in _Forecasts of the Coming
Century_, edited by Edward Carpenter, Manchester: Labour Press, 1897;
it afterwards appeared in French in _L'Humanité Nouvelle_ (Ghent and
Paris), August, 1900, edited by Auguste Hamon, the well-known Socialist
and the French translator of Shaw's plays.
[77] _The Class War_, in the _Clarion_, September 30th, 1904.
[78] Shaw's position in regard to the Class War is ably set forth in
his three articles, under the general heading, _The Class War_, which
appeared in the _Clarion_, London; dates: September 30th, October 21st
and November 4th, 1904.
[79] In 1888 Shaw wrote two very clever articles, which so far seem
to have escaped attention, although the disguise is so thin as to
be negligible. These two articles are, respectively, _My Friend
Fitzthunder, the Unpractical Socialist_, by Redbarn Wash--note the
anagram--(_To-Day_, edited by Hubert Bland, August, 1888), and
_Fitzthunder on Himself--A Defence_, by Robespierre Marat Fitzthunder
(_To-Day_, September, 1888). These very amusing papers, both written
by Shaw, it is needless to say, constitute a _reductio ad absurdum_ of
the unpractical and revolutionary Socialist; Fitzthunder is evidently
a composite picture, made up from a number of Shaw's Socialist
_confrères_.
[80] Fabian Tract, No. 45: _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, a paper
by Shaw, written in 1888, read to the Fabian Society on October 16th,
1891, and published by the Fabian Society, July, 1893.
[81] Compare the former chapter; complete details are to be found in
Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 12-15.
[82] In the twenty-seventh Annual Report on the work of the Fabian
Society (for the year ended March 31st, 1910), the membership is given
as 2,627.
[83] Worthy of record in connection with the new policy of the Fabian
Society, although discussion is outside the scope of this work, is
the movement inaugurated by Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. A. R. Orage,
afterwards joint-editors of the London Socialist organ, _The New
Age_, in the foundation of the Leeds Art Club in 1905. “The object of
the Leeds Art Club,” their syllabus read, “is to affirm the mutual
dependence of art and ideas.” This movement, supported by a group of
able lecturers, proved so successful and so stimulating as to eventuate
in the formation of the Fabian Art Group (Bernard Shaw presiding over
the initial meeting), the declared object of which is “to interpret the
relation of Art and Philosophy to Socialism.” Admirable pamphlets and
brochures have been published under its auspices; and its meetings, and
the Fabian Summer School in Wales, have been addressed by many of the
most brilliant and advanced thinkers in England.
[84] Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 15-16; date, 1892.
[85] The Fabian motto, suggested by Mr. Frank Podmore, runs: “For the
right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring
against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time
comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in
vain and fruitless.”
[86] This book has now gone into its seventieth thousand, and has been
republished in both Germany and America. It is regarded to-day as the
standard text in English for Socialist lecturers and propagandists.
[87] Compare Fabian Tract No. 70: _Report on Fabian Policy_, the
bombshell thrown by the Fabian Society into the International Socialist
Workers' and Trade Union Congress, 1896.
[88] _Socialism and Republicanism_, in the _Saturday Review_, November
17th, 1900.
[89] For highly appreciative summaries of _The Common Sense of
Municipal Trading_ (Archibald Constable and Co.), and of Shaw's
article, _Socialism for Millionaires_ (first published in the
_Contemporary Review_ of February, 1896, and afterwards, in 1901,
as Fabian Tract No. 107), compare Mr. Holbrook Jackson's monograph,
_Bernard Shaw_, pages 114-131.
[90] _Fabian Economics_, in the _Fortnightly Review_, February, 1894.
Mr. Mallock purposed to show how the defenders of a broad and social
Conservatism, as outlined by himself, “may be able, by a fuller
understanding of it, to speak to the intellect, the heart, and the
hopes of the people of this country (England), like the voice of a
trumpet, in comparison with which the voice of Socialism will be merely
a penny whistle.” Shaw delightfully termed his rejoinder, _On Mr.
Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance_, which brought forth, in the
same magazine, not one, but two rejoinders from Mr. Mallock. In 1909
an attack by Mr. Mallock on Mr. Keir Hardie in the _Times_ provoked
Shaw to a fierce onslaught on his old opponent, and the Fabian Society
presently republished the correspondence and the old _Fortnightly_
article under the title, _Socialism and Superior Brains_. The latter,
in a shilling edition, is also published by A. C. Fifield, London, in
the _Fabian Socialist Series_.
[91] In his analysis of the situation in his native land, he insisted
that Home Rule was a necessity for Ireland, because the Irish would
never be content, would never feel themselves free, until Home Rule was
granted them. It was not a question of logic, but a question of natural
right.
[92] _Socialism at the International Congress_, in _Cosmopolis_,
September, 1896.
THE ART CRITIC
“Produce me your best critic, and I will criticize his head
off.”--_On Diabolonian Ethics._ In _Three Plays for Puritans_.
Preface, p. xxi.
CHAPTER VII
Shaw's career as a critic dates from the period of his first
acquaintance with Mr. William Archer, in 1885. After living for nine
years, according to his own story, on the six pounds of which he is
so fond of speaking, Shaw was at last reduced to quite straitened
financial circumstances. He eagerly seized the opportunity to become a
critic afforded him by Mr. Archer's ingenious kindness. “Our friend,
William Archer,” Shaw relates, “troubled by this state of things, to
which the condition of my wardrobe bore convincing testimony, rescued
me by a stratagem. Being already famous as the 'W. A.' of the _World's_
drama, he boldly offered to criticize pictures as well. Edmund Yates
was only too glad to get so excellent a critic. Archer got me to do
the work, resigned the post as soon as I had got firm hold of it, and
left me in possession.” The years from 1885 to 1889, during which he
lived at 29, Fitzroy Square, Shaw devoted in part to criticism of art,
contemporary English art in particular; during this period, he once
told me, he criticized every picture show in London. He also published
many unsigned literary reviews and sallies in the _Pall Mall Gazette_;
whilst a number of his criticisms of pictures appeared in unsigned
paragraphs, both in the _World_, 1885 to 1888, and in _Truth_, 1889. A
few of his _critiques_ also appeared in a magazine called _Our Corner_.
[Illustration: =Shaw's Second Home in London.=]
_Alvin Langdon Coburn._ Fitzroy Square (No. 29)
I recently read Shaw's critical reviews of this period, especially
the complete file of his articles in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ from May
16th, 1885, to August 31st, 1888, placed at my disposal by Mr. Shaw.
The articles are pertinent and shrewd, but only comparatively few
are marked by that peculiar and fantastic humour which has come to
be known as Shavian. They embrace every sort of subject from Ouida's
novels to the _Life of Madame Blavatsky_, from Grant Allen to W.
Stanley Jevons, from Cairo to the Surrey Hills--art, fiction, music,
drama, science, theology. Occasionally Shaw took delight in adding to
the gaiety and curiosity of his readers by putting forth some Shavian
frivolity, under an assumed name. Such, for example, was his letter
to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ on _The Taming of the Shrew_, dated June
8th, 1888, the earliest instance I have of his so-called “Shakspearean
Bull-baiting”--a letter copied innumerable times and in almost every
paper in the United Kingdom. It ran as follows:
“To the Editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_.
“SIR,--They say that the American woman is the most advanced
woman to be found at present on this planet. I am an
Englishwoman, just come up, frivolously enough, from Devon
to enjoy a few weeks of the season in London, and at the
very first theatre I visit I find an American woman playing
Katharine in _The Taming of the Shrew_--a piece which is one
vile insult to womanhood and manhood from the first word to
the last. I think no woman should enter a theatre where that
play is performed; and I should not have stayed to witness
it myself, but that, having been told that the Daly Company
has restored Shakspeare's version to the stage, I desired to
see with my own eyes whether any civilized audience would
stand its brutality. Of course, it was not Shakspeare: it
was only Garrick adulterated by Shakspeare. Instead of
Shakspeare's coarse, thick-skinned money hunter, who sets to
work to tame his wife exactly as brutal people tame animals
or children--that is, by breaking their spirit by domineering
cruelty--we had Garrick's fop who tries to 'shut up' his wife
by behaving worse than she--a plan which is often tried by
foolish and ill-mannered young husbands in real life, and one
which invariably fails ignominiously, as it deserves to. The
gentleman who plays Petruchio at Daly's--I neither know nor
desire to know his name--does what he can to persuade the
audience that he is not in earnest, and that the whole play is
a farce, just as Garrick before him found it necessary to do;
but in spite of his fine clothes, even at the wedding, and his
winks and smirks when Katharine is not looking, he cannot
make the spectacle of a man cracking a heavy whip at a starving
woman otherwise than disgusting and unmanly. In an age when a
woman was a mere chattel, Katharine's degrading speech about
“'Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign: one that cares for thee (with a whip),
And for thy maintainance; commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land,' etc.
might have passed with an audience of bullies. But imagine a
parcel of gentlemen in the stalls at the Gaiety Theatre, half
of them perhaps living idly on their wives' incomes, grinning
complacently through it as if it were true or even honourably
romantic. I am sorry that I did not come to town earlier that I
might have made a more timely protest. In the future I hope all
men and women who respect one another will boycott _The Taming
of the Shrew_ until it is driven off the boards.
“Yours truly,
“HORATIA RIBBONSON.
“St. James's Hotel, and Fairheugh Rectory, North Devon, June
7th.”
In his capacity as art critic, when time was priceless and hundreds
of pictures had to be examined critically, Shaw found his knowledge
of phonography invaluable. I recently looked over a collection of his
art catalogues during a single year, and his phonographic notes give
a miniature forecast of the art criticism he is presently to write.
Beside the titles of certain pictures often appears a single adjective:
“gaudy,” “brilliant,” “stupid,” and the like; beside others, “Wilkie,”
“Reynolds,” and the names of other artists, indicating his detection
of resemblance to or imitation of the works of the masters. Beside the
mention of a “Lighthouse” picture is pencilled the explanatory note,
a mixture of praise and blame: “Too green. Has a lamp lighted. Good
subject.” One recognizes the Shavian _timbre_ in such laconic notes
as “Fluffy style”; “What does he mean?” “Very dreadful!” and “Same
old game.” And we feel sure that Shaw will “gore and trample” the
unfortunate wretches who called forth the damning comments--“wheels
awful,” “idiotic,” and “green blush and pasty face.”
During these years, however, from 1885 to 1888 in especial, Socialism
was the living centre of all Shaw's interests. His time was principally
devoted to the most active form of Socialist propagandism. The literary
articles of this period do not possess the piquant interest of the “C.
di B.” or the “G. B. S.” criticisms, which are quite remarkable for
epigram, satire, and paradox. Most of them are almost unintelligible
now that they can no longer be read with the context of the events
of the week in which they appeared. Shaw has always been a leader
of forlorn hopes; at this time, willy-nilly, he was on the side of
the majority. I remember one day quoting Clarence Rook's remark to
the effect that Shaw is like the kite, and can rise only when the
_popularis aura_ is against him. “No, that is a radical mistake,” Mr.
Shaw said forcibly. “I have never worked with the sense that everybody
is against me. On the contrary, my inspiration springs from a sense of
sympathy with my views.” Still, one might say that it has always been
as a defiant and vexatious personality that Shaw has best succeeded in
arousing and challenging clamorous protest. Hermann Bahr insists that
Bernard Shaw possesses in rich measure the remarkable and exceptional
talent of the great artist-critic: the ability to arouse the whole
state, the whole nation, against him. Not only was that opposition,
which is the very breath of his nostrils, non-existent: there was no
great battle on in the world of art in London comparable to those that
were yet to be waged. It is true that the Impressionist movement was
struggling for life in London, and while Shaw defended it vigorously,
neither its day nor his day was yet come. As an almost totally unknown,
comparatively unskilled critic of literature and art, he could scarcely
be expected to create the unparalleled sensations which he subsequently
achieved as a Shakespearean image-breaker, a champion of Wagner and
Ibsen, and the most radical exponent of the newest forms of the New
Drama.
And yet it was during these very years that he developed those
remarkable qualities which have won him the title of the most brilliant
of contemporary British journalistic critics. On all sides the younger
generation, which included Mr. Shaw as one of its most daring and
iconoclastic members, rose up in revolt against academicism in style.
The New Journalism came into being. “Lawless young men,” says Shaw,
“began to write and print the living English language of their own
day instead of the prose style of one of Macaulay's characters named
Addison. They split their infinitives and wrote such phrases as 'a
man nobody ever heard of,' instead of, 'a man of whom nobody had
ever heard'; or, more classical still, 'a writer hitherto unknown.'
Musical critics, instead of reading books about their business and
elegantly regurgitating their erudition, began to listen to music
and to distinguish between sounds; critics of painting began to look
at pictures; critics of the drama began to look at something besides
the stage; and descriptive writers actually broke into the House of
Commons, elbowing the reporters into the background, and writing about
political leaders as if they were mere play-actors. The interview, the
illustration, and the cross-heading hitherto looked on as American
vulgarities impossible to English literary gentlemen, invaded all
our papers; and, finally, as the climax and masterpiece of literary
Jacobinism, the _Saturday Review_ appeared with a signed article in it.
Then Mr. Traill and all his generation covered their faces with their
togas and died at the base of Addison's statue, which all the while
ran ink.” “Don't misunderstand my position,” Mr. Shaw once remarked
to me. “It is true that I was opposed to academicism in style, not
to style itself. I believe in style. I thought that the academicism
we had was not good academicism. I was pedantic enough myself when I
first began to write--when I wrote my first novel. Afterwards I came to
the conclusion that a phrase meant much only after it had been washed
into shape in the mouths of dozens of generations. The fact of the
matter is that I am extremely sensitive to the _form_ of art.” Shaw
simply repudiated the classical tradition of writing like “a scholar
and a gentleman.” As far as his scholarship was concerned, he took
the greatest pains to dissemble the little he possessed. Moreover,
he doubted if it had ever been worth while being a “gentleman,” and
used every means in his power to discredit this antiquated survival of
the age of sentimentalism. He always aimed at accuracy, but scoffed
consumedly at the notion of achieving “justice” in criticism. “I am
not God Almighty,” he said in effect, “and nobody but a fool could
expect justice from me, or any other superhuman attribute.” He wrote
boldly according to his bent; he said only what he wanted to say, and
not what he thought he ought to say, or what was right, or what was
just. To Shaw, this affected, manufactured, artificial conscience of
morality and justice was of no use in the writing of genuine criticism,
or in the making of true works of art. For that, he felt that one must
have the real conscience that gives a man courage to fulfil his will
by saying what he likes. An epigram I once heard him make: “Accuracy
only means discovering the relation of your will to facts instead of
cooking the facts to save trouble”--is a note of his entire criticism.
Shaw sought simply to write as accurately, as frankly, as vividly, and
as lightly as possible. He hesitated neither at violating taste, nor at
being vexatious, even positively disagreeable. “If I meet an American
tourist who is greatly impressed with the works of Raphael, Kaulbach,
Delaroche and Barry,” he once said, “and I, with Titian and Velásquez
in my mind, tell him that not one of his four heroes was a real
painter, I am no doubt putting my case absurdly; but I am not talking
nonsense, for all that: indeed, to the adept seer of pictures I am only
formulating a commonplace in an irritatingly ill-considered way. But in
this world if you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may just
as well not say it at all, since nobody will trouble themselves about
anything that does not trouble them.”
Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the great English Socialist, once told me that he
was really the first person in England to discover Shaw. “In 1883,” he
explained, “I wrote a letter of recommendation for Shaw to Frederick
Greenwood, at that time editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_. The letter
led to nothing, it is true; but that is not material. The point is,
that in that letter I compared Shaw to Heine--a comparison for which
I have been unmercifully chaffed many times since. Of course, Shaw
does not possess Heine's wonderful gift of lyrism; but as iconoclastic
critics, they have many qualities in common. In his power to turn up
for our inspection the seamy side of the robe of modern life, and make
us recoil at the sight, Bernard Shaw is without a peer.
“I have always been inclined to class Bernard Shaw and my dear friend
George Meredith together. In enigmatic character and faculty of
mystification as to their real opinion, they are remarkably alike.”
Of Shaw, in all his criticism, might be quoted his own words
descriptive of George Henry Lewes as a critic of the drama: “He
expressed his most laboured criticisms with a levity which gave them
the air of being the unpremeditated whimsicalities of a man who had
perversely taken to writing about the theatre for the sake of the jest
latent in his own outrageous unfitness for it.”
If the world is convinced that Shaw is only a gay deceiver, he himself
has felt from the very beginning that the _rôle_ he plays is that of
the candid friend of society. “Waggery as a medium is invaluable,” he
once explained. “My case is really the case of Rabelais over again.
When I first began to promulgate my opinions, I found that they
appeared extravagant, and even insane. In order to get a hearing, it
was necessary for me to attain the footing of a privileged lunatic,
with the licence of a jester. Fortunately the matter was very easy. I
found that I had only to say with perfect simplicity what I seriously
meant just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh. My method, you
will have noticed, is to take the utmost trouble to find the right
thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity. And all the
time the real joke is that I am in earnest.” It is Shaw's supreme
distinction that he refuses to view life through the confining,
beclouding medium of convention. His primal claim to serious attention
is based upon the assertion of his freedom from illusion. If he appears
grotesque and eccentric, it is not so much because he expresses himself
grotesquely and eccentrically: it is primarily because he scrutinizes
life with a more aquiline eyesight than that of the illuded majority.
His levity has saved him from martyrdom; for, although it is a very
difficult thing to speak disagreeable truths, it is a still more
difficult thing to listen to them. Recall the treatment the British
public gave to George Moore for his advocacy of realism, to Vizetelly
for his championing of Zola, even to Shaw himself for his defence of
Ibsen! Shaw has based all his brilliancy and solidity, Mr. Chesterton
acutely observes, upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that
truth is stranger than fiction. And Shaw himself has cleverly put the
case in his own paradoxical way. “There is an indescribable levity--not
triviality mind, but levity--something spritelike about the final truth
of a matter; and this exquisite levity communicates itself to the
style of a writer who will face the labour of digging down to it. It
is the half-truth which is congruous, heavy, serious, and suggestive
of a middle-aged or elderly philosopher. The whole truth is often
the first thing that comes into the head of a fool or a child; and
when a wise man forces his way to it through the many strata of his
sophistications, its wanton, perverse air reassures him instead of
frightening him.”[93]
This spritelike quality, this indescribable levity inherent in the
final truth of a matter, has communicated itself to Shaw's style in the
most intimate way. With the not unnatural result that it is difficult
for the average man to believe that opinions advanced with such
light-hearted levity carry any of the weight of final truth. It is for
this reason that all of Shaw's attempts to write genuine autobiography
have been greeted with the most amiable scepticism. Shaw himself is
able to speak with more confidence on the folly of writing scientific
natural history, because he has tried the experiment, within certain
timid limits, of being candidly autobiographical.
“I have produced no permanent impression,” he declares,
“because nobody has ever believed me. I once told a brilliant
London journalist[94] some facts about my family, running to
forty-first cousins and to innumerable seconds and thirds.
Like most large families, it did not consist exclusively of
teetotallers, nor did all its members remain until death up
to the very moderate legal standard of sanity. One of them
discovered an absolutely original method of committing suicide.
It was simple to the verge of triteness, yet no human being
had ever thought of it before. It was also amusing. But in
the act of carrying it out, my relative jammed the mechanism
of his heart--possibly in the paroxysm of laughter which the
mere narration of his suicidal method has never since failed
to provoke--and if I may be allowed to state the result in my
Irish way, he died a second before he succeeded in killing
himself. The coroner's jury found that he died 'from natural
causes'; and the secret of the suicide was kept not only from
the public, but from most of the family.
“I revealed the secret in private conversation to the brilliant
journalist aforesaid. He shrieked with laughter and printed
the whole story in his next _causerie_. It never for a moment
occurred to him that it was true. To this day he regards me as
the most reckless liar in London.”
Had Shaw ever attempted to write the Rougon-Macquart history of
his family in twenty volumes, along the candid lines of the above
narrative, it is not improbable that he would thereafter have been
permanently and forcibly deprived of his privileges as a lunatic. “I
have not yet ascertained the truth about myself,” he wrote some years
ago. “For instance, am I mad or sane? I really do not know. Doubtless,
I am clever in certain directions; my talent has enabled me to cut a
figure in my profession in London. But a man may, like Don Quixote, be
clever enough to cut a figure and yet be stark mad. A critic recently
described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of
my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark
than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and
cravenly afraid. I have never thought much of the courage of a lion
tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is
not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics,
no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything
that he does not want to eat. In the late war, the Americans burnt
the Spanish fleet, and finally had to drag men out of hulls that had
become furnaces. The effect of this on one of the American commanders
was to make him assemble his men and tell them that he believed in God
Almighty. No lion would have done that. On reading it and observing
that the newspapers, representing normal public opinion, seemed to
consider it a very creditable, natural and impressively pious incident,
I came to the conclusion that I must be mad. At all events, if I am
sane, the rest of the world ought not to be at large. We cannot both
see things as they really are.”
It was at a somewhat later time that the critics came to treat Shaw
as a reckless liar and a privileged lunatic. At this period, he
impressed the self-conscious literary clique as a witty, but frivolous,
ignoramus, totally incompetent to discuss the high subjects of which
he professed such penetrating comprehension. I once had an interesting
discussion with Mr. Shaw about the subject of his flippancy. “Do you
accept as just the criticism, made in some quarters,” I asked Mr. Shaw,
“that you and Whistler were very much alike in your attitude towards
the general public?”
“Not at all, that is a crude error,” replied Mr. Shaw earnestly.
“Whistler came to grief because he gave himself up to clever smartness,
which is abhorrent to the average Englishman. As for me, I have never
for a moment lost sight of my serious relation to a serious public.
You see, I had an advantage over Whistler in any case, for at least
three times every week I could escape from artistic and literary stuff,
and talk seriously on serious subjects to serious people. For this
reason--because I persisted in Socialist propagandism--I never once
lost touch with the real world.”
Shaw's _critiques_, sallies, and reviews were the combination of a
laborious criticism with a recklessly flippant manner. Into literature
he carried the methods he adopted on the platform, where he tossed
off the most diligently acquired, studiously pondered information
with all the _insouciance_ of omniscience. As a critic, Shaw has ever
laboured for the scanty wages of the “intolerable fatigue of thought.”
In characteristic style, he has gone so far as to declare that good
journalism is much rarer and more important than good literature; he
has no sympathy with Disraeli's view of a critic as an author who has
failed. “I know as one who has practised both crafts,” wrote Shaw in
1892, “that authorship is child's play compared to criticism; and
I have, you may depend upon it, my full share of the professional
instinct which regards the romancer as a mere adventurer in literature
and the critic as a highly skilled workman. Ask any novelist or
dramatist whether he can write a better novel or play than I; and he
will blithely say 'Yes.' Ask him to take my place as critic for one
week; and he will blench from the test. The truth is that the critic
stands between popular authorship, for which he is not silly enough,
and great authorship, for which he is not genius enough.”[95]
While Mr. Shaw was laboriously striving to impart lightness and
_insouciance_ to his literary style, and to acquire careless
_sang-froid_ as a platform speaker, he was likewise making the
acquaintance of certain distinguished men of his day. His relation and
association with William Morris, for example, exercised no noteworthy
influence upon his art; but it certainly did no less than accentuate
certain distinct traits of his character. Unmistakably, in this way,
does this association serve to give us a clearer insight into the
_rationale_ of Shaw's--popularly-called--idiosyncrasies. On the other
hand, it furnishes us a new aspect of Morris from the Shavian point of
view.
Readers of the authorized edition of _Cashel Byron's Profession_ will
recall that William Morris, who, like Shaw, had thrown himself into the
Socialist revival of the early eighties, first became curious about
Shaw through reading the monthly instalments of _An Unsocial Socialist_
as they appeared in the Socialist magazine _To-Day_. Shaw had heard of
Morris, to be sure; and had even, years before, once seen him--of all
places in the world!--in the Doré Gallery. Yet his notions about Morris
were, in reality, of the vaguest. He knew nothing beyond the meagre
facts that he was a poet, that he belonged to the Rossetti circle, and
that he was associated with Burne-Jones and with what was then called
Æstheticism. He had never read a line of Morris's, and, in fact, had
taken no definite measure of his calibre. This was the situation when
Shaw found himself one evening in Gatti's big restaurant in the Strand
at the table with Morris and H. M. Hyndman. Morris belonged to Mr.
Hyndman's society, the Democratic Federation, now the Social-Democratic
Federation, while Mr. Hyndman himself was the head centre of London
Socialism. With naïve simplicity, Morris humbly announced that he was
prepared to do whatever he was told and go wherever he was led: that
was all he could say. In a letter to me describing the interview,
written many years afterwards, Mr. Shaw said that, while it was only
snap-judgment--a personal impression across the table--he could not
help being “privately tickled by this announcement from an obviously
ungovernable man who was too big to be led by any of us.”
In ignorance concerning Morris, Shaw was not alone: the other
Socialists were in precisely the same predicament. Morris himself said
afterwards that it was among his Socialist _confrères_ that he first
realized he was an elderly duffer. His old Rossettian associates used
to call him Topsy; but, as readers of Lady Burne-Jones's _Memorials_
will recall, Burne-Jones used to be angry when she applied this
embarrassing nickname to Morris before strangers. If Morris was
affectionately regarded as a young man by his associates of the “P.
R. B.,” to his Socialist allies he looked older than he was--sixty
at fifty, though a magnificent sixty--a sort of “sixty-years-young”
patriarch. Morris and Shaw, after they settled down to the routine of
Socialist agitation, were at the opposite poles of the movement. Shaw
headed the Fabian Society, while Morris, after his secession from
the S. D. F., organized the Socialist League, which shortly went to
pieces--because, as Shaw says, there was only one William Morris; he
was afterwards the leading spirit in the Hammersmith Socialist Society.
Despite this fundamental difference in view-point--for Morris's
fundamental conceptions were “Equality, Communism, and the rediscovery
under Communism of Art as 'work-pleasure,'” whereas Shaw, as a Fabian,
aimed simply at the reduction of Socialism to a constitutional
political policy--there was never any personal friction between the
two. Indeed, they did a great deal of speaking together in the early
days, most of it at the street corner, and often thought themselves
lucky if they had an audience of twenty. In after years, we find Morris
with the broadest of views endeavouring to settle the differences which
arose between the various Socialist sects. By 1893, when he gave his
well-known address entitled Communism before the Hammersmith Socialist
Society, Morris had acquired an intimate knowledge of the attempt to
organize Socialism in England which began in the early eighties. “He
had himself undertaken and conducted,” writes Shaw, “that part of
the experiment which nobody else would face: namely, the discovery
and combination, without distinction of class, of all those who were
capable of understanding Equality and Communism as he understood it,
and their organization as an effective force for the overthrow of the
existing order of property and privilege. In doing so he had been
brought into contact, and often into conflict, with every other section
of the movement. He knew all his men and knew all their methods. He
knew that the agitation was exhausted, and that the time had come to
deal with the new policy which the agitation had shaken into existence.
Accordingly, we find him in this (the above-mentioned) paper, doing
what he could to economize the strength of the movement by making peace
between its jarring sections, and recalling them from their disputes
over tactics and programs to the essentials of their cause.”[96]
None of Morris' Socialist associates were in the least degree
hero-worshippers, at least where he was concerned: they never
bothered at all about his eminence. “I was not myself conscious of
the impression he had made on me,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, in
explaining his feeling for Morris, “until one evening, at a debating
society organized by Stopford Brooke, when Morris, in a speech on
Socialism in the course of a debate, astonished me by saying that he
left the economics to me--'in that respect I regard Shaw as my master.'
The phrase meant only that he left that side of the case to me, as he
always did when we campaigned together, but though I knew this, still
it gave me a shock which made me aware that I had unconsciously rated
him so highly that his compliment gave me a sort of revulsion.” It was
genuine modesty which once prompted Shaw to say that he never liked to
call himself Morris's friend, because he was too much his junior and
too little necessary or serviceable to him in his private affairs. And
yet he enjoyed an unstinted and unreserved intercourse with Morris:
one of Shaw's best-known Fabian tracts, _The Transition to Social
Democracy_, for example, was written at Morris's mediæval manor-house,
Lechlade, on the Thames, and was heartily approved on its historical
side by that erudite student of the Middle Ages. Shaw once said that
no man was more liberal in his attempts to improve Morris's mind than
he was; “but I always found that, in so far as I was not making a most
horrible idiot of myself out of misknowledge (I could forgive myself
for pure ignorance), he could afford to listen to me with the patience
of a man who had taught my teachers. There were people whom we tried to
run him down with--Tennysons, Swinburnes, and so on; but their opinions
about things did not make any difference, Morris's did.”[97]
Morris greatly enjoyed a number of Shaw's essays, for the prime reason
that in those essays Shaw said certain things which Morris wanted to
have said. After Shaw's celebrated reply to Max Nordau, Morris suddenly
began to talk to Shaw about Whistler and the Impressionists in a way
which showed that he knew all about them and what they were driving at,
though before that Shaw had given Morris up as--on that subject--an
intolerant and ignorant veteran of the pre-Raphaelite movement. That
this was highly characteristic of Morris from Shaw's standpoint is
evidenced by some paragraphs in Shaw's obituary notice of Morris
in the _Saturday Review_. “When an enthusiast for some fashionable
movement or reaction in art would force it into the conversation, he
(Morris) would often behave so as to convey an impression of invincible
prejudice and intolerant ignorance, and so get rid of it. But later on,
he would let slip something that showed, in a flash, that he had taken
in the whole movement at its very first demonstration, and had neither
prejudices nor illusions about it. When you knew the subject yourself,
and could see beyond it and around it, putting it in its proper place
and accepting its limits, he could talk fast enough about it; but it
did not amuse him to allow novices to break a lance with him, because
he had no special facility for brilliant critical demonstration, and
required too much patience for his work to waste any of it on idle
discussions. Consequently there was a certain intellectual roguery
about him of which his intimate friends were very well aware; so
that if a subject were thrust on him, the aggressor was sure to be
ridiculously taken in if he did not calculate on Morris's knowing much
more about it than he pretended.” He thus often presented himself
as imperious and prejudiced, because up to a certain point he would
neither agree nor discuss, simply giving you up as walking in darkness.
But the moment you had worked your way through the subject and come out
on the other side, as Shaw expressed it, Morris would suddenly begin
to talk like an expert and show all sorts of knowledge--scientific,
political, commercial, intellectual-as-opposed-to-artistic, and so
on--that you never suspected him of. “He was fond of quoting Robert
Owen's rule: 'Don't argue: repeat your assertion,'” Mr. Shaw recently
told me; “and mere debating, which he knew to be an intellectual game
and not an essential part of the Will-to-Socialism (so to speak), did
not interest him enough to make him good at it. But he highly enjoyed
hearing anyone else do it cleverly on his side, and was furious when
it was done on the other side. In point of command of modern critical
language, he was by no means a ready man; and as I was in great
practice just then, he would take a prompt from me (if it was the
right one) with as much relief and simplicity as if I had found his
spectacles for him.”
Shaw once said that, as far as he was aware, he shared with Mr. Henry
Arthur Jones the distinction of being the only modern dramatist,
except the author of _Charley's Aunt_, which bored Morris, whose plays
were witnessed by Morris. Shaw did not pretend to claim Morris's
visits as a spontaneous act of homage to modern acting and the modern
drama, but only as a tribute of personal friendship; for Morris was
a “twelfth-twentieth-century artist,” exclusively preoccupied with a
vision of beauty unrealized upon the modern stage. In a passage in
a letter to me, Mr. Shaw has tersely etched the firm figure of the
artist and the man, who could not be induced “to accept ugliness as
art, no matter how brilliant, how fashionable, how sentimental, or
intellectually interesting you might make it.”
“Morris's artistic integrity was, humanly speaking, perfect.
You could not turn him aside from the question of the beauty
and the decency of a thing by bringing up its _interest_,
scientific, casuistic, novel, curious, historical, or what not.
That was most extraordinary in so clever a man; for he was
capable of all the interests. Compared to him Ruskin was not an
artist at all: he was only a man whose interest in Nature led
him to study Turner, and whose insight into religion gave him
a clue to the art of the really religious painters. He would
not give twopence for a rarity or a curiosity or a relic; but
when he saw a sanely beautiful thing, and it was for sale, he
went into the shop; seized it, held it tight under his arm (it
was generally a mediæval book); and, after the feeblest and
most transparent show of bargaining, bought it for whatever
was asked. Once, when he was rebuked for paying eight hundred
pounds for something that a dealer would have got for four
hundred and fifty pounds, I said, 'If you _want_ a thing, you
always get the worst of the bargain.' Morris was delighted with
my wisdom, and probably spent many unnecessary pounds on the
strength of that poor excuse.
“This artistic integrity of his was what made him
unintelligible to the Philistine public. When the Americans
set to work to imitate his printing, they showed that they
regarded him as a fashionably quaint and foolish person; and
the Roycroft Shop and all the rest of the culture-curiosity
shops of the States poured forth abominations which missed
every one of his lessons and exaggerated every one of the
practices he tried to cure printers of. In the same way his
houses at Hammersmith and Kelmscott were, though quite homely,
as beautiful in their domestic way as St. Sophia's in Stamboul;
but other people's 'Morris houses' always went wrong, even when
he started them right.”
[Illustration: =William Morris.=]
_Photo by Elliot & Fry_
_Baker Street, London._
One day Mr. Shaw and I were discussing Morris and the influence he
exerted upon Shaw. “What Morris taught me,” confessed Mr. Shaw, “was
in the main technical--printing, for example.[98] And I soon came
to realize that his most characteristic trait was integrity in the
artistic sense. By watching Morris, I first learned that Ruskin wasn't
strong as a critic of works of art. In a sense, Ruskin was a naturalist
because he understood Turner. And the key to his comprehension of the
pre-Raphaelites was his religious sense. And yet he could not discover
so glaring an error as Bernardino Luini's employment of the same model
for the Virgin and the Magdalen. The trouble with Ruskin was that
he invariably fell into egregious blunders when he didn't have his
religious clue.”
“I learned a great deal from Morris,” he added, “because Morris
and I worked together in Socialism--and, as a critic, I was
intensely interested in the pre-Raphaelite movement.”
It was always a source of regret to Shaw that he never met Burne-Jones,
Morris's greatest friend. When Morris died, Shaw wrote obituary
articles in the _Daily Chronicle_ and in the _Saturday Review_; and
when McKail's _Life of Morris_ appeared, he reviewed it in the _Daily
Chronicle_. Burne-Jones was pleased by the _Saturday Review_ article,
and wanted to meet Shaw. They made appointment after appointment; but
something always occurred--an illness, a journey, or the like--to
defeat them. At last they resolved that the meeting _must_ come off;
and a firm arrangement was made--for a Sunday lunch, it seems--to be
kept at all hazards. But Destiny had a card up its sleeve that they did
not reckon with. Burne-Jones died the day before; so Shaw never met
him as an acquaintance, and only saw him twice, once at an exhibition
where he heard him say that a picture attributed to Morris had been
partly painted by Madox Brown, and once at a theatre, where their seats
happened to be next one another.
When Shaw became a critic of music in 1888, he began to consider
whether he was making enough money by the very hard work of plodding
through all the picture exhibitions. At last he counted his gains,
and found, to his amazement, that his remuneration for paragraphs
at fivepence per line, worked out at--according to his recollection
afterwards--less than forty pounds a year; whereas two hundred pounds
would not have been at all excessive for the work. “Edmund Yates,
when I resigned and told him why,” Mr. Shaw once told me, “was as
much staggered as I was myself, and proposed a much more lucrative
arrangement by which I should divide the work with Lady Colin
Campbell. But the division would not have been fair to her; and Yates,
recognizing this, did what I asked, which was, to hand the whole
department over to Lady Colin, and confine my contributions to music
alone.”
The period of Shaw's activities as an art critic is memorable less
for the quality and value of his criticism than for the revelation of
the essential moral integrity of the man so often denounced as the
cranky immoralist of this, our time. This, as we shall see, appears
most clearly in his relations with W. E. Henley, the story of which, I
believe, has never been told in print; yet other crucial instances,
equally revelative, are worthy of record. Shaw's experience amply
justifies his statement that the public has hardly any suspicion of the
rarity of the able editor who is loyal to his profession and to his
staff; and that without such an editor even moderately honest criticism
is impossible. Take, for example, the case of Shaw and a London paper.
Shaw wrote about pictures for the best part of a season until a naïve
proposal was made to him that he should oblige certain artist-friends
of the editorium by favourable notices, and was assured that he might
oblige any friends of his own in the same way. “This proposal was made
in perfect good faith and in all innocence,” Shaw candidly avers,
“it never having occurred to those responsible that art criticism
was a serious pursuit or that any question of morals or conduct
could possibly arise over it. Of course I resigned with some vigour,
though without any ill humour; but some I know were quite sincerely,
pathetically hurt by my eccentric, unfriendly and disobliging
conduct.” During his career as a critic Shaw was repeatedly urged by
colleagues to call attention to some abuse which they themselves were
not sufficiently strongly situated to mention. He had to resign very
desirable positions on the critical staff of London papers; in the
case above mentioned, because he considered it derogatory to write
insincere puffs; and in another case, “because my sense of style
revolted against the interpolation in my articles of sentences written
by others to express high opinions of artists, unknown to fame and to
me.” This second resignation followed the appearance of an Academy
notice, written by Shaw in the capacity of art critic to another London
paper. This article on an Academy exhibition appeared padded out to an
extraordinary length by interpolations praising works which Shaw had
never seen--“No. 2,744 is a sweet head of Mrs. ---- by that talented
young artist, Miss ----,” and so on. It is needless to add that Shaw
resigned in a highly explosive manner. And so Shaw vanished from the
picture galleries. His comment on the conduct of the management of
these papers explains his own attitude, testifying conclusively to the
rigour of the moral standard to which he always conformed. “They were
no more guilty of corruption,” Mr. Shaw expressed the case to me, “than
a man with no notion of property can be guilty of theft; and to this
day they probably have not the least idea why I threw up a reasonably
well-paid job and assumed an attitude vaguely implying some sort of
disapproval of their right to do what they liked with their own paper.”
It was probably at the particular Press view just referred to, some
time after 1889, that Henley's meeting with Shaw occurred. To go
back a little, James Runciman, the uncle of J. F. Runciman, the
musical critic, was a Cashel Byronite, and used to write Shaw letters
containing occasional references to Henley, who also admired _Cashel
Byron's Profession_. Between Runciman, who had known Henley and
quarrelled with him, and Cashel Byron, Shaw got into correspondence
with Henley. Among the various literary and artistic Dulcineas whose
championship Henley mistook for criticism, was Mozart. Mr. Shaw thus
explained the situation to me:
“As I also knew Mozart's value, Henley induced me to write articles on
music for his paper, the _Scots Observer_, afterwards the _National
Observer_; and I did write some--not more than half a dozen--perhaps
not so many. Henley was an impossible editor. He had no idea of
criticism except to glorify the masters he liked, and pursue their
rivals with quixotic jealousy. To appreciate Mozart without reviling
Wagner was to Henley a blank injustice to Mozart. Now, he knew I
was what he called a Wagnerite, and that I thought his objections
to Wagner _vieux jeu_, stupid, ignorant and common. Therefore he
amused himself by interpolating abuse of Wagner into my articles over
my signature. Naturally he lost his contributor; and it was highly
characteristic of him that he did not understand why he could not get
any more articles from me. At the same time he made the _National
Observer_ an organ, politically and socially, of the commonest sort
of plutocratic and would-be aristocratic Toryism, and clamoured in
the usual forcible-feeble way for the strong hand to 'put down' the
distress which then--in the eighties--was threatening insurrection. For
this sort of thing I had no mercy. I did not object to tall talk about
hanging myself and my friends who were trying to get something done for
the condition of the people; but what moved me to utter scorn was the
association of the high republican atmosphere of Byron, Shelley and
Keats, and the gallantry of Dumas _père_--another idol of ours--with
the most dastardly class selfishness and political vulgarity. When
Henley at last pressed me very hard for another article, I wrote him
in a perfectly friendly but frankly contemptuous strain, chaffing him
rather fiercely as the master of his fate, the captain of his soul,
with his head bloody but unbowed, and his hat always off to the police
and the upper classes.” Shaw always believed that, even then, Henley
was simply puzzled, and thought Shaw was only making a senseless
literary display of smartness at his expense.
Clearly Shaw was revolted by the atrocious vulgarity of Henley's
politics as contrasted with the pretentiousness of his literary
attitude. The defence of Henley after his death, to the effect that he
knew nothing of politics, and that he placed himself as to the politics
of the paper in the hands of his friend Charles Whibley, disarmed
Shaw, as I have good reason to know. For Shaw liked Whibley well
enough, regarding him as a clever fellow in literary matters, but quite
impossible politically. Opinions similar to those quoted below may be
found in the only criticism Shaw ever wrote of Henley--a review of his
poems in the old _Pall Mall Gazette_ under Mr. Stead's editorship. The
following quotation from a hitherto unpublished letter to me vividly
clarifies the whole matter by defining the grounds of Shaw's criticism
of Henley:
“Henley interested me as being what I call an Elizabethan, by
which I mean a man with an extraordinary and imposing power
of saying things, and with nothing whatever to say. The real
disappointment about his much discussed article on Stevenson
was not that he said spiteful things about his former friend,
but that he said nothing at all about him that would not have
been true of any man in all the millions then alive. The world
very foolishly reproached him because he did not tell the usual
epitaph monger's lies about 'Franklin, my loyal friend.' But
the real tragedy about the business was that a man who had
known Stevenson intimately, and who was either a penetrating
critic or nothing, had nothing better worth saying about him
than that he was occasionally stingy about money and that when
he passed a looking-glass he looked at it. Which Stevenson's
parlour-maid could have told as well as Henley if she had been
silly enough to suppose that the average man is a generous
sailor in a melodrama, and totally incurious and unconscious
as to his personal appearance. But it was always thus with
Henley. He could appreciate literature and enjoy criticism.
He could describe anything that was forced on his observation
and experience, from a tom-cat in an area to a hospital
operation. Give him the thing to be expressed, and he could
find its expression wonderfully either in prose or verse. But
beyond that he could not go: the things he said--or the things
he wrote (I know nothing of his conversation)--are always
conventionalities, all the worse because they are selected from
the worst part of the great stock of conventionalities--the
conventional unconventionalisms. He could discover and
encourage talent, and was thus half a good editor, but he
could not keep friends with it; and so his papers finally fell
through.”
As in the case of his obituary notices of Sir Augustus Harris and Sir
Henry Irving, Shaw was accused of nothing short of brutality in his
attitude towards Henley, the Cashel Byronite who had wished to see
Shaw's novel dramatized. In the first place, Henley admired Shaw,
and it seemed ungenerous for Shaw to repay him by a denial of the
sort of talent he desired to excel in. And in the second place, it
seemed to Shaw's detractors that it was doubly ungenerous of a man
sound in wind and limb to disparage a man who was physically a wreck,
fighting bravely against infirmity and pain. I was not surprised to
find, on inquiring of Mr. Shaw his real feelings and attitude in the
matter, that he regarded both these reasons as absurd, sentimental and
pointless.
“People have a strong feeling,” Mr. Shaw explained, “that if a man
has lost his hearing or sight bravely in a noble cause the world is
thereby bound in decency to assume for ever after that he had the eye
of an eagle and the ear of a hare.” He continued, impressively: “I have
never belittled a misfortune in that way. Long ago, when a blind poet
died, and certain maudlin speeches of his were repeated in print as
expressions of the pathos of his darkened existence, I said, also in
print, that he always said these things when he was drunk, and that the
fact that he was blind may have added to the pity of them, but did not
give them any sort of validity.
“In the same way when, in the European revolutionary movement, men
came with horrible experiences of prison and Siberian wanderings on
them, and women whose husbands had been hanged or committed suicide,
I have always had to stand out against the notion that they were the
better instead of the worse for their misfortunes, or that they derived
any credit or authority whatever from them. Give them the indulgence
due to enforced weakness or the help due to unavoidable distress; but
don't make them heroes and leaders _ex-officio_ because they have been
unlucky enough to be lamed.
“And so, I have often conveyed to sentimental people an impression
of revolting callousness simply because I know that suffering is
suffering, and not merely the acquisition of a romantic halo.
Henley's infirmities were to me trifles compared to those which I
had encountered in other cases; and in any case, I was trained to
look in the face the fact that infirmities disable people instead of
reinforcing them. People who learn in suffering what they teach in song
usually give very dangerous lessons; and I admire Henley for having
no doctrine of that sort. Besides, I have always abhorred the petty
disloyalties which men call sparing one another's feelings.
“To make an end of the matter,” Mr. Shaw concluded, “Henley, though
a barren critic and poet, had enough talent and character to command
plenty of consideration. A man cannot be everything. I am as fond
of music as Henley was of literature,” he added, his grey-blue eyes
twinkling brightly; “but I am the worst of players, and have a very
poor voice.”
The opinion that Shaw's art during this period is less interesting
than his life does not necessarily involve any reflection upon the
value of his experience as an art critic in giving direction and
tendency to the subsequent course of his development. Indeed Shaw has
been mainly influenced by works of art in his artificial culture: he
has always been more consciously susceptible to music and painting
than to literature. It is no idle assertion--one that Shaw is fond
of repeating--that Mozart and Michelangelo count for a great deal in
the making of his mind. And, however paradoxical it may sound, the
English dramatists after Shakespeare are practically negligible as
concerning their influence in the development of his peculiar and
highly specialized dramatic genius. His close and familiar daily
intercourse with the music masters of the past; his instant recognition
of Wagner's overwhelming greatness; his rapturous delight in that king
of music-dramatists, Mozart; his dogged attempts, alone and unaided, to
master the difficulties of pianoforte playing, which eventuated in his
becoming a congenial, sympathetic accompanist--all early marked him as
a natural and undiscouragedly persistent lover of music. His individual
studies of Italian art, in its history and its expression, while he was
still in his teens, his frequent visits to the Dublin Gallery, the many
hours passed in London at the priceless picture galleries in Trafalgar
Square and Hampton Court, testify with equal force to his spontaneous
preoccupation with the best that has been thought and done in the world
of art. It would carry one too far afield to pursue the inquiry as to
what influence Michelangelo might possibly have exerted upon the dramas
of Bernard Shaw. But there can be little doubt that what Shaw found
to wonder at and glorify in Michelangelo was his passion for anatomy,
his devotion to the studiously realistic, and his unlimited mastery of
form acquired through “profound and patient interrogation of reality.”
Shaw, the close, searching student of life, found untold inspiration
in the discovery of the genuinely naturalistic spirit in which Michael
Angelo worked! Words he once used in speaking to me of the influence
of Michelangelo upon his art are very illuminative. “I never shall
forget climbing an enormously high, rickety framework, in company
with Anatole France,” he remarked, “in order to get a closer look at
the Delphic Sibyl. We were close enough to touch it with our hands;
and I was surprised to discover that, instead of losing, it gained
impressiveness on nearer view. The grand, set face made a tremendous
impression upon me. For the first time, I fully realized that Michael
Angelo was a great artist, and a great man as well--because his every
subject is a person of genius. He never had a commonplace subject. His
models are extraordinary people. They are all Supermen and Superwomen.
“Michelangelo, you see,” he continued, “taught me this--always to put
people of genius into my works. I am always setting a genius over
against a commonplace person.”
In the same spirit, Shaw praised Madox Brown as a realist, “because
he had vitality enough to find intense enjoyment in the world as it
really is, unbeautified, unidealized, untitivated in any way for
artistic consumption.” The sad, sensuous daydreams of Rossetti, the
gentlemanly draughtsmanship of Leighton, the whole romantic trend of
English art, with its delicacy of sentiment, its beauty-fancying, its
reality-shirking philosophy, found Shaw coldly, cruelly condemnatory.
“Take the young lady painted by Ingres as 'La Source,' for example.
Imagine having to make conversation for her for a couple of hours.”
This gives the tone of his criticism. His deepest scorn was aroused by
that form of art which sets up “decorative moral systems contrasting
roseate and rapturous vice with lilied and languorous virtue, making
'Love' face both ways as the universal softener and redeemer.” The
artist who sought to depict life with perfect integrity--in Browning's
phrase, “to paint man man, whatever the issue”--the artist who sought
to express the veracity and reality of life rather than its imagined
beauty and poetry, found in Shaw an unhesitating champion. This passion
for unidealized reality was the outcome of long and deliberate study of
art works, concerning each of which Shaw deliberately forced himself to
form an intelligent and conscious estimate. This was the solid residuum
of his studies, rescued from a ruck of sophistication. “I remember once
when I was an art critic,” wrote Shaw in 1897, “and when Madox Brown's
work was only known to me by a few drawings, treating Mr. Frederick
Shields to a critical demonstration of Madox Brown's deficiencies,
pointing out in one of the drawings the lack of 'beauty' in some
pair of elbows that had more of the wash-tub than of 'The Toilet of
Venus' about them. Mr. Shields contrived without any breach of good
manners to make it quite clear to me that he considered Madox Brown
a great painter and me a fool. I respected both convictions at the
time; and now I share them. Only, I plead in extenuation of my folly
that I had become so accustomed to take it for granted that what every
English painter was driving at was the sexual beautification and moral
idealization of life into something as unlike itself as possible, that
it did not at first occur to me that a painter could draw a plain woman
for any other reason than that he could not draw a pretty one.”[99]
Shaw stood forth as a champion of all forms of art--pictorial, fictive
and dramatic--which aim at realistic exposure of the sheer facts of
life without idealistic falsification and romantic sublimation. He
lauded Madox Brown, for example, as he lauded Ibsen, and for the same
reason: they both took for their themes “not youth, beauty, morality,
gentility and prosperity as conceived by Mr. Smith of Brixton and
Bayswater, but real life taken as it is, with no more regard for poor
Smith's dreams and hypocrisies than the weather has for his shiny silk
hat when he forgets his umbrella.” It is no matter for surprise that
the unshirking student of sociological conditions should have chosen
to write _Widowers' Houses_ and _Mrs. Warren's Profession_; it would
have been astounding had he not done so. And yet the catholicity of his
taste in art enabled him to realize, not simply one aspect of English
art, but the real English art-culture of to-day. To Shaw, indeed, the
significance of the modern movement in England had its germ in the
growing sense of the “naïve dignity and charm” of thirteenth-century
work, in a passionate affection for the exquisite beauty of
fifteenth-century art. “The whole rhetorical school in English
literature, from Shakespeare to Byron,” he once wrote, “appears to us
in our present mood only another side of the terrible _dégringolade_
from Michelangelo to Canova and Thorwaldsen, all of whose works would
not now tempt us to part with a single fragment by Donatello, or even
a pretty foundling baby by Delia Robbia.” He maintained that William
Morris made himself the greatest living master of the English language,
both in prose and verse, by picking up the tradition of the literary
art where Chaucer left it; that Burne-Jones made himself the greatest
among English decorative painters by picking up the tradition of
his art where Lippi left it, and utterly ignoring “their Raphaels,
Correggios and stuff”; and that Morris and Burne-Jones, close friends
and co-operators in many a masterpiece, form the highest aristocracy of
English art of our day.[100]
The only controversial question that came up during Shaw's period as an
art critic was raised by the Impressionists; and his reputation, with
the select few, for consistency is sustained by the course he adopted.
He recognized Impressionism as a new birth of energy in art, a movement
in painting which was wholly beneficial and progressive, and in no
sense insane and decadent. Despite the fact that the movement, like all
new movements in art, was accompanied by many absurdities--exhibition
of countless daubs, the practice of optical distortion, the
substitution of “canvases which looked like enlargements of obscure
photographs for the familiar portraits of masters of the hounds
in cheerfully unmistakable pink coats, mounted on bright chestnut
horses”--Shaw supported it vigorously because, “being the outcome of
heightened attention and quickened consciousness on the part of its
disciples, it was evidently destined to improve pictures greatly by
substituting a natural, observant, real style for a conventional,
taken-for-granted, ideal one.” It is needless to say that Shaw did not
fall into the Philistine trap and talk “greenery yallery” nonsense
about Burne-Jones and the pre-Raphaelite school: his admiration was
checked by the sternest critical reservations. He applauded the
Impressionists for their busy study of the atmosphere, and of the
relation of light and dark between the various objects depicted,
_i.e._, of “values.” Like Zola in his championship of Monet, Shaw led
a miniature crusade in behalf of Whistler, whose pictures at first
quite naturally amazed people accustomed to see the “good north light”
of a St. John's Wood studio represented at exhibitions as sunlight in
the open air--for example, Bouguereau's “Girl in a Cornfield.” More
than this need not be said: that Shaw never joined the ranks of the
_moqueurs_ who called Mr. Whistler “Jimmy.”
It is worthy of record that Shaw vigorously and ably championed the
Dutch school, earnestly advocating the claims of James Maris as a
great painter; and he stood up for Van Uhde, not only in defence of
his pictures of Christ surrounded by people in tall hats and frock
coats, but also in favour of his excellent painting of light in a dry,
crisp, diffused way then quite unfashionable. But his most signal art
criticism of the last decade, beyond question, has had to do with
photography. In 1901, he announced that “the conquest by photography
of the whole field of monochromatic representative art may be regarded
as completed by the work of this year.” His position is based on the
dictum that “in photography, the drawing counts for nothing, the
thought and judgment count for everything; whereas in the etching
and daubing processes where great manual skill is needed to produce
anything that the eye can endure, the execution counts for more than
the thought.” This is no new or sudden notion, derived from the study
of some photographic exhibition, but the mature statement of a judgment
arrived at over a quarter of a century ago. In _An Unsocial Socialist_,
Trefusis astounds Erskine and Sir Charles Brandon with those same
remarkable views on photography which to-day, in the mouth of Bernard
Shaw, so delight the patrons of the Photographic Salon.[101]
“It is more than twenty years since I first said in print
that nine-tenths (or ninety-nine hundredths, I forget which)
of what was then done by brush and pencil would presently
be done, and far better done, by the camera. But it needed
some imagination, as well as some hardihood, to say this at
that time ... because the photographers of that day were not
artists.... Let us admit handsomely that some of the elder
men had the root of the matter in them as the younger men of
to-day; but the process did not then attract artists.... On
the whole, the process was not quite ready for the ordinary
artist, because (1) it could not touch colour or even give
colours their proper light values; (2) the Impressionist
movement had not then rediscovered and popularized the great
range of art that lies outside colour; (3) the eyes of artists
had been so long educated to accept the most grossly fictitious
conventions as truths of representation that many of the
truths of the focussing screen were at first repudiated as
grotesque falsehoods; (4) the wide-angled lens did in effect
lie almost as outrageously as a Royal Academician, whilst the
anastigmat was revoltingly prosaic, and the silver print,
though so exquisite that the best will, if they last, be one
day prized by collectors, was cloying, and only suitable to a
narrow range of subjects; (5) above all, the vestries would
cheerfully pay fifty pounds for a villainous oil-painting
of a hospitable chairman, whilst they considered a guinea a
first-rate price for a dozen cabinets, and two-pound-ten a
noble bid for an enlargement, even when the said enlargement
had been manipulated so as to be as nearly as possible as bad
as the fifty pound painting. But all that is changed nowadays.
Mr. Whistler, in the teeth of a storm of ignorant and silly
ridicule, has forced us to acquire a sense of tone, and has
produced portraits of almost photographic excellence; the
camera has taught us what we really saw as against what the
draughtsman used to show us; and the telephoto lens and its
adaptations, with the isochromatic plate and screen, and the
variety and manageableness of modern printing processes, have
converted the intelligent artists, smashed the picture-fancying
critics, and produced exhibitions such as those now open at
the Dudley and New Galleries, which may be visited by people
who, like myself, have long since given up as unendurable the
follies and falsehoods, the tricks, fakes, happy accidents, and
desolating conventions of the picture galleries. The artists
have still left to them invention, didactics, and (for a
little while longer) colour. But selection and representation,
covering ninety-nine-hundredths of our annual output of art,
belong henceforth to photography. Someday the camera will do
the work of Velásquez and Peter de Hooghe, colour and all; and
then the draughtsmen and painters will be left to cultivate the
pious edifications of Raphael, Kaulbach, Delaroche, and the
designers of the S. P. C. K. But even then they will photograph
their models instead of drawing them.”[102]
In a paper Maurice Maeterlinck wrote for Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, who
kindly gave me a copy, he charges art with having held itself aloof
from “the great movement which for half a century has engrossed all
forms of human activity in profitably exploiting the natural forces
that fill heaven and earth.” Maeterlinck lauds the camera as an
instrument of thought, proclaiming it the best of mediums, because it
serves “to portray objects and beings more quickly and more accurately
than can pencil or crayon.” Just as Maeterlinck concludes that thought
has at last found a fissure through which to penetrate the mystery
of this anonymous force (the sun), “invade it, subjugate it, animate
it, and compel it to say such things as have not yet been said in all
the realm of chiaroscuro, of grace, of beauty and of truth,” so Shaw
expresses his belief that “the old game is up,” and that “the camera
has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of
artistic representation.”
Shaw is a vigorous champion of the photographic art in its integrity;
attempts at imitation of etching or painting draw his hottest fire. The
idea of sensitive photographers allowing themselves to be bull-dozed
into treating painting, not as an obsolete makeshift which they have
surpassed and superseded, but as a glorious ideal to which they have
to live up!!! One day Mr. Shaw was showing me some striking examples
of his own photographic work--a remarkable picture of Sidney Webb, I
recall in especial, an effect got by omitting to do something in taking
the photograph. Mr. Shaw remarked that some of the most unique and
fantastic pictures he had ever taken were the results of accidents. One
day, for instance, he spilled some boiling water over a photograph of
himself, which immediately converted it into so capital an imitation
of the damaged parts of Mantegna's frescoes in Mantua that the print
delighted him more in its ruin than it had in its original sanity.
And, in view of his violently-expressed detestation of photographic
imitation of painting, it is very refreshing to hear him confess that
his own experience as a critic and picture fancier had sophisticated
him so thoroughly, that “those accidental imitations of the products
of the old butter-fingered methods of picture-making often fascinate
me so that I have to put forth all my strength of mind to resist the
temptation to become a systematic forger of damaged frescoes and Gothic
caricatures.”
Mr. Shaw was harshly ridiculed and sharply censured for permitting the
exhibition in 1906 of a nude photograph of himself by Alvin Langdon
Coburn. In this connection, I recall a conversation with Éduard J.
Steichen, who was showing me a collection of his masterly prints,
including several nudes. The faces of the nude figures were averted;
and Steichen told me, with a laugh, that Shaw had ridiculed him
unmercifully for permitting his subjects to call attention to their
embarrassment and shame by averting their faces. And in 1901, Mr. Shaw
wrote:
“The camera will not build up the human figure into a
monumental fiction as Michelangelo did, or coil it cunningly
into a decorative one, as Burne-Jones did. But it will draw it
as it is, in the clearest purity or the softest mystery, as no
draughtsman can or ever could. And by the seriousness of its
veracity it will make the slightest lubricity intolerable.
'Nudes from the Paris Salon' pass the moral _octroi_ because
they justify their rank as 'high art' by the acute boredom into
which they plunge the spectator. Their cheap and vulgar appeal
is nullified by the vapid unreality of their representation.
Photography is so truthful--its subjects are so obviously
realities, and not idle fancies--that dignity is imposed
on it as effectually as it is on a church congregation.
Unfortunately, so is that false decency, rightly detested by
artists, which teaches people to be ashamed of their bodies;
and I am sorry to see that the photographic life school
still shirks the faces of its sitters, and thus gives them a
disagreeable air of doing something they are ashamed of.”[103]
One morning in Paris, during the period that Shaw was sitting to Rodin,
Coburn, with his camera, caught Shaw coming out of his morning bath;
whereupon he laughingly bade Shaw to “be still and look pleasant.” “I
casually assumed, as near as I could recall it,” Mr. Shaw told me,
“the pose of Rodin's '_Le Penseur_.' It was all done in a moment, and
although I am not like '_Le Penseur_,' at least my pose is not unlike
his.” Mr. Shaw permitted the photograph to be put on exhibition as
an object-lesson, so to speak, to the photographic life school; as
Steichen expressed it to me: “I believe Mr. Shaw wanted to show the
courage of his convictions, by publicly taking the medicine he so
unhesitatingly prescribed for others.”
It is needless to point out that Bernard Shaw, the analytic critic and
clear thinker _par excellence_, would naturally prefer photography
to painting. When away from London he is seldom to be seen without
a camera slung over his shoulders; and he has been taking pictures,
and dabbling away at interesting photographic experiments, for
many years. Without talent as an artist himself, but with almost a
passion for photography, we need not be surprised to hear him praise
the photographer because he is free of “that clumsy tool--the human
hand--which will always go its own single way, and no other.”
Steichen and Coburn, he has told me and he has told them, are the two
greatest photographers in the world; and he once said to me of Coburn:
“Whenever his work does not please you, watch and pray for a while and
you will find that your opinion will change.”[104]
To Shaw the true conquest of colour no longer seems far off in the
light of Lumière's discoveries, and the day will soon come, he
surmises, when work like that of Hals and Velásquez may be done by men
who have never painted anything except their own nails with pyro. “As
to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their
day of daubs is over.” He once declared for two photographs of himself
against anything of Holbein, Rembrandt, or Velásquez. “When I compare
their subtle diversity with the monotonous inaccuracy and infirmity
of drawings, I marvel at the gross absence of analytic power and of
imagination which still sets up the works of the great painters,
defects and all, as standard, instead of picking out the qualities they
achieved and the possibilities they revealed, in spite of the barbarous
crudity of their methods.” There are certain quite definite things the
photographer has not yet achieved: Shaw's imagination as a creative
dramatist teaches him this, even though he insists that the decisive
quality in a photographer is the “faculty of seeing certain things and
being tempted by them.” Oscar Wilde acutely remarked that in certain
modern portraits--Sargent's, notably, I should say--there is often
as much of the artist as of the subject. Bernard Shaw insists that
in the pictorial and dramatic phases of the photographic art of the
future, both the artist and the subject must be imaginative artists,
working in conjunction. “As to the creative, dramatic, story-telling
painters--Carpaccio, and Mantegna, and the miraculous Hogarth, for
example--it is clear that photography can do their work only through
a co-operation of sitter and camerist which assimilates the relations
of artist and model to those at present existing between playwright
and actor. Indeed, just as the playwright is sometimes only a very
humble employee of the actor or actress manager, it is conceivable
that in dramatic and didactic photography the predominant partner will
not be necessarily either the photographer or the model, but simply
whichever of the twain contributes the rarest art to the co-operation.
Already that instinctive animal, the public, goes into a shop and says:
'Have you any photographs of Mrs. Patrick Campbell?' and not 'Have you
any photographs by Elliott and Fry, Downey, etc., etc.?' The Salon
is altering this, and photographs are becoming known as Demachys,
Holland Days, Horsley Hintons, and so forth, as who should say Greuzes,
Hoppners and Linnells. But, then, the Salon has not yet touched the art
of Hogarth. When it does, 'The Rake's Progress' will evidently depend
as much on the genius of the rake as of the moralist who squeezes the
bulb, and then we shall see what we shall see.”
FOOTNOTES:
[93] _Who I Am, and What I Think._ Part II., in the _Candid Friend_,
May 18th, 1901.
[94] Mr. A. B. Walkley, Mr. Shaw lately told me.
[95] _The Author to the Dramatic Critics_, Appendix I. to the first
edition of _Widowers' Houses_. London, Henry and Co., Bouverie Street,
E.C., 1893.
[96] Note of the Editor, G. B. Shaw, of Fabian Tract No. 113:
_Communism_--a lecture by William Morris, published by the Fabian
Society.
[97] Obituary essay: _Morris as Actor and Dramatist_, in the _Saturday
Review_, October 10th, 1896. Reproduced in _Dramatic Opinions and
Essays_, Vol. II.
[98] In this connection, compare _The Author's View. A Criticism of
Modern Book Printing._ By Bernard Shaw. In the _Caxton Magazine_,
January, 1902.
[99] _Madox Brown, Watts, and Ibsen._ In the _Saturday Review_, March
13th, 1897.
[100] Cf. _King Arthur_. In the _Saturday Review_, January 19th, 1895.
[101] Compare _Photography_, October 26th, 1909.
[102] _The Exhibitions--I._, by G. Bernard Shaw. In the _Amateur
Photographer_, October 1st, 1901.
[103] _The Exhibitions--II._, in the _Amateur Photographer_, October
18th, 1901.
[104] Compare Shaw's article, _Coburn the Camerist_, in the
_Metropolitan Magazine_, May, 1906.
THE MUSIC CRITIC
“CORNO DI BASSETTO” AND “G. B. S.”
“Don't be in a hurry to contradict G. B. S., as he never
commits himself on a musical subject until he knows at least
six times as much about it as you do.”--_Music._ In the
_World_, January 18th, 1893.
CHAPTER VIII
In 1888 a gentleman described in the _World_ at that time as “a Chinese
statesman named Tay Pay,”[105] founded the _Star_, claiming for it the
distinction of the first and only half-penny paper, and ignoring the
_Echo_, which early succumbed to the treatment. On the recommendation
of Mr. H. W. Massingham, Shaw was placed on the editorial staff as
leader writer, on the second day of the paper's existence. At that
time the Fabian Society had just invented the municipal modification
of Socialism called Progressivism; and the sole object of Shaw, then a
“moderate and constitutional, but strenuous Socialist,” in joining the
_Star_ was to foist this new invention upon it as the latest thing in
Liberalism. Here Shaw's “impossibilism” broke out worse than ever; and
Mr. O'Connor, an Irishman too, and a skilled journalist in the bargain,
was not to be taken in. He refused to print the articles. “Then the
Fabian Society ordered all its members to write to the _Star_,” records
Shaw, “expressing indignant surprise at the lukewarmness of its
Liberalism and the reactionary and obsolete character of its views.
This was more successful; the paper became Progressive, and London
rose so promptly to the new programme, that the first County Council
election was fought and won on it. The Liberal leaders remonstrated
almost daily with T. P., being utterly bewildered by what was to them
a most dangerous heresy. But the _Star_ articles became more and more
Progressive, then ultra-Progressive, then positively Jacobin; and the
further they went the better London liked them. They were not, I beg to
say, written by me, but by Mr. H. W. Massingham.”[106]
While the Fabians were thus engaged in “collaring the _Star_ by
this stage army stratagem,” Shaw, to the utter consternation of the
Chinese statesman, was writing political leaders for which the country
was not ripe by about five hundred years, according to the political
computation of the eighties. Too good-natured to do his duty and put
Shaw out summarily, Tay Pay, in desperation, proposed that Shaw should
have a column to himself, to be headed “Music,” and to be “coloured by
occasional allusions to that art.” It was with a gasp of relief that he
heard Shaw's acceptance of the proposition; and so a new career opened
for Shaw as “ Corno di Bassetto,”[107] a “person now forgotten, but I
flatter myself, very popular for a couple of years in the _Star_.”
[Illustration: =“Magnetic, he has the power to infect almost everyone
with the delight that he takes in himself.” (Mr. George Bernard Shaw.)=]
_A Cartoon. By Max Beerbohm._
_By permission of the Artist and “Vanity Fair.”_
Among Shaw's colleagues on the _Star_ at this time were Clement K.
Shorter and Richard Le Gallienne. A. B. Walkley, the distinguished
dramatic critic of the London _Times_, was then the “_Star_ man”
in the theatres, and although he was more fastidious and dignified
than the incorrigible “Bassetto,” he was quite as amusing. “I am far
from denying that a man of genius may make even a newspaper notice
of the Royal Academy or of a 'Monday Pop.' permanently valuable and
delightful,” Mr. Archer once said; “all I maintain is that it assuredly
takes a man of genius to do so. Mr. Bernard Shaw ... has to my thinking
a peculiar genius for bringing day-by-day musical criticism into vital
relation with æsthetics at large, and even with ethics and politics--in
a word, with life....” According to his subsequent confession, “The
_Star's_ own captious critic,” as Shaw was denominated at the time,
used the word music in a platonically comprehensive sense; for he wrote
about anything and everything that came into his head. He once spoke of
his column in the _Star_, signed “Corno di Bassetto,” as “a mixture of
triviality, vulgarity, farce and tomfoolery with genuine criticism.”
George Henry Lewes' style, as Mr. Archer has shrewdly observed,[108]
reminds one of that of “Corno di Bassetto”; but the dramatic essays
of Lewes, Shaw freely confesses, are miles beyond the crudities of Di
Bassetto, although the combination of a laborious criticism with a
recklessly flippant manner is the same in both. Indeed, Shaw's column
in the _Star_ was perhaps the most startling evidence of the insurgency
and iconoclasm of the New Journalism as represented by the _Star_, its
foremost exponent. Imagine a column a week in the sprightly vein of the
following:
“I warn others that Offenbach's music is wicked. It is
abandoned stuff: every accent in it is a snap of the fingers
in the face of moral responsibility, every ripple and sparkle
on its surface twits me for my teetotalism, and mocks at the
early rising which I fully intend to make a habit of some
day.... In Mr. Cellier's scores, music is still the chastest
of the muses. In Offenbach's she is--what shall I say?--I am
ashamed of her. I no longer wonder that the Germans came to
Paris and suppressed her with fire and thunder. Here in England
how respectable she is! Virtuous and rustically innocent
her six-eight measures are, even when Dorothy sings, 'Come,
fill up your glass to the brim'! She learned her morals from
Handel, her ladylike manners from Mendelssohn, her sentiment
from the 'Bailiff's Daughter of Islington.' But listen to her
in Paris, with Offenbach. Talk of six-eight time: why, she
stumbles at the second quaver, only to race off again in a wild
Bacchanalian, Saturnalian, petticoat spurning, irreclaimable,
shocking quadrille.”
No more accurate characterization of the work of Di Bassetto can be
conceived than is to be found in Shaw's own confession. He secured the
privileges he usurped, he says, in two ways: first, by taking care
that “Corno di Bassetto” should always be amusing; and, secondly, by
using a considerable knowledge of music, which nobody suspected him of
possessing, to provide a solid substratum of genuine criticism for the
mass of outrageous levities and ridiculous irrelevancies which were the
dramatic characteristics of “Bassetto.” “I daresay these articles would
seem shabby, vulgar, cheap, silly, vapid enough if they were dug up and
exposed to the twentieth century light; but in those days, and in the
context of the topics of that time, they were sufficiently amusing to
serve their turn.”[109]
It will be recalled that Shaw, from his early childhood, had been in
close contact with the best that had been thought, felt, and written
in music. It was his practice as a boy to whistle to himself the
operatic themes he heard continually practised at his home, precisely
as a street _gamin_ whistles the latest piece of “rag-time.” He
was introduced to Wagner's music for the first time by hearing a
second-rate military band play an arrangement of the _Tannhäuser_
march. He thought it a rather commonplace plagiarism from the famous
theme in _Der Freischütz_. This boyish impression was exactly the same
as that recorded of the mature Berlioz, who was to Shaw at that time
the merest shadow of a name which he had read once or twice. Shaw
learned his notes at the age of sixteen; and although for a long time
thereafter he inflicted untold suffering on his neighbours, he became
in time quite a good accompanist. In the early days in London, when
he was not laboriously writing five pages a day on one of his novels,
Shaw occasionally tried his hand at musical composition, at writing and
setting words to music. I have before me now a folded sheet of pink
paper, dated “23d of June, 1883,” in Shaw's fine handwriting, on which
he had written music for one of Shelley's poems, Rossetti edition, Vol.
III., p. 107. On the inside of the folded sheet, in Shaw's hand, is
copied the poem, headed _Lines_, beginning:
“When the lamp is shattered,
The light in the dust lies dead;
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed;
“When the lute is broken,
Sweet notes are remembered not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.”
Shaw was deeply interested in a study of Wagner's music, and took
great pains in studying Wagner's methods of composition. I have seen
Shaw's musical notes made during this period--sheets of stiff paper on
which he had written out the musical scores of the various distinct
_leit motifs_ in the Wagnerian operas--the Ring motive, the Rheingold
motive, etc., etc.--with fine marginal stenographic notes in the Pitman
system. He once made quite a study of counterpoint; and, as we learned
in an earlier chapter, acquired a grounding in “Temperament” through
his acquaintance with his friend, James Lecky. When Mr. O'Connor
transferred Shaw from the editorial staff to the post of musical critic
for the _Star_, believing that he could do no great harm there, his
wisdom was justified by the result. All his experience in writing and
criticism on the _Star_, combined with his early knowledge of music,
filled Shaw's hands with weapons. And when Louis Engel, the “best hated
musical critic in Europe,” as Shaw calls him, found it necessary to
give up his position as musical critic of the _World_, his post fell to
“Corno di Bassetto.”
At the time when Shaw first entered the lists as a musical critic, he
was possessed of the strongest convictions on the subject of music,
musicians, and true musical genius. In _Love Among the Artists_ Shaw
has given expression to his decided views concerning the pedantry
of the academic schools, the absurd jargon of conventional musical
criticism, and the vacuity and inconsequence of all music, based
on method alone, which does not come into being through unaffected
enthusiasm for art, and the sincere effort towards the complete
realization of personality. The musical criticism which takes the
analysis of “Bach in B minor” as its point of departure is there held
up to unmeasured scorn. It seems something more than a coincidence that
the avoidance of this very subject, with all its implications, should
have been the condition on which Shaw began his career as a critic of
music. In connection with his appointment as musical critic of the
_Star_, Shaw relates this story of Mr. O'Connor: “He placed himself
in my hands with one reservation only. 'Say what you like,' he said;
'but for--(here I omit a pathetic Oriental adjuration)--don't tell us
anything about Bach in B minor.' It was a bold speech, considering
the superstitious terror in which the man who has the abracadabra of
musical technology at his fingers' end holds the uninitiated editor;
but it conveyed a golden rule.” Shaw was in perfect accord with the
editor in the belief that “Bach in B minor” is not good criticism, not
good sense, not interesting to the general readers, not useful to the
student. He fulfilled his part of the contract far more completely than
the “Chinese statesman” had any right to expect. Not only did Shaw not
tell us anything about “Bach in B minor”: he spent six years of his
life in holding the practice up to ridicule and contempt!
Bernard Shaw brought his critical faculty to bear upon music in England
during the period when the academic faction held full sway. There was
a large reserve of native musical talent in England at this time, but
it found nothing like full scope for its development, largely because
of the commercial pandering to popular taste. The so-called masters of
contemporary music in England were all reared on the methodology of the
schools. Dr. Mackenzie, the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music,
was probably the leader of the academic faction. Sir George Grove,
author of that standard work, the _Dictionary of Musicians_, was an
honoured figure in the world of music. Dr. Hubert Parry, at the height
of his creative activity, was writing and occasionally conducting his
oratorios, such as _Job_ and _Judith_. These and other earlier works
of his--notably, _L'Allegro ed il Pensieroso_ and _Prometheus_--Shaw
took the utmost pleasure in declaring to be “without any merit
whatsoever,” or “the most conspicuous failures,” despite their fine
feeling, their scrupulous moderation, and other pleasant and perfectly
true irrelevancies. At the Albert Hall, Sir Joseph Barnby, Principal
of the Royal Choral Society, in his measured and complacent style, was
leading those huge, lumbering choirs which are still the pride of Great
Britain. Villiers Stanford, that Irish professor ever trifling in a
world of ideas, was writing his _Eden_, and other works, which entitled
him to a high place in the councils of academicism. Goring Thomas, for
his _Golden Web_, and other operas, had already attained a position
as a dramatic composer, which, according to Shaw, at least, “placed
the production of an opera of his beyond all suspicion as a legitimate
artistic enterprise.” Arnold Dolmetsch, that rarely fine interpreter
of ancient music, was giving those unique viol concerts in the hall of
Barnard's Inn and elsewhere which charmed Arthur Symons yesterday as
they charmed Bernard Shaw long ago. Gilbert and Sullivan had once more
joined forces in _Utopia_, scoring another operatic triumph, somewhat
less decisive and conspicuous, it must be confessed, than _Pinafore_,
_The Mikado_ and _The Pirates of Penzance_. Cowen was winning encomiums
as a conductor, and Sterndale Bennett was still a name to conjure with.
To the many, Wagner, like Ibsen, was still an offensive impostor. But
Ashton Ellis's exhaustive task of translating Wagner's works was slowly
proceeding; and Armbruster, that Bayreuth extension lecturer, so to
speak, aided by Shaw in the _Star_ and in the _World_, was paving the
way for a more general comprehension and appreciation of Wagner in
England. Paderewski was slowly mounting to the position of the foremost
living pianist, and Patti had begun to give her “Farewell Concerts.”
In musical criticism, as in all other phases of his strangely
diversified career, Shaw is essentially a revolutionary. His attack
upon Parry's _Job_, so he always maintained, threatened to call
forth a great national protest! He fought for Wagner with the same
revolutionary enthusiasm which enlisted him in the cause of Ibsen--and
Shaw. He had no tolerance for anything traditional, not even for
traditional versions of old airs, for the simple reason that they were
always inaccurate. So jealous was he of his critical sense, for fear
of its prostitution by irrelevant beauty or factitious romance, that
he steadfastly steeled himself against that subtlest of all forces in
undermining critical integrity--personal magnetism.
Perhaps the simplest way to arrive at a comprehension of Shaw, the
critic of music, is by taking account of his tastes and aversions. For
example, Shaw usually viewed Paderewski's performances, at the time
when the Polish pianist was first creating such sensations in England,
as brutal contests between the piano and the pianist to settle the
question of the survival of the fittest. The following description of
his sensations on hearing Paderewski is not without its reminder of
that once popular _pièce de récitation_, _How Ruby Played_.[110] “The
concerto was over, the audience in wild enthusiasm, and the piano a
wreck. Regarded as an immensely spirited young harmonious blacksmith,
who puts a concerto on the piano as upon an anvil, and hammers it
out with an exuberant enjoyment of the swing and strength of the
proceeding, Paderewski is at least exhilarating; and his hammer play
is not without variety, some of it being feathery, if not delicate.
But his touch, light or heavy, is the touch that hurts; and the glory
of his playing is the glory that attends murder on a large scale when
impetuously done.” Three years later, in 1893, Shaw has reached the
conclusion that Paderewski is a weak, a second-hand composer, but an
artist whose genuine creative achievements have assured him the title
of the greatest of living pianists. “I had rather see Paderewski in his
next composition for orchestra drop the piano altogether,” Shaw said.
“It is the one instrument he does not understand as a composer, exactly
because he understands it so well as an executant.”
For David Bispham Shaw had the sincerest admiration, and the De Reszkes
won his praise because, as he explained it, they sang like dignified
men, instead of like male viragoes in the dramatic Italian style. He
made a point of insisting, however, that Édouard de Reszke occasionally
abused his power by “wilful bawling for the mere fun of making a
thundering noise. On hearing Gerster in 1890, he was sufficiently
charmed to say: “The old artistic feeling remained so unspoiled and
vivid that, if here and there a doubt crossed me whether the notes were
all reaching the furthest half-crown seat as tellingly as they came to
my front stall, I ignored it for the sake of the charm which neither
singer nor opera (_The Huguenots_) has lost for me.” Of a concert
given in 1893 by “our still adored Patti,” whom he calls “now the most
accomplished of mezzo-sopranos,” he gives the following description:
“It always amuses me to see that vast audience (at Albert
Hall) from the squares and villas listening with moist eyes
whilst the opulent lady from the celebrated Welsh castle
fervently sings: 'Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage
again.' The concert was a huge success: there were bouquets,
raptures, effusions, kissings of children, graceful sharings
of the applause with _obbligato_ players--in short, the usual
exhibition of the British _bourgeoisie_ in the part of Bottom
and the prima donna in the part of Titania. Patti hazarded none
of her old exploits as a florid soprano with an exceptional
range: her most arduous achievement was '_Ah, fors e lui_,' so
liberally transposed that the highest notes in the rapid traits
were almost all sharp, the artist having been accustomed for so
many years to sing them at a higher pitch. Time has transposed
Patti a minor third down, but the middle of her voice is
still even and beautiful; and this with her unsurpassed
phrasing and that delicate touch and expressive _nuance_ which
make her _cantabile_ singing so captivating, enables her to
maintain what was, to my mind, always the best part of her old
supremacy.”[111]
Of that brilliant executant Essipoff, the wife of Leschetizky, Shaw
said that if it were possible to believe that she _cared_ two straws
about what she played, she would be one of the greatest executive
musicians of Europe. Hollman was, on the whole and without any
exception, in Shaw's opinion, the greatest violoncellist he had ever
heard. Joachim's fineness of tone, perfect dignity of style, and
fitness of phrasing impressed Shaw as truly magnificent; and when he
heard him play Bach's “Chaconne in D minor,” he confessed that he came
as near as he ever came to calling anything done by mortal artist
perfect. Ysaye, that other master-violinist, moved Shaw as much as he
moved Symons by the perfectly harmonious blending of his every faculty.
Shaw smilingly reminded all readers of the screed of G. B. S. that
“Decidedly, if Ysaye only perseveres in playing splendidly to us for
twenty-five years more or so, it will dawn on us at last that he is one
of the greatest of living artists; and then he may play how he pleases
until he turns ninety without the least risk of ever hearing a word of
disparagement or faint praise.”
In Shaw's view, Mozart is the ideal, the supreme composer. Again
and again, throughout his works, Shaw has lavished upon Mozart the
finely-tempered praise of the clear-eyed devotee. The critical rating
of a composer is overwhelmingly impressive when it is supported by
the avowal of personal indebtedness; and Shaw has frequently asserted
that Mozart has influenced his dramatic works more than any English
dramatist since Shakespeare. I remember discussing Mozart with Mr.
Shaw one day; and I took occasion to express my scepticism as to the
possibility of any profound influence exerted by Mozart the composer
upon Shaw the dramatist. “In a certain sense, Mozart must always have
been a model for me,” replied Mr. Shaw. “Throughout the entire period
of my career as a critic of music, I always thought and wrote of
Mozart as a master of masters. The dream of a musician is to have the
technique of Mozart. It was not his 'divine melodies' but his perfect
technique that profoundly influenced me. What a great thing to be a
dramatist for dramatists, just as Mozart was a composer for composers!
First, and above all things else, Mozart was a _master to masters_.”
The second part of _Faust_ impressed Shaw as the summit of Schumann's
achievement in dramatic music; and he was very ready to admit that
Schumann had at least one gift which has now come to rank very high
among the qualifications of a composer for the stage: a strong feeling
for harmony as a means of emotional expression. He always found Brahms
to be insufferably tedious when he tried to be profound, but delightful
when he merely tried to be pleasant and naïvely sentimental. “Euphuism,
which is the beginning and end of Brahms' big works,” Shaw remarks
in connection with the “Symphony in E minor,” “is more to my taste
in music than in literature. Brahms takes an essentially commonplace
theme; gives it a strange air by dressing it in the most elaborate
and far-fetched harmonies; keeps his countenance severely (which at
once convinces an English audience that he must have a great deal in
him); and finds that a good many wiseacres are ready to guarantee him
as deep as Wagner, and the true heir of Beethoven.” Dvorak, Bohemia's
most eminent creative musician, famed alike for an inexhaustible wealth
of melodic invention and a rich variety of colouring, is stamped by
Shaw as a romantic composer, and only that. His “Requiem” Shaw found
utterly tedious and mechanical, while his “Symphony in G” is “very
nearly up to the level of a Rossini overture, and would make excellent
promenade music at the summer fêtes.” The announcement of a Mass by
Dvorak affected Shaw very much as would the announcement of a “Divine
Comedy” in ever so many cantos by Robert Louis Stevenson! He regarded
Verdi as the greatest of living dramatic composers; and years before
Shaw began writing musical criticism, when Von Bülow and others were
contemptuously repudiating Verdi, Shaw was able to discern in him
a man possessing more power than he knew how to use, or, indeed,
was permitted to use by the old operatic forms imposed on him by
circumstances.[112]
For the solemnly manufactured operas of Saint Saëns, Shaw felt not mere
distaste, but genuine contempt. As soon, in fact, as he discovered
the sort of thing that a French composer dreams of as the summit of
operatic achievement, his artistic sympathy with Paris was cut off at
the main. Early in his career, he solemnly announces, he gave up Paris
as impossible from the artistic point of view! His characterization of
French music is nothing short of Heinesque.
“London I do not so much mind. Your average Londoner is, no
doubt, as void of feeling for the fine arts as a man can be
without collapsing bodily; but, then, he is not at all ashamed
of his condition. On the contrary, he is rather proud of it,
and never feels obliged to pretend that he is an artist to the
tips of his fingers. His pretences are confined to piety and
politics, in both of which he is an unspeakable impostor. It
is your Parisian who concentrates his ignorance and hypocrisy,
not on politics and religion, but on art. In this unwholesome
state of self-consciousness he demands statues and pictures
and operas in all directions, long before any appetite for
beauty has set his eyes or ears aching; so that he at once
becomes the prey of pedants who undertake to supply him with
classical works, and swaggerers who set up in the romantic
department. Hence, as the Parisian, like other people, likes
to enjoy himself, and as pure pedantry is tedious and pure
swaggering tiresome, what Paris chiefly loves is a genius who
can make the classic voluptuous and the romantic amusing.
And so, though you cannot walk through Paris without coming
at every corner upon some fountain or trophy or monument for
which the only possible remedy is dynamite, you can always
count upon the design including a female figure free from the
defect known to photographers as under-exposure; and if you go
to the opera--which is, happily, an easily avoidable fate--you
may wonder at the expensive trifling that passes as musical
poetry and drama, but you will be compelled to admit that the
composer has moments, carried as far as academic propriety
admits, in which he rises from sham history and tragedy to
genuine polka and barcarolle; whilst there is, to boot,
always one happy half-hour when the opera-singers vanish, and
capable, thoroughly trained, hard-working, technically skilled
executants entertain you with a ballet. Of course the ballet,
like everything else in Paris, is a provincial survival, fifty
years behind English time; but still it is generally complete
and well done by people who understand ballet, whereas the
opera is generally mutilated and ill done by people who don't
understand opera.”
Is it any wonder, then, that the “tinpot stage history” of Saint Saëns
was the bane of Shaw's existence and the abomination of his critical
sense? Or that Offenbach's music struck him as wicked, abandoned
stuff? And of Meyerbeer, then still regarded in Paris as a sort of
Michelangelo, he says: “If you try to form a critical scheme of the
development of English poetry from Pope to Walt Whitman, you cannot
by any stretch of ingenuity make a place in it for Thomas Moore, who
is accordingly either ignored in such schemes or else contemptuously
dismissed as a flowery trifler. In the same way, you cannot get
Meyerbeer into the Wagnerian scheme except as the Autolycus of the
piece.”
The most significant feature of Shaw's career as a musical critic was
his championship of Wagner. Although he had an exalted admiration for
Wagner, he was no hero-worshipper, nor in the least degree blind to
the defects of Wagner as a composer who failed to preserve philosophic
continuity and coherence in his greatest dramatic achievement. The
similarity of tastes in music between Wagner and Shaw is a very
noticeable feature of the “C. di B.” and “G. B. S.” criticisms. It
was to be expected that Shaw the dramatist would admire Wagner for
composing music designed to heighten the expression of human emotion;
he realized fully that such music was intensely affecting in the
presence of that emotion, and utter nonsense apart from it. Like
Wagner, Shaw had a deep love for Beethoven, an intense admiration for
Mozart, and a sincere appreciation of the Mendelssohn of the Scotch
symphony. And he likewise shared Wagner's sovereign contempt for the
efforts of Schumann and Brahms to be “profound.”
A German would laugh at the notion that Wagner required any
“championing” during the years from 1888 to 1894 inclusive, since
the Bayreuth performances began in 1876. The chief novelty in
Shaw's Wagner criticisms was his attack on Bayreuth for the various
old-fashioned absurdities perpetrated there--the inadequacy of _mise
en scène_, the ridiculous unnaturalness and inappropriateness of
scenery and dress, and the retention in leading parts of “beer-barrels
of singers” who did not know how to sing. The result of Shaw's first
visit, in 1889, was an article on Bayreuth for the _English Illustrated
Magazine_; a later visit produced an illustrated article in the _Pall
Mall Budget_. Besides this, both visits were reported day by day by
Shaw in the _Star_, over his signature, “Corno di Bassetto,” or “C. di
B.” Up to that time, in Shaw's opinion, Bayreuth criticism had been
either worship or blasphemy. “I threw off all this, and criticized
performances of Wagner's works at Bayreuth precisely as I should have
criticized performances of Wagner's works at Covent Garden. The effect
on pious Wagnerians was as though I had brawled in church.”
In his relation of musical critic in England, Shaw took the greatest
pains to ascertain the exact bearings of the controversy which had
raged round Wagner's music-dramas since the middle of the century.
The six years of Shaw's activity as a musical critic fell within the
decade of Sir Augustus Harris's greatest operatic enterprises. Shaw
spent a large part of his time in making onslaught after onslaught on
the “spurious artistic prestige” of Covent Garden. For some seasons
he was forced to pay for his own stall; and there were times, Shaw
says, when “I was warned that my criticisms were being collated by
legal experts for the purpose of proving 'prejudice' against me, and
crushing me by mulcting my editor in fabulous sums.... The _World_
proved equal to the occasion in the conflict with Covent Garden, and,
finally, my invitations to the opera were renewed; the impresario made
my personal acquaintance, and maintained the pleasantest relations with
me from that time onward....” It is true that Jean de Reszke made his
first appearance on any stage on July 13th, 1889, as the hero of _Die
Meistersinger_; but it infuriated Sir Augustus Harris to be publicly
reminded by Shaw that _Tristan and Isolde_, having been composed in
1859, was perhaps a little overdue. Indeed, it was not until 1896 that
_Tristan and Isolde_ at last made its way into the repertory of Royal
Italian Opera in England. Shaw exhausted himself, in the columns of the
_World_, in “apparently hopeless attempts to shame the De Reszkes out
of their perpetual Faust and Mephistopheles, Romeo and Laurent, and in
pooh-poohed declarations that there were such works in existence as
_Die Walküre_ and _Tristan_. It was not Sir Augustus Harris who roused
Jean de Reszke from his long lethargy, but his own artistic conscience
and the shock of Vandyk's brilliant success in Massenet's _Manon_.”
And when Shaw's successor on the _World_, on the occasion of the death
of Sir Augustus Harris in 1896, declared that the great impresario
laboured to cast aside the fatuous conventions of the Italian school,
and to adopt all that was best in the German stage, Shaw was provoked
into a crushing reply. “_Sancta simplicitas!_” he exclaimed. “The truth
is that he fought obstinately for the Italian fatuities against the
German reforms. He was saturated with the obsolete operatic traditions
of the days of Tietjens, whose Semiramide and Lucrezia he admired as
great tragic impersonations. He described _Das Rheingold_ as 'a damned
pantomime'; he persisted for years in putting _Tannhäuser_ on the stage
with Venusberg effects that would have disgraced a Whitechapel Road
gaff, with the twelve horns on the stage replaced by a military band
behind the scenes, and with Rotten Row trappings on the horses.... It
was only in the last few years that he began to learn something from
Calvé and the young Italian school, from Wagner, from Massenet and
Bruneau, and from Verdi's latest works. In opera, unfortunately, he
was soaked in tradition, and kept London a quarter of a century behind
New York and Berlin--down almost to the level of Paris--in dramatic
music.”[113]
It happens that Shaw's squarest and solidest contributions to
Wagnerian criticism were written after his career as musical critic
ceased. At the request of Mr. Benjamin Tucker, editor of _Liberty_,
a journal of Philosophic Anarchy, published in New York, Shaw wrote
a reply to Max Nordau's _Degeneration_, which was then (1895) making
a great impression on the American mind. This reply, entitled _A
Degenerate's View of Nordau_, was published in a double copy of
_Liberty_, especially printed to make room for it; Mr. Tucker sent a
copy to every paper in America; and, as Shaw avers, Nordau's book has
never been heard of in an American paper since. It was undoubtedly a
great piece of journalism in those days for Mr. Tucker to pick out
the right man--as Shaw unquestionably was--for that stupendous task;
and Shaw still takes an unholy joy in showing how Tucker the crank
was able to beat all the big fashionable editors at their own game.
Besides being largely imported in England, the article did Shaw a
great private service. For when William Morris read it, he at once
threw off all reserve in talking to Shaw about modern art, and treated
him thenceforth as a man who knew enough to understand what might be
said to him on that subject. The article contained, among many other
equally able things, an eminently sane and intelligible treatment
of the development of modern music, and its relation to Wagner. Mr.
Huneker, who regards this as Shaw's finest piece of controversial work,
rightly declared that it completely swept Nordau from the field of
discussion.[114]
[Illustration: =Ahenobarbus at Rehearsal.=]
Reproduced from the original water-color, drawn from memory, in 1894.
_Bernard Partridge._
_Courtesy of the Artist._
The other piece of Wagnerian criticism by which Shaw is best known
was the subject of a letter Shaw once wrote to the editor of the
_Academy_ (October 15th, 1895): “I see you have been announcing a
book by me entitled, 'The Complete Wagnerite,'” writes Shaw. “This
is an error; you are thinking of an author named Izaak Walton. The
book, which is a work of great merit, even for me, is called, 'The
Perfect Wagnerite,' and is an exposition of the philosophy of _Der
Ring des Nibelungen_. It is a G. B. essence of modern Anarchism, or
Neo-Protestantism. This lucid description speaks for itself. As it has
been written on what the whole medical faculty and all the bystanders
declare to be my death-bed, it is naturally rather a book of devotion
than one of those vain brilliancies which I was wont to give off in
the days of my health and strength.--P. S. I have just sprained my
ankle in trying to master the art of bicycling on one foot. This, with
two operations and a fall downstairs, involving a broken arm, is my
season's record so far, leaving me in excellent general condition. And
yet they tell me a vegetarian can't recuperate!” In this commentary to
what had already been written by “musicians who are no revolutionists,
and revolutionists who are no musicians,” Shaw reads into Wagner far
more Socialism than he had ever read into Ibsen. He took pains to base
his interpretation upon the facts of Wagner's life--his connection with
the revolution of 1848, his association with August Roeckel and Michael
Bakounin, his later pamphlets on social evolution, religion, life, art,
and the influence of riches--rather than upon his recorded utterances
in regard to the specific meanings of the “Ring” music-dramas. It
is not difficult to recognize, with Shaw, the portraiture of our
capitalistic industrial system from the Socialist point of view in
the slavery of the Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberich: but little
significance attaches to such cheap symbolism. It is more difficult
to identify the young Siegfried with the anarchist Bakounin on the
strength of the latter's notorious pamphlet demanding the demolition
of existing institutions. To the _Ring of the Niblungs_, Shaw has,
so to speak, applied the Ibsenic-Nietzschean-Shavian philosophy as a
unit of measure, and found it to apply at many points. Siegfried is
a “totally unmoral person, a born Anarchist, the ideal of Bakounin,
an anticipation of the 'overman' of Nietzsche”--a Germanized Dick
Dudgeon or a Teutonic Prometheus. Whenever the philosophy of the
“Ring” diverges from the Shavian philosophy, Wagner was “wandering in
his mind.” Whenever his own explanations do not agree with the _idée
fixe_ of Shaw, they only prove, as was once claimed by Shaw in the
case of Ibsen, that Wagner was far less intellectually conscious of
his purpose than Shaw. As an exposition of the Shavian philosophy, the
book is worthy of note; as an exposition of the Wagnerian philosophy,
it is unconvincing. The book is exceedingly ingenious and in places,
brilliant; but it is the work of an ideologue and an a-priorist.
One final word in regard to Shaw's position as a champion of Wagner.
While it is of little importance now, still Wagner and anti-Wagner
was the great controversy of that time in music until anti-Wagnerism
finally became ridiculous in the face of Wagner's overwhelming
popularity. In the same way, Ibsen and anti-Ibsen was the great
controversy in drama in London after 1889. In both instances, the
whirligig of time has brought round its revenges. For some years, even
before his death, Ibsen stood unchallenged as the premier dramatist
of the age. And now that Wagner's battle is won and over-won, Shaw
has the profound gratification of seeing “the professors, to avert
the ridicule of their pupils, compelled to explain (quite truly) that
Wagner's technical procedure in music is almost pedantically logical
and grammatical; that the _Lohengrin_ prelude is a masterpiece of the
'form' proper to its aim; and that his disregard of 'false relations,'
and his free use of the most extreme discords without 'preparation,'
were straight and sensible instances of that natural development of
harmony which has proceeded continually from the time when common
six-four chords were considered 'wrong,' and such free use of
unprepared dominant sevenths and minor ninths as had become common in
Mozart's time would have seemed the maddest cacophony.” And in a letter
to me, Mr. Shaw said (July 15th, 1905): “I was on the right side in
both instances: that is all. According to the _Daily Chronicle_, Wagner
and Ibsen were offensive impostors. As a matter of fact, they were
the greatest living masters in their respective arts; and I knew that
quite well. The critics of the nineteenth century had two first-rate
chances--Ibsen and Wagner. For the most part they missed both. Second
best they could recognize; but best was beyond them.”[115]
Mr. Shaw's most recent incursion into the field of music criticism
was occasioned by a criticism of Richard Strauss' _Elektra_, at the
time of its first production in England in March, 1910, from the pen
of the well-known critic of music, Mr. Ernest Newman. The vigorous
controversy between Mr. Shaw and Mr. Newman that ensued was, of course,
quite inconclusive, so far as erecting any absolute standards by which
Strauss' greatness as a dramatic composer might be judged. But it
evoked from Mr. Shaw an outburst of enthusiasm unparalleled in his
career as a critic of music:
“What Hofmannsthal and Strauss have done is to take
Clytemnestra and Aegistheus, and by identifying them with
everything that is evil and cruel, with all that needs must
hate the highest when it sees it, with hideous domination and
coercion of the higher by the baser, with the murderous rage
in which the lust for a lifetime of orgiastic pleasure turns
on its slaves in the torture of its disappointment and the
sleepless horror and misery of its neurasthenia, to so rouse
in us an overwhelming flood of wrath against it and ruthless
resolution to destroy it, that Elektra's vengeance becomes holy
to us; and we come to understand how even the gentlest of us
could wield the axe of Orestes or twist our firm fingers in the
black hair of Clytemnestra to drag back her head and leave her
throat open to the stroke.
“That was a task hardly possible to an ancient Greek.
... And that is the task which Hofmannsthal has achieved. Not
even in the third scene of _Das Rheingold_, or in the Klingsor
scenes in _Parsifal_, is there such an atmosphere of malignant
and cancerous evil as we get here. And that the power with
which it is done is not the power of the evil itself, but of
the passion that detests and must and finally can destroy that
evil, is what makes the work great, and makes us rejoice in its
horror....
“That the power of conceiving it should occur in the same
individual as the technical skill and natural faculty needed to
achieve its complete and overwhelming expression in music, is a
stroke of the rarest good fortune that can befall a generation
of men. I have often said, when asked to state the case against
the fools and moneychangers who are trying to drive us into a
war with Germany, that the case consists of the single word,
Beethoven. To-day, I should say with equal confidence, Strauss.
That we should make war on Strauss and the heroic warfare and
aspiration that he represents is treason to humanity. In this
music-drama Strauss has done for us just what he has done
for his own countrymen: he has said for us, with an utterly
satisfying force, what all the noblest powers of life within us
are clamouring to have said, in protest against and defiance of
the omnipresent villainies of our civilization; and this is the
highest achievement of the highest art.”[116]
So often was Shaw mocked by scepticism concerning his talent and
by imperviousness to his mood, that he sometimes actually went to
the length of tagging one of his Irish bulls with the explanatory
parenthesis (“I speak as an Irishman”). If the larger public ever
gains a just understanding of Shaw, it will be because they have
found this central and directing clue: he speaks as an Irishman. The
right to say in jest what is meant in earnest is a right the average
Englishman denies; he agrees with Victor Hugo that “every man has
a right to be a fool, but he should not abuse that right.” M.
Faguet has recently said of Sainte Beuve that he was guided by one
of the finest professional consciences the world of literature has
ever known. Early in his career, Shaw succeeded in imparting to his
readers the conviction that his glaring deficiency was the total lack
of a professional conscience. Shaw was preoccupied with the exposition
of the eternal comedy. He is that hitherto unknown phenomenon in the
history of musical criticism--a musical critic who charged his critical
weapon with genuine comic force. The conviction has probably come to
every musical critic in some moment of self-distrust that his effort
to catch and imprison in written words the elusive spirit of music is,
after all, only a more or less humorous subterfuge. In this respect
Shaw differs from every other musical critic who ever lived: instead of
feeling his criticism to be merely a humorous subterfuge, he actually
believed it to be a comically veracious impression of reality.
No view of Shaw's unique attitude as a critic has yet been obtained
that is not one-sided, false, or--what is far worse--misleading. The
absurdly simple truth is that Shaw always aimed at saying, in the most
forcible and witty way possible, exactly what he thought and felt,
however absurd, unnatural, or comic these criticisms might sound to the
“poor, silly, simple public.” To the feelings of other musical critics,
to the prejudices of the dry academic schools, or even to the consensus
of opinion, crystallized through the lapse of years, he paid no heed
whatsoever. He did not feel himself bound by the traditions of any
journal, by any obligations, fancied or real, to operatic managers, or
by the predilections of his audience. In fact, to put it in a homely
way, he was “his own man,” feeling free to express his opinions exactly
as he chose. And it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that, since
1885, the whole spirit of English criticism, personified in Walkley,
Archer and Shaw--an Englishman of French descent, a Scotchman, and an
Irishman--has been a spirit of forthrightness, outspoken frankness and
unblushing sincerity.
In the matter of individual style, Shaw occupies an absolutely unique
position in English literature. He occupied a more unusual _terrain_
than had ever been occupied before. Concerning the subjects in which
he claimed to be thoroughly versed, he gaily announced himself as an
authority. With an air of grandiose condescension, he once confessed
that he might be mistaken: “Even I am not infallible--that is, not
always.” He really meant that he was. “Let it be remembered, that I am
a superior person,” he characteristically says, “and that what seemed
incoherent and wearisome fooling to me may have seemed an exhilarating
pastime to others. My heart knows only its own bitterness; and I do
not desire to intermeddle with the joys of those among whom I am a
stranger. I assert my intellectual superiority--that is all.” He was
ever sublimely conscious of his own supreme dialectical and critical
skill. “Some day I must write a supplement to Schumann's 'Advice to
Young Musicians.' The title will be 'Advice to Old Musicians'; and the
first precept will run, 'Don't be in a hurry to contradict G. B. S.,
as he never commits himself on a musical subject until he knows at
least six times as much about it as you do.'” If he had been matched
in argument with the greatest living critic of the arts--and he was
frequently matched against the greatest English critics--he would
doubtless have said to him, in the language of the apocryphal anecdote:
“All the world's mad save thee and me, John. And sometimes I think
thee's a little mad too.”
Behind all this “_infernal blague_” lurks the real critic, whose
chief conviction is that “Bach in B minor” is not fit subject for
enjoyment or criticism. “I would not be misunderstood,” Mr. Shaw
remarked to me one day, “in regard to my position about analysis and
'analytic criticism.' The analytic criticism I mercilessly condemn
is the sort of criticism of Hamlet's soliloquy that reads: 'It is
highly significant, in the first place, that Hamlet begins his
soliloquy with the infinitive of the verb “To be,” etc., etc' Far from
minimizing the function of analysis sanely and appropriately employed
in criticism, I attribute my superiority as a critic to my superiority
in the faculty of analysis.” The inevitable reaction from “absolute
music” was the dramatic expression of individuality, _e.g._, Wagner.
The inevitable reaction from “analytic criticism” is the critical
expression of individuality, _e.g._, Shaw. He never hunted out false
relations, consecutive fifths and sevenths, the first subject, the
second subject, the working out, and all the rest of “the childishness
that could be taught to a poodle.” His supreme effort was to get away
from a discussion of the technology of music to the _nuances_ of the
music itself, the source of its inspiration, the spirit of its genius.
If Shaw should find Wagner an offensive charlatan and his themes
cacophonous strings of notes, he would frankly say so, without making
any effort to _prove_ him so by laying down the first principles of
character and composition, and showing that his conduct and his works
are incompatible with these principles. The expert, in Shaw's view,
should merely give you his personal opinion for what it is worth. Shaw
protested against the whole academic system in England, and declared
himself its open enemy. “This unhappy country would be as prolific of
musical as of literary composers were it not for our schools of music,
where they seize the young musician, turn his attention forcibly away
from the artistic element in his art, and make him morbidly conscious
of its mechanical conditions, especially the obsolete ones, until he at
last becomes, not a composer, but an adept in a horribly dull sort of
chess played with lines and dots, each player having different notions
of what the right rules are, and playing his game so as to flourish his
view under the noses of those who differ from him. Then he offers his
insufferable gambits to the public as music, and is outraged because I
criticize it as music and not as chess.”
Shaw made the most persistent effort to encourage the employment of
the vernacular in music, as well as in criticism of music. An arrant
commonplace, made out of the most hackneyed commonplace in modern
music, pleased him more than all the Tenterden Street specialties. “I
cry 'Professor' whenever I find a forced avoidance of the vernacular in
music under the impression that it is vulgar.... Your men who really
can write, your Dickenses, Ruskins and Carlyles, and their like,
are vernacular above all things: they cling to the locutions which
everyday use has made a part of our common life. The professors may
ask me whether I seriously invite them to make their music out of the
commonplaces of the comic song writer? I reply, unabashed, that I do.”
With the deepest fervour, he continued to preach the doctrine of
spontaneity and naturalness. “Why hesitate to perpetrate the final
outrage of letting loose your individuality, and saying just what you
think in your own way as agreeably and frankly as you can?” His own aim
was to reach that truly terrible fellow, the average man--“the plain
man who wants a plain answer.” If he can only awake the attention of
the man in the street and, by expressing himself frankly in everyday
language, the quotidian commerce of thought, occasionally even in the
vernacular of the street, make clear to that man the appeal that music
makes to a critic acutely sensitive to the subtler implications of
its highest forms, Shaw is perfectly satisfied with himself and his
performance. Accordingly, he aimed, primarily, to make an exact record
of the sensations induced by a certain piece of music, or a certain
performer, _Don Juan_ or De Reszke, Letty Lind or _The Pirates of
Penzance_. He made no effort whatsoever to control the current of his
humour. He allowed it to play as lightly about Patti, as uproariously
about Paderewski, as derisively about Vieuxtemps as his inclination
directed. The most solemn symphony excited his risibility to the
explosion point, and the latest Mass suggested seaside promenades
instead of the life of the world to come.
Shaw's efforts to free musical criticism from the blighting effects
of academicism, his advocacy of the free expression of individuality,
and his insistence upon the return to nature, both in music and in
criticism, brought upon him the scorn and contempt that is always
the meed of the would-be reformer. The French public looked up to
Francisque Sarcey with a sort of filial veneration, and affectionately
dubbed him “uncle.” The English public sneered at Shaw's brilliant
attacks upon their favourites and their idols, and looked down upon
him, not as a reasonable human being, but, as Shaw expressed it, as
a mere Aunt Sally. Not only did the critics and the public laugh
at his revolutionary zeal, but they regarded him as an amusing
incompetent, availing himself of his abundant gift of humour to supply
the deficiency of any knowledge of music or of the possession of
the faintest critical sense. Analytic criticism was revered, while
the individual and impressionistic style of Shaw was immoderately
enjoyed as the tricky device of a colossal humbug. Shaw fought against
misrepresentation and prejudice with unabated vigour, continually
confounding his critics with some unanswerable argument that logically
reduced their attacks to nothingness. By apt examples, he often
revealed the absurdities of analytic criticism in literature, once
confronting his critics with the startling query: “I want to know
whether it is just that a literary critic should be forbidden to make
his living in this way on pain of being interviewed by two doctors
and a magistrate, and hauled off to Bedlam forthwith; whilst the more
a musical critic does it, the deeper the veneration he inspires. By
systematically neglecting it I have lost caste as a critic even in the
eyes of those who hail my abstinence with the greatest relief; and I
should be tempted to eke out these columns in the Mesopotamian manner
if I were not the slave of a commercial necessity and a vulgar ambition
to have my articles read, this being the main reason why I write them,
and the secret of the constant 'straining after effect' observable in
my style.”
Perhaps the most enlightening evidence as to Shaw's position as a
critic of music is contained in his recital of an amusing incident.
One day, it seems, a certain young man, whose curiosity overswayed
his natural modesty, approached Shaw on the subject of the G. B. S.
column in the _World_. “At last he came to his point with a rush by
desperately risking the question: 'Excuse me, Mr. G. B. S., but _do_
you know anything about music? The fact is, I am not capable of forming
an opinion myself; but Dr. Blank says you don't, and--er--Dr. Blank is
such a great authority that one hardly knows what to think.' Now this
question put me into a difficulty, because I had already learnt by
experience that the reason my writings on music and musicians are so
highly appreciated is that they are supposed by many of my greatest
admirers to be a huge joke, the point of which lies in the fact that
I am totally ignorant of music, and that my character of critic is an
exquisitely ingenious piece of acting, undertaken to gratify my love
of mystification and paradox. From this point of view every one of my
articles appears as a fine stroke of comedy, occasionally broadening
into a harlequinade, in which I am the clown, and Dr. Blank the
policeman. At first I did not realize this, and could not understand
the air of utter disillusion and loss of interest in me that would
come over people in whose houses I incautiously betrayed some scrap
of amateurish enlightenment. But the naïve exclamation, 'Oh! you _do_
know something about it, then!' at last became familiar to me; and I
now take particular care not to expose my knowledge. When people hand
me a sheet of instrumental music, and ask my opinion of it, I carefully
hold it upside down, and pretend to study it in that position with
the eye of an expert. They invite me to try their new grand piano, I
attempt to open it at the wrong end; and when the young lady of the
house informs me that she is practising the 'cello, I innocently ask
her whether the mouthpiece did not cut her lips dreadfully at first.
This line of conduct gives enormous satisfaction, in which I share to a
rather greater extent than is generally supposed. But, after all, the
people whom I take in thus are only amateurs. To place my impostorship
beyond question, I require to be certified as such by authorities like
our Bachelors and Doctors of Music--gentlemen who can write a '_Nunc
Dimittis_' in five real parts, and know the difference between a tonal
fugue and a real one, and can tell you how old Monteverde was on his
thirtieth birthday, and have views as to the true root of the discord
of the seventh on the supertonic, and devoutly believe that _si contra
fa diabolus est_. But I have only to present myself to them in the
character of a man who has been through these dreary games without ever
discovering the remotest vital connection between them and the art of
music--a state of mind so inconceivable by them--to make them exclaim:
“'Preposterous ass! that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordained,'
and give me the desired testimonials at once. And so I manage to scrape
along without falling under suspicion of being an honest man.
“However, since mystification is not likely to advance us in the
long run, may I suggest that there must be something wrong in the
professional tests which have been successfully applied to Handel,
to Mozart, to Beethoven, to Wagner, and last, though not least, to
me, with the result in every case of our condemnation as ignoramuses
and charlatans. Why is it that when Dr. Blank writes about music,
nobody but a professional musician can understand him; whereas the
man-in-the-street, if fond of art and capable of music, can understand
the writings of Mendelssohn, Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, or any of the
composers? Why, again, is it that my colleague, W. A., for instance, in
criticizing Mr. Henry Arthur Jones' play the other day, did not _parse_
all the leading sentences in it? I will not be so merciless as to
answer these questions now, though I know the solution, and am capable
of giving it if provoked beyond endurance. Let it suffice for the
moment that writing is a very difficult art, criticism a very difficult
process, and music not easily to be distinguished, without special
critical training, from the scientific, technical and professional
conditions of its performance, composition and teaching. And if the
critic is to please the congregation, who wants to read only about the
music, it is plain that he must appear quite beside the point to the
organ-blower, who wants to read about his bellows, which he can prove
to be the true source of all the harmony.”[117]
FOOTNOTES:
[105] Mr. T. P. O'Connor.
[106] In speaking of his first appearance as a journalistic writer--in
a “London Letter,” written, at the age of fifteen, for a well-known
journal in Scarborough--Max Beerbohm once wrote (the _Saturday Review_,
January 26th, 1901): “I well remember that the first paragraph I wrote
was in reference to the first number of the _Star_, which had just
been published. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, in his editorial _pronunciamento_,
had been hotly philanthropic. 'If,' he had written, 'we enable the
charwoman to put two lumps of sugar in her tea instead of one, then
we shall not have worked in vain.' My comment on this was that if Mr.
O'Connor were to find that charwomen did not take sugar in their tea,
his paper would, presumably, cease to be issued.... I quote it merely
to show that I, who am still regarded as a young writer, am exactly
connate with Mr. Shaw. For it was in this very number of the _Star_
that Mr. Shaw, as 'Corno di Bassetto,' made his first bow to the
public.” This latter statement, although inaccurate, is essentially
correct.
[107] The name of a musical instrument which went out of use in
Mozart's time.
[108] In his introduction to the _Dramatic Essays of John Forster and
George Henry Lewes_.
[109] _In the Days of Our Youth._ In the _Star_, February 19th, 1906.
[110] The reference is to Rubinstein.
[111] _Music_, signed G. B. S., in the _World_, June 7th, 1893.
[112] In this connection compare Shaw's article: _A Word More about
Verdi_, in the _Anglo-Saxon Review_, Vol. VIII., March, 1901.
[113] _De Mortuis_, signed G. B. S., in the _Saturday Review_, July
4th, 1896.
[114] In the letter Mr. Tucker wrote to Mr. Shaw at Easter, 1895, Shaw
once told me, he said that he knew Shaw was the only man in the world
capable of tackling Nordau on his various fields of music, literature,
painting, etc.: “He said that if I would find out the highest figure
ever paid by, say, the _Nineteenth Century_ for a single article to
any writer, not excluding Gladstone or any other eminent man, he
would pay me that sum for a review of 'Degeneration' for his little
paper. This, mind you, from a man who was publishing a paper at his
own expense, without a chance of making anything out of it, and with a
considerable chance of finding himself in prison some day for telling
the truth about American institutions. Mr. Tucker probably worked
double shifts and ate half meals for the next two or three years to pay
off what the adventure cost him.” This essay, somewhat amplified, was
recently (February, 1908) published in America by Benjamin R. Tucker,
N. Y.--in England by the _New Age_ Press, London--under the title, _The
Sanity of Art: an Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being
Degenerate_.
[115] Is Shaw, the anti-romantic, consistent in championing Wagner,
the head and front of European romanticism? Shaw, the individualist,
recognized that Wagner was a great creative force in art; that was
sufficient cause for his championship. It may be interesting in this
connection to consult Julius Bab's acute analysis of Shaw's Wagnerism:
_Bernard Shaw_ (S. Fischer, Berlin), pp. 210-214.
[116] _The 'Elektra' of Strauss and Hofmannsthal._ A letter to the
editor of the _Nation_ (London), March 19th, 1910.
[117] _Music_, in the _World_, February 18th, 1893.
THE DRAMATIC CRITIC
Mac Beth.
Oth Ello.
Comedy of Er Rors.
Merchant of Ve Nice.
Coriol Anus.
Midsummer Night's D Ream.
Merry Wives of Win Dsor.
Measure for Mea Sure.
Much Ado about Not Hing.
Antony and Cleop Atra.
All's Well that Ends Well.[118]
FOOTNOTES:
[118] The conclusive cryptographic proof that Bernard Shaw wrote the
plays usually attributed to Shakespeare--discovered by Mr. S. T. James,
of Leeds.
CHAPTER IX
When the history of the last quarter of the nineteenth century
comes to be written, it will be seen that the name of Bernard Shaw
is inextricably linked with five epoch-making movements of our
contemporary era. The Collectivist movement in politics, ethics and
sociology; the Ibsen-Nietzschean movement in morals; the reaction
against the materialism of Marx and Darwin; the Wagnerian movement in
music; and the anti-romantic movement in literature and art--these are
the main currents of modern thought for which Shaw has unfalteringly
sought to open a passage into modern consciousness.
On the death of Mr. Edmund Yates, the editor of the _World_, in 1894,
Shaw gave up his “labour of Hercules” as music critic of that paper,
and was succeeded by Mr. Robert Hichens. By this time Shaw had only one
more critical continent to conquer; but he wanted the right editor, he
has told us--“one with the virtues of Yates--and some of his faults as
well, perhaps.” On Mr. Frank Harris's revival of the _Saturday Review_,
it was matter for no surprise that the author of _The Quintessence of
Ibsenism_ and of four plays besides, should have been offered the post
of dramatic critic on that magazine. Shaw did not begin his career as
an actor, as is sometimes stated; he never was on the stage, nor ever
dreamt of going on it. He has taken part in a copyrighting performance,
and once acted at some theatricals, got up for the benefit of an old
workman member of the “International,” with Edward Aveling, Eleanor
Marx, May Morris, and Sidney Pardon, all amateurs; and impersonated
a photographer at William Morris's house at one of the _soirées_ of
the Socialist League. But there is not the remotest foundation for
the statement that he began his career as an actor. Although Shaw
had written a number of plays, he realized that dramatic authorship
no more constitutes a man a critic than actorship constitutes him a
dramatic author; but he rightly judged that a dramatic critic learns
as much from having been a dramatic author as Shakespeare or Pinero
from having been actors. It was his chief distinction to have touched
life at many points; unlike many contemporary dramatic critics, he
had not specialized to such an extent as to lose his character as man
and citizen, and become a mere playgoer. “My real aim,” he asserted
in reference to his work on the _Saturday Review_, “is to widen the
horizon of the critic, especially of the dramatic critic, whose habit
at present is to bring a large experience of stage life to bear on
a scanty experience of real life, although it is certain that all
really fruitful criticism of the drama must bring a wide and practical
knowledge of real life to bear on the stage.”
Jowett's characterization of Disraeli as “a curious combination of the
Arch-Priest of Humbug and a great man,” has a certain appropriateness
for Bernard Shaw. That fictitious personage known as G. B. S. is
Shaw's most remarkable creation. With characteristic daring, his very
first article broke the sacred tradition of anonymity, inviolate till
then in the conservative columns of the _Saturday Review_. With the
innate instinct of the journalist, he devoted himself to sedulous
self-advertisement, creating a traditionary character unrivalled in
conceit, in cleverness, and in iconoclastic effrontery. Charged with
being conceited, he replied: “No, I am not really a conceited man: if
you had been through all that I have been through, and done all the
things I have done, you would be ten times as conceited. It's only a
pose, to prevent the English people from seeing that I am serious.
If they did, they would make me drink the hemlock.” Do not make the
mistake of concluding, from this confession, that Shaw was merely a
ghastly little celebrity posing in a vacuum. If “New lamps for old” is
the cry of this ultra-modern fakir, “Remember Aladdin” is the warning
of the suspicious populace. Shaw's chief claim for consideration is
not merely that he has spent his life in crying down the futility and
uselessness of the old lamps, but that with equal earnestness he has
advertised the merits of the new. Nowhere is this more clearly shown
than in his attitude towards Shakespeare and Ibsen.
[Illustration: =Pope Innocent X.=]
Original in the Doria Palace, Rome. By Velásquez.
[Illustration: =The Modern Pope of Wit and Wisdom.=]
After Velásquez. From the original painting, exhibited in 1907.
(_From a photograph by Emery Walker._)
_The Hon. Neville S. Lytton._ _Courtesy of the Artist._
Shaw's incorrigible practice of “blaming the Bard,” publicly
inaugurated in the _Saturday Review_, is no mere antic in which he
indulges for the fun of the thing, but as inevitable an outcome of his
philosophy as is his championship of Ibsen. His inability to see a
masterpiece in every play of Shakespeare's arises largely from the fact
that he knows his Shakespeare as he knows his Bunyan, his Dickens, his
Ibsen. It is flying in the face of fact to aver that a man who knew
his Shakespeare from cover to cover by the time he was twenty does not
like or admire Shakespeare. “I am fond,” says Shaw, “unaffectedly fond,
of Shakespeare's plays.” He looks back upon those delightful evenings
at the New Shakespeare Society, under F. J. Furnival, with the most
unfeigned pleasure. A careful perusal of his score or more articles on
Shakespeare in the _Saturday Review_ shows that he has not only studied
Shakespeare consistently, and periodically interpreted him from a
definite point of view, but that he always fought persistently for the
performance of his plays in their integrity. And although he has by no
means taken advantage of all his opportunities, yet he has managed to
see between twenty and thirty of Shakespeare's plays performed on the
stage.
When Shaw first read Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's words: “Surely the
crowning glory of our nation is our Shakespeare; and remember he
was one of a great school,” he almost burst, as he put it, with the
intensity of his repudiation of the second clause in that utterance.
Against the first clause he had nothing to say; but the Elizabethans
Shaw has always regarded chiefly as “shallow literary persons, drunk
with words, and seeking in crude stories of lust and crime an excuse
for that wildest of all excitements, the excitement of imaginative
self-expression by words.” Mr. Shaw once defined an Elizabethan as “a
man with an extraordinary and imposing power of saying things, and with
nothing whatever to say.” Indeed, it was not to be expected that the
arch-foe of Romance, in modern art and modern life, would be edified
with the imaginative and romantic violence of the Elizabethans. Nothing
less than a close and, so to speak, biologic study of humanity in the
nude can satisfy one who avers that Romance is the root of modern
pessimism and the bane of modern self-respect.
To call the Elizabethans imaginative amounted with Shaw to the same
thing as saying that, artistically, they had delirium tremens. The true
Elizabethan he found to be a “blank-verse beast, itching to frighten
other people with the superstitious terrors and cruelties in which he
does not himself believe, and wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity
of expression and strenuous animal passion as only literary men do when
they become thoroughly depraved by solitary work, sedentary cowardice,
and starvation of the sympathetic centres.” He passes them in review,
calling them a crew of dehumanized specialists in blank verse! Webster,
a Tussaud laureate; Chapman, with his sublime balderdash; Marlowe, the
pothouse brawler, with his clumsy horse-play, his butcherly rant, and
the resourceless tum-tum of his “mighty line.” Even in this dust-heap,
Shaw managed to find some merit and variety. Was not Greene really
amusing, Marston spirited and “silly-clever,” Cyril Tourneur able
to string together lines of which any couple picked out and quoted
separately might pass as a fragment of a real organic poem? Though
a brutish pedant, Jonson was not heartless; Marlowe often charged
his blank-verse with genuine colour and romance; while Beaumont and
Fletcher, although possessing no depth, no conviction, no religious
or philosophic basis, were none the less dainty romantic poets, and
really humorous character-sketchers in Shakespeare's popular style.
“Unfortunately, Shakespeare dropped into the middle of these ruffianly
pedants (the Elizabethans); and since there was no other shop than
theirs to serve his apprenticeship in, he had perforce to become an
Elizabethan too.
“In such a school of falsehood, bloody-mindedness, bombast, and
intellectual cheapness, his natural standard was inevitably dragged
down, as we know to our cost; but the degree to which he dragged
their standard up has saved them from oblivion.” Indeed, Shakespeare,
enthused by his interest in the art of acting and by his desire to
“educate the public,” tried to make that public accept genuine studies
of life and character in, for instance, _Measure for Measure_ and
_All's Well that Ends Well_. But the public would have none of them
(traditionary evidence, be it noted), “preferring a fantastic sugar
doll like Rosalind to such serious and dignified studies of women as
Isabella and Helena.”
Shakespeare had discovered that “the only thing that paid in the
theatre was romantic nonsense, and that when he was forced by this
to produce one of the most effective samples of romantic nonsense in
existence--a feat which he performed easily and well--he publicly
disclaimed any responsibility for its pleasant and cheap falsehood by
borrowing the story and throwing it in the face of the public with
the phrase '_As You Like It_.'” Despite Mr. Chesterton's assertion
that Shaw has read an ironic snub into the title, and that after all
it was only a sort of hilarious bosh, Shaw still maintains, as he did
fifteen years ago, that when Shakespeare used that phrase he meant
exactly what he said, and that the phrase: “What You Will,” which he
applied to _Twelfth Night_, meaning “Call it what you please,” is not,
in Shakespearean or any other English, the equivalent of the perfectly
unambiguous and penetratingly simple phrase: “As You Like It.”
Shakespeare's popularity, Shaw would have us believe, was due to a
deliberate pandering to the public taste for “romantic nonsense.” Shaw
holds that Shakespeare's supreme power lies in his “enormous command of
word-music, which gives fascination to his most blackguardly repartees
and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes, besides raising to the
highest force all his gifts as an observer, an imitator of personal
mannerisms and characteristics, a humorist and a story-teller.” No
matter how poor, coarse, cheap and obvious may be the thought in _Much
Ado about Nothing_, for example, the mood is charming and the music
of the words expresses the mood, transporting you into another, an
enchanted world.
“When a flower-girl tells a coster to hold his jaw, for nobody is
listening to him, and he retorts: 'Oh, you're there, are you, you
beauty?' they reproduce the wit of Beatrice and Benedick exactly. But
put it this way: 'I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor
Benedick: nobody marks you.' 'What! my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet
living?' You are miles away from costerland at once.” In other words,
Shaw insists that a nightingale's love is no higher than a cat's,
except that the nightingale is the better musician!
“It is not easy to knock this into the public head, because
comparatively few of Shakespeare's admirers are at all
conscious that they are listening to music as they hear his
phrases turn and his lines fall so fascinatingly and memorably;
whilst we all, no matter how stupid we are, can understand his
jokes and platitudes, and are flattered when we are told of the
subtlety of the wit we have relished, and the profundity of the
thought we have fathomed. Englishmen are specially susceptible
to this sort of flattery, because intellectual subtlety is not
their strong point. In dealing with them you must make them
believe that you are appealing to their brains, when you are
really appealing to their senses and feelings. With Frenchmen
the case is reversed: you must make them believe that you are
appealing to their senses and feelings when you are really
appealing to their brains. The Englishman, slave to every
sentimental ideal and dupe of every sensuous art, will have
it that his great national poet is a thinker. The Frenchman,
enslaved and duped only by systems and calculations, insists
on his hero being a sentimentalist and artist. That is why
Shakespeare is esteemed a master-mind in England, and wondered
at as a clumsy barbarian in France.”[119]
Shaw is as far from Taine on the one side as he is from Swinburne
on the other--“as far this side bardolatry as Johnson or Mr. Frank
Harris.” To the idolatrous and insensate worship of Shakespeare which
got on Ben Jonson's nerves, which Lamb brought back into fashion, and
which has gone to blasphemy and sacrilege in the mouth of Swinburne,
Shaw, like Byron before him, declined to subscribe. And for the very
good reason that, being primarily an ideologue, he has examined
Shakespeare as a man of thought only to find him wanting. Lop away all
beauty of form, all grace of mood--in a word, reduce Shakespeare to
his lowest terms--and what is the result? Paraphrase the encounters of
Benedick and Beatrice in the style of a Blue-book, carefully preserving
every idea they present, and it immediately becomes apparent to Shaw
that they contain at best nothing out of the common in thought or
wit, and at worst a good deal of vulgar naughtiness. Paraphrasing
Goethe, Wagner, or Ibsen in the same way, he finds in them original
observation, subtle thought, wide comprehension, far-reaching intuition
and psychological study. Even if you paraphrase Shakespeare's best and
maturest work, you will still get nothing more, Shaw avers, than the
platitudes of proverbial philosophy, with a very occasional curiosity
in the shape of a rudiment of some modern idea, not followed up. “Once
or twice we scent among them an anticipation of the crudest side
of Ibsen's polemics on the Woman Question, as in _All's Well that
Ends Well_, when the man cuts as meanly selfish a figure beside his
enlightened lady-doctor wife as Helmer beside Nora; or in _Cymbeline_,
where Posthumus, having, as he believes, killed his wife for
inconstancy, speculates for a moment on what his life would have been
worth if the same standard of continence had been applied to himself.
And certainly no modern study of the voluptuous temperament, and the
spurious heroism and heroinism which its ecstasies produce, can add
much to _Antony and Cleopatra_.”
Last of all, Shaw goes a step further with the declaration that
Shakespeare's weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest
sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy,
morality, and the bearing of these on communities, which is sociology.
“Search for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the
Commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making
of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope,
courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find
nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex
made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the
mechanical lilt of blank-verse.” All the truly heroic which came so
naturally to Bunyan is missing in Shakespeare. In the words of Whitman,
Shaw regards Shakespeare as “the æsthetic-heroic among poets, lacking
both in the democratic and spiritual,” but never as “the heroic-heroic,
which is the greatest development of the spirit.” In Shaw's eyes,
Shakespeare's “test of the worth of life is the vulgar hedonic test,
and since life cannot be justified by this or any other external test,
Shakespeare comes out of his reflective period a vulgar pessimist,
oppressed with a logical demonstration that life is not worth living,
and only surpassing Thackeray in respect of being fertile enough,
instead of repeating '_Vanitas vanitatum_' at second-hand, to word the
futile doctrine differently and better.... This does not mean that
Shakespeare lacked the enormous fund of joyousness which is the secret
of genius, but simply that, like most middle-class Englishmen bred in
private houses, he was a very incompetent thinker, and took it for
granted that all inquiry into life began and ended with the question:
'Does it pay?'.... Having worked out his balance-sheet and gravely
concluded that life's but a poor player, etc., and thereby deeply
impressed a public which, after a due consumption of beer and spirits,
is ready to believe that everything maudlin is tragic, and everything
senseless sublime, Shakespeare found himself laughing and writing plays
and getting drunk at the 'Mermaid' much as usual, with Ben Jonson
finding it necessary to reprove him for a too extravagant sense of
humour.” Like Ernest Crosby, Shaw regards Shakespeare as the poet of
courts, of lords and ladies. His fundamental assent is accorded to
Tolstoy in his declaration that Shakespeare's quintessential deficiency
was his failure to face, fairly and squarely, the eternal question of
life: “What are we alive for?”[120]
It is a task of the merest supererogation to go into the details of
Shaw's admiration of Shakespeare's plays, to quote his praise of
_Twelfth Night_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ as “crown jewels of
dramatic poetry”; of _Romeo and Juliet_ with its “lines that tighten
the heart or catch you up into the heights”; of _Richard III._, as the
best of all the “Punch and Judy” plays, in which the hero delights man
by provoking God, and dies unrepentant and game to the last; of _Julius
Cæsar_, in which the “dramatist's art can be carried no higher on the
plane chosen”; of _Othello_, which “remains magnificent by the volume
of its passion and the splendour of its word-music”; of the “great
achievement” of _Hamlet_; and of _Macbeth_, than which “no greater
tragedy will ever be written.” Not only is Shaw unaffectedly fond of
Shakespeare: he pities the man who cannot enjoy him:
“He has outlived hundreds of abler thinkers, and will outlast
a thousand more. His gift of telling a story (provided someone
else told it to him first); his enormous power over language,
as conspicuous in his senseless and silly abuse of it as in his
miracles of expression; his humour; his sense of idiosyncratic
character; and his prodigious fund of that vital energy which
is, it seems, the true differentiating property behind the
faculties, good, bad, or indifferent, of the man of genius,
enable him to entertain us so effectively that the imaginary
scenes and people he has created become more real to us than
our actual life--at least, until our knowledge and grip of
actual life begins to deepen and glow beyond the common. When
I was twenty I knew everybody in Shakespeare, from Hamlet
to Abhorson, much more intimately than I knew my living
contemporaries.”[121]
[Illustration: =John Bull's Other Playwright.=]
A new design for a statue in Leicester Square.
Reproduced by the special permission of the proprietors of _Punch_.
_E. T. Reed_
_Courtesy of the Artist._
The literary side of the mission of Ibsen in England, as Shaw conceived
it, was the rescue of that unhappy country from its centuries of
slavery to Shakespeare. The moral side of Ibsen's mission was the
breaking of the shackles of slavery to conventional ideals of virtue.
And Shaw's iconoclastic cry in the _Saturday Review_ was “Down
with Shakespeare. Great is Ibsen; and Shaw is his prophet.”[122]
Interrogated in 1892 as to whether Shakespeare was not his model in
writing _Widowers' Houses_, Shaw replied with quizzical disdain:
“Shakespeare! stuff! Shakespeare--a disillusioned idealist! a
rationalist! a capitalist! If the fellow had not been a great poet,
his rubbish would have been forgotten long ago. Molière, as a thinker,
was worth a thousand Shakespeares. If my play is not better than
Shakespeare, let it be damned promptly.” And in reviewing his work as
a dramatic critic, he said: “After all, I have accomplished something.
I have made Shakespeare popular by knocking him off his pedestal and
kicking him round the place, and making people realize that he's not
a demi-god, but a dramatist.”[123] When he came to judge the works of
the two dramatists by the tests of intellectual force and dramatic
insight, quite apart from beauty of expression, he found that “Ibsen
comes out with a double first-class, whereas Shakespeare comes out
hardly anywhere.” Shaw recognized only the splendour of Shakespeare's
literary gift; whereas, in Ibsen, he hailed the very antithesis of
Shakespeare, _i.e._, a thinker of extraordinary penetration, a moralist
of international influence, and a philosopher going to the root of
those very questions to the solution of which Shaw's own life has been
largely devoted. In the dramas of Ibsen, he found epitomized the
modern realistic struggle for intellectual and spiritual emancipation,
the revolt against the machine-made morality of our sordid, flabby, and
hypocritical age. Shaw had begun his career in the strife and turmoil
of the Zetetical and Dialectical Societies, debating the questions of
Women's Rights, Emancipation, and Married Women's Property Acts. Before
he had ever read a line of Ibsen or heard of _A Doll's House_, he had
already reached the conclusion, always consistently maintained by him,
that Man is not a species superior to Woman, but that mankind is male
and female, like other kinds, and that the inequality of the sexes is
literally nothing more than a cock-and-bull story, invented by the
“lords of creation” for supremely selfish motives. When Ibsen wrote
_Ghosts_, his name was unknown to Shaw. But it is undeniable that, in
the eighties, Shaw was forging towards precisely similar conclusions.
He had felt in his inmost being the loathing of the nineteenth century
for itself, and had marked with exultation the ferocity with which
Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx, Ruskin and Carlyle,
Morris and Wagner had rent the bosom that bore them. Smouldering within
his own breast was that same detestation of all the orthodoxies, and
respectabilities, and ideals railed at by these political, social and
moral anarchs. Fired by their inspiring example, he had espoused the
cause of Socialism, and zealously fought the battle for equality of
opportunity, for social justice, for woman's freedom, for liberty of
thought, of action, and of conscience. His conscious revolt against
a sentimental, theatrical and senselessly romantic age, chivalrously
and blindly “holding aloft the banner of the ideal,” preceded his
acquaintance with _The Pillars of Society_ and _The Wild Duck_. A
Fabian, almost universally regarded in England as a crack-brained
fanatic and doctrinaire, he found years afterwards in _An Enemy of the
People_ the final expression of his experience that all human progress
involves as its fundamental condition a recognition by the pioneer
that to be right is to be in the minority. The very keynote of Shaw's
own convictions was struck in Ibsen's declaration that the really
effective progressive forces of the moment were the revolt of the
working-classes against economic, and of the women against idealistic,
slavery.
During the entire period of his career as a dramatic critic, Shaw stood
forth as an unabashed champion of Ibsen. For many years prior to this
period, he had borne the odium of Philistine objurgation; never, even
in the blackest hour of British intolerance and insult, did he once
flinch from adherence to the Wizard of the North. Much that he wrote in
the _Saturday Review_ concerning Ibsen and his plays, he had already
said--and said better--in _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, written in
the spring of 1890.[124] Still, the articles in the _Saturday Review_
completed Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism, as exhibited in the remaining
plays of Ibsen published after 1890; and, in addition, they possessed
the advantage of being criticisms of the acted dramas themselves. The
brilliant brochure, entitled _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, contains
the heart of Shaw's Ibsen criticism, and is undoubtedly the most
notable _tour de force_ its author has ever achieved in any line. It
is a distinct contribution to that fertile field of modern philosophy
farcically and superficially imaged by Gilbert, mordantly dramatized
by Ibsen, and rhapsodically concretized by Nietzsche. Let us disabuse
our minds at once of the idea that this book is either mere literary
criticism or a supernally clever _jeu d'esprit_. Not a critical
essay on the poetical beauties of Ibsen, but simply an exposition of
Ibsenism, it may be described as an ideological distillation of Ibsen
in the _rôle_ of ethical and moral critic of contemporary civilization.
To call _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_ one-sided is not simply a futile
condemnation: it is a perfectly obvious truth.
To Ibsen, according to Shaw, the pioneer of civilization is the man or
woman bold enough to seek the fulfilment of the individual will, hardy
enough to prefer the naked facts of life to the comforting illusions
of the imagination. Society is composed, in the main, of Philistines
who accept the established social order without demur or misgiving;
and of a few Idealists, temperamentally dissatisfied with their lot,
yet seeking refuge from the spectacle of their own failure in an
imaginary world of romantic ideals, and in the self-delusion that to
see the world thus is noble and spiritual, whilst to see it as it is
is vulgar, brutal and cynical. But sometimes there arises the solitary
pioneer, the realist, if you will--a Blake, a Shelley, a Bashkirtseff,
a Shaw--who dares to face the truth the idealists are shirking, to chip
off the masks of romance and idealism, and to say fearlessly that life
needs no justification and submits to no test; that it must be lived
for its own sake as an end in itself, and that all institutions, all
ideals, and all romances must be brought to its test and stand or fall
by their furtherance of and loyalty to it.
Thus to Ibsen: “The Ideal is dead; long live the ideal!” epitomizes
the history of human progress. Brand, the heroic idealist, daring to
live largely, to will unreservedly, fails because of his inability
to realize the unattainability of his ideals in this present life.
As Cervantes in _Don Quixote_ reduced the old ideal of chivalry to
absurdity, so Ibsen in _Peer Gynt_ reduces to absurdity the ideal
of self-realization when it takes the form of self-gratification
unhampered by sense of responsibility. Shaw found it unnecessary
to translate the scheme of _Emperor and Galilean_ in terms of the
antithesis between idealism and realism, since Julian, in this
respect, is only a reincarnation of Peer Gynt. After constructing
imaginative projections of himself in Brand, Peer Gynt and Julian,
Ibsen next turns to the real life around him, to the creatures of _tous
les jours_, to continue his detailed attack upon idealism. In _The
Pillars of Society_, the Rörlund ideals go down before the realities of
truth and freedom; in _A Doll's House_, Helmer's unstable card-house
of ideals falls to the ground; and in _Ghosts_, Mrs. Alving offers
herself up as a living sacrifice on the altar of the ideal, only to
discover the futility of the sacrifice. _An Enemy of the People_
exposes the fallacy of the majority ideal, and posits the striking
doctrine that to be right is to be in the minority. _The Wild Duck_
appears as a wholesale condemnation of the ideal of truth for truth's
sake alone. _Rosmersholm_ embodies Rebekka's tragic protest against
the Rosmersholm ideal “that denied her right to live and be happy from
the first, and at the end, even in denying its God, exacts her life as
a vain blood-offering for its own blindness.” _The Lady from the Sea_
presents a fanciful image of the triumph of responsible freedom over
romantic idealism grounded in unhappiness, while in _Hedda Gabler_
the woman rises from life's feast because she has neither the vision
for ideals nor the passion for reality--“a pure sceptic, a typical
nineteenth-century figure, falling into the abyss between the ideals
which do not impose on her and the realities which she has not yet
discovered.”
It is needless to follow Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism further, although
it might readily be applied to Ibsen's remaining plays. Suffice it to
say, that Shaw nowhere denies that Ibsen is an idealist, or that ideals
are indispensable to human progress. He has been forced to call Ibsen
a realist; in fact, almost to invent new terms, a new phraseology, in
order to distinguish between the ideals which have become pernicious
through senescence, and the ideals which remain valid through
conformity to reality. Out of Ibsen's very longing for the ideal grew
that mood of ideal suspiciousness which Brandes, like Shaw, affirmed
to be one of his dominant characteristics. Ibsen opposes current
political and moral values, strong in the conviction that every end
should be challenged to justify the means. Acceptance of Ibsen's
philosophy to will greatly, to dare nobly, to be always prepared to
violate the code of conventional morality, to find fulfilment of the
will as much in voluntary submission to reality as in affirmation of
life the eternal--must at once, Shaw rightly indicates, greatly deepen
the sense of moral responsibility. “What Ibsen insists on is that there
is no golden rule--that conduct must justify itself by its effect upon
happiness and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal.”[125]
Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism holds out a large, sane, tolerant standard
of life as the inevitable lesson of Ibsen's plays. Lies, pretences,
and hypocrisies avail not against the strong man, fortified in the
resolution to find himself, to attain self-realization, through
fulfilment of the will. However much one may regret that Shaw, by
preserving his _postulata_ in concrete terms, has to some extent
diverted our attention from the whole formidable significance of the
Ibsenic drama, it is idle to deny that the book is at once caustically
powerful and unflaggingly brilliant. Certainly Shaw has seen Ibsen
clearly, even if he has not seen him whole. Ibsen cannot be summed up
in a thesis; the curve of his art, as Mr. Huneker says, reaches across
the edge of the human soul. “The quintessence of Ibsenism is that there
is no formula”--this is Shaw's last assurance to us that he has not
reduced Ibsen to a formula. It is impossible for anyone, with greater
assurance, to assure us that there is nothing assured.
[Illustration: =William Archer.=]
From the original pencil sketch.
_Jessie Holliday._
_Courtesy of the Artist._
Comprehension of Shaw's attitude towards Shakespeare and Ibsen is a
prerequisite to an accurate judgment of his attitude towards dramatic
art in general, and, more particularly, towards the contemporary
British stage. Beneath all his criticism lay the belief that the
theatre of to-day is as important an institution as the Church was in
the Middle Ages. “The apostolic succession from Eschylus to myself,”
he recently said, in speaking of his _Saturday Review_ period, “is as
serious and as continuously inspired as that younger institution,
the apostolic succession of the Christian Church. Unfortunately this
Christian Church, founded gaily with a pun, has been so largely
corrupted by rank Satanism that it has become the Church where you
must not laugh; and so it is giving way to that older and greater
Church to which I belong: the Church where the oftener you laugh
the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without
malice, and affirm good-fellowship without mawkishness. When I wrote,
I was well aware of what an unofficial census of Sunday worshippers
presently proved, that church-going in London has been largely replaced
by play-going. This would be a very good thing if the theatre took
itself seriously as a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an
elucidator of social conduct, an armoury against despair and dullness,
and a temple of the Ascent of Man. I took it seriously in that way,
and preached about it instead of merely chronicling its news and
alternately petting and snubbing it as a licentious but privileged
form of public entertainment. And this, I believe, is why my sermons
gave so little offence, and created so much interest.”[126] Although
plays have neither political constitutions nor established churches,
they must all, if they are to be anything more than the merest tissue
of stage effects, have a philosophy even if it be no more than an
unconscious expression of the author's temperament. Just as nowadays
all the philosophers maintain intimate relations with the fine arts, so
conversely the great dramatists have at all times maintained intimate
relations with philosophy. William Archer used often to tell Shaw
that he (Shaw) had no real love of art, no enjoyment of it, only a
faculty for observing performances, and an interest in the intellectual
tendency of plays. One may retort in Shaw's own words: “In all the life
that has energy enough to be interesting to me, subjective volition,
passion, will, make intellect the merest tool.” It is significant of
much that, to Shaw, the play is not the thing, but its thought, its
purpose, its feeling, its execution. Indeed, he regarded the theatre as
a response to our need for a “_sensable_ expression of our ideals
and illusions and approvals and resentments.” In comparing the dramatic
standards of Archer and himself, Shaw exhibits a passion for feeling
little suspected by his critics: “Every element, even though it be an
element of artistic force, which interferes with the credibility of
the scene, wounds him, and is so much to the bad. To him acting, like
scene-painting, is merely a means to an end, that end being to enable
him to make-believe. To me the play is only the means, the end being
the expression of feeling by the arts of the actor, the poet, the
musician. Anything that makes this impression more vivid, whether it be
versification, or an orchestra, or a deliberately artificial rendition
of the lines, is so much to the good for me, even though it may destroy
all the verisimilitude of the scene.”
In a review of the London dramatic season of 1904-5 Mr. Walkley made
the following characterization of Shaw:
“After all, we must recall this truth: the primordial function of the
artist--whatever his means of artistic expression--is to be a purveyor
of pleasure, and the man who can give us a refined intellectual
pleasure, or a pleasure of moral nature or of social sympathy, or
else a pleasure which arises from being given an unexpected or wider
outlook upon life--this man imparts to us a series of delicate and
moving sensations which the spectacle simply of technical address, of
theatrical talent, can never inspire. And this man is no other than
Bernard Shaw.”[127]
In conversation with me, Shaw vehemently repudiated the notion that
he was anything so petty as a mere purveyor of pleasure. “The theatre
cannot give pleasure,” he went so far as to say. “It defeats its
very purpose if it does not take you outside of yourself. It may
sometimes--and, indeed, often does--give one sensations which are far
from pleasant, which may even be, in the last degree, horrifying and
terrible. The function of the theatre is to stir people, to make them
think, to make them suffer.
“Why, I have seen people stagger out of the Court Theatre after seeing
one of my plays,” he said, laughing, “unspeakably indignant with me
because I had made them think, had stirred them to opposition, and had
made them heartily ashamed of themselves.”
In regard to comedy, the field in which he peculiarly excels, Shaw is
equally positive in the statement that unless comedy touches as well
as amuses him, he is defrauded of his just due. “When a comedy of mine
is performed, it is nothing to me that the spectators laugh--any fool
can make an audience laugh. I want to see how many of them, laughing or
grave, have tears in their eyes.” More than once he has insisted that
people's ideas, however useful they may be for embroidery, especially
in passages of comedy, are not the true stuff of drama, which is always
“the naïve feeling underlying the ideas.” When Mr. Meredith said, in
his _Essay on Comedy_, “The English public have the basis of the comic
in them: an esteem for common sense,” the remark aroused Mr. Shaw's
most vigorous opposition. The intellectual virtuosity of the Frenchman,
the Irishman, the American, the ancient Greek, leading to a love of
intellectual mastery of things, Shaw acutely observes, “produces a
positive enjoyment of disillusion (the most dreaded and hated of
calamities in England), and consequently a love of comedy (the fine art
of disillusion) deep enough to make huge sacrifices of dearly idealized
institutions to it. Thus, in France, Molière was allowed to destroy
the Marquises. In England he could not have shaken even such titles as
the accidental sheriff's knighthood of the late Sir Augustus Harris.”
Shaw had realized to his own misfortune that the Englishman's so-called
“common sense” always involves a self-satisfied unconsciousness of
its own moral and intellectual bluntness, whereas the function of
comedy--in particular the comedies written by Shaw himself--is “to
dispel such unconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest
moral and intellectual analysis right on it.” The following paragraph
embodies Shaw's rather limited conception of comedy:
“The function of comedy is nothing less than the destruction of
old-established morals. Unfortunately, to-day such iconoclasm
can be tolerated by our play-going citizens only as a counsel
of despair and pessimism. They can find a dreadful joy in it
when it is done seriously, or even grimly and terribly as they
understand Ibsen to be doing it; but that it should be done
with levity, with silvery laughter like the crackling of thorns
under a pot, is too scandalously wicked, too cynical, too
heartlessly shocking to be borne. Consequently, our plays must
either be exploitations of old-established morals or tragic
challengings of the order of Nature. Reductions to absurdity,
however logical; banterings, however kind; irony, however
delicate; merriment, however silvery, are out of the question
in matters of morality, except among men with a natural
appetite for comedy which must be satisfied at all costs and
hazards: that is to say, not among the English play-going
public, which positively dislikes comedy.”[128]
It is perfectly apparent that it was Shaw's distinction--a notorious
distinction--to be the leading and almost unique representative of a
school which was in violent reaction against that of Pinero, generally
regarded as the premier British dramatist. Moreover, he lacked the
sympathy of his colleagues in dramatic criticism--Clement Scott, the
impassioned champion of British sentimentality and ready-made morals,
William Archer, the austere patron of young England in the drama, and
Walkley, the Gallic impressionist and dilettante. Shaw endured the
virulent attacks of Clement Scott with equanimity, if not with positive
enjoyment. By his friend Walkley he was taunted, under the classic name
of Euthrypho, with being an impossibilist: “Euthrypho hardly falls into
Mr. Grant Allen's category of 'serious intellects,' for none has ever
known him to be serious, but about his intellect there is, as the Grand
Inquisitor says:
“'No probable possible shadow of doubt,
No possible doubt whatever.'
“A universal genius, a brilliant political economist, a Fabian of
the straitest sect of the Fabians, a critic (of other arts than the
dramatic) _comme il y en a peu_, he persists, where the stage is
concerned, in crying for the moon, and will not be satisfied, as the
rest of us have learned to be, with the only attainable substitute,
a good wholesome cheese. His standard is as much too high as Crito's
(another critic) is too low. He asks from the theatre more than
the theatre can give, and quarrels with the theatre because it is
theatrical. He lumps _La Tosca_ and _A Man's Shadow_ together as
'French machine-made plays,' and, because he is not edified by them,
refuses to be merely amused. Because _The Dead Heart_ is not on the
level of a Greek tragedy, he is blind to its merits as a pantomime.
He refuses to recognize the advance made by Mr. Pinero because Mr.
Pinero has not yet advanced as far as Henrik Ibsen. Half a loaf, the
wise agree, is better than no bread; but because it is only half a
loaf, Euthrypho complains that they have given him a stone.”[129] Worse
than all, Mr. Archer vigorously charged him with the most aggressive
hostility towards the contemporary movement in British drama. In one
of his _Study and Stage_ articles, entitled _Mr. Shaw and Mr. Pinero_,
and published August 22d, 1903, Mr. Archer thus condemns Shaw as
a dramatic critic: “Just at the time when the English drama began
clearly to emerge from the puerility into which it had sunk between
the 'fifties and the 'eighties, Mr. Shaw was engaged, week by week,
in producing dramatic criticisms. Writing for a six-penny paper, he
had but a limited audience; and, therefore, even his wit, energy and
unique literary power (I use the epithet deliberately) could do little
to influence the course of events. But all that he could do he did,
to discredit, crush and stamp out the new movement. Had he been a
power at all he would have been a power for evil. There were moments
during that period when I sympathized, as never before or since, with
the Terrorists of exactly a century ago. I felt that when a new and
struggling order of things is persistently assailed with inveterate
and inhuman hostility, it is no wonder if it defends itself with equal
relentlessness. If a guillotine had been functioning in Trafalgar
Square--but do not let us dwell on the horrid fantasy. Those days are
over. 'We have marched prospering, not through his presence.' There
is still a long fight to be fought before the English theatre becomes
anything like the great social institution it ought to be; but even
if the movement were now to stop dead (and of that there is not the
slightest fear), nothing can alter the fact that the past ten years
have given us a new and by no means despicable dramatic literature.”
These severe characterizations by the two leading English dramatic
critics deserve more than casual notice. Shaw represented _l'école
du plein air_; his unpardonable crime consisted in daringly throwing
open the windows to let in a fresh and vivifying current of ideas.
With Shaw, to dramatize was to philosophize; moreover, he sought to
discredit the tradition that the drama is never the forerunner, but
always the laggard, in interpretation of the _Zeitgeist_. Far from
being the instigator of the crimes and the partner of the guilty joys
of the drama, he regarded himself as the policeman of dramatic art;
and avowed it his express business to denounce its delinquencies. Firm
in the faith that the radicalism of yesterday is the conservatism of
to-morrow, he boldly declared: “It is an instinct with me personally to
attack every idea which has been full grown for ten years, especially
if it claims to be the foundation of all human society. I am prepared
to back human society against any idea, positive or negative, that
can be brought into the field against it. In this--except as to my
definite intellectual consciousness of it--I am, I believe, a much
more typical and popular person in England than the conventional man;
and I believe that when we begin to produce a genuine national drama,
this apparently anarchic force, the mother of higher law and humaner
order, will underlie it, and that the public will lose all patience
with the conventional collapses which serve for the last acts to the
serious dramas of to-day.” He found the contemporary English drama
lamentably “dating” in ethics and philosophy; their daily observation
kept the English dramatists up-to-date in personal descriptions, but
there was “nothing to force them to revise the morality they inherited
from their grandmothers.” But Shaw's high and uncompromising ideal
for British drama was no justification for Mr. Archer's charge that
Shaw as a dramatic critic was only a paralyzing and sterilizing force.
“There is more talent now than ever,” wrote Shaw in December, 1895,
to take a single example, “more skill now than ever, more artistic
culture, better taste, better acting, better theatres, better dramatic
literature. Mr. Tree, Mr. Alexander, Mr. Hare have made honourable
experiments, Mr. Forbes Robertson's enterprise at the Lyceum is not a
sordid one; Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and Mr. Pinero are doing better work
than ever before, and doing it without any craven concession to the
follies of the British public.”
We may, perhaps, best arrive at a notion of Shaw's relation to the
British stage by discovering his attitude towards his colleagues in
the drama--say Pinero, Jones, Wilde, Grundy, Stevenson and Henley.
Pinero he resolutely refused, in the face of popular clamour, to laud
as the “English Ibsen.” He regarded Pinero as an adroit describer
of people as the ordinary man sees and judges them, but not as a
genuine interpreter of character. “Add to this a clear head, a love
of the stage, and a fair talent for fiction, all highly cultivated
by hard and honourable work as a writer of effective stage plays for
the modern commercial theatre; and you have him on his real level.”
_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, hailed as the greatest tragedy of the
modern English school, Shaw regarded as not only a stage play in the
most technical sense, but even a noticeably old-fashioned one in its
sentiment and stage-mechanism; he objected to it on another ground--and
quite unreasonably, I think--because it exhibited, not the sexual
relations between the principals, but the social reactions set up by
this amazing marriage. Shaw was utterly revolted by Pinero's coarseness
and unspeakable ignorance in the portrayal of the feminine social
agitation in _The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_; the noble work of such
women as Annie Besant, who had worked at Shaw's side for many years,
gave the direct lie to Pinero's characterization. “I once pointed
out a method of treatment which might have made _The Notorious Mrs.
Ebbsmith_ bearable,” Mr. Shaw recently remarked to me. “Now I am of
the opinion that nothing could have made it a good play.” Shaw had
a vast contempt for Pinero as a moralist and a social philosopher.
“Archer objected to me as a critic,” he once remarked to me, “because
I didn't like _The Profligate_ and _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_.” But
Shaw sincerely admired the Pinero of _The Benefit of the Doubt_ and
_The Hobby Horse_, notable as they were for high dramatic pressure or
true comedy, close-knit action or genuine literary workmanship, humour,
fresh observation, naturalness, and free development of character. Shaw
technically defined a “character actor” as a “clever stage performer
who cannot act, and therefore makes an elaborate study of the disguises
and stage tricks by which acting can be grossly simulated.” And he
pronounced Pinero's performance as a thinker and social philosopher
to be “simply character acting in the domain of authorship, which can
impose only on those who are taken in by character acting on the stage.”
The hypothetical “guillotine functioning in Trafalgar Square,” of
which Mr. Archer speaks, Shaw insists was reserved for him, not at all
because he did all that he could do “to discredit, crush, and stamp
out the new movement,” but because he would not bow to the fetish of
Pinero. One of his chief heresies consisted in unhesitatingly classing
Henry Arthur Jones as “first, and eminently first, among the surviving
fittest of his own generation of playwrights.” Ever on the side of the
minority, he regarded _Michael and His Lost Angel_ as “the best play
its school has given to the theatre.” While Pinero, in Shaw's eyes,
drew his characters from the outside, Jones developed them from within.
Shaw recognized in Jones a kindred spirit; both believed that “in all
matters of the modern drama, England is no better than a parish, with
'parochial' judgments, 'parochial' instincts, and 'parochial' ways of
looking at things.” And Shaw accorded Jones the warmest praise because
he was “the only one of our popular dramatists whose sense of the
earnestness of real life has been dug deep enough to bring him into
conflict with the limitations and levities of our theatre.”
For Grundy's school of dramatic art, Shaw had absolutely no relish.
Indeed, he lamented the vogue of the “well-made piece”--those
“mechanical rabbits,” as he called them, with wheels for entrails.
Henry James's _Guy Domville_, which he regarded as distinctly _du
théâtre_, won his sincere praise; and the plays of Henley and
Stevenson delighted him with their combination of artistic faculty,
pleasant boyishness and romantic imagination, and fine qualities of
poetic speech, despite the fact that the authors didn't take the
stage seriously--“unless it were the stage of pasteboard scenes and
characters and tin lamps.” And to Shaw, Oscar Wilde--“almost as acutely
Irish an Irishman as the Iron Duke of Wellington”--was, in a certain
sense, “our only playwright,” because he “plays with everything: with
wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the
whole theatre.”
The most serious and the most well-founded charge that can be urged
against Shaw as a dramatic critic was his impatience with everybody who
would not “come his way.” It was his habit to damn a play which was
not written as he himself would have written it. With characteristic
iconoclasm, Shaw expressed his regret that _Michael and His Lost
Angel_ is a play without a hero--some captain of the soul, resolute in
championing his own faith _contra mundum_. “Let me rewrite the last
three acts,” says the diabolonian author of _The Devil's Disciple_,
“and you shall have your Reverend Michael embracing the answer of his
own soul, thundering it from the steps of his altar, and marching
out through his shocked and shamed parishioners, with colours flying
and head erect and unashamed, to the freedom of faith in his own
real conscience. Whether he is right or wrong is nothing to me as a
dramatist; he must follow his star, right or wrong, if he is to be a
hero.”
Again, in the latter part of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, Aubrey says
to Paula, “I know what you were at Ellean's age. You hadn't a thought
that wasn't a wholesome one; you hadn't an impulse that didn't tend
towards good.... And this was a very few years back.” Shaw's comment
is highly significant of his attitude. “On the reply to that fatuous
but not unnatural speech depended the whole question of Mr. Pinero's
rank as a dramatist. One can imagine how, in a play by a master-hand,
Paula's reply would have opened Tanqueray's foolish eyes to the
fact that a woman of that sort is already the same at three as at
thirty-three, and that however she may have found by experience that
her nature is in conflict with the ideals of differently-constituted
people, she remains perfectly valid to herself, and despises herself,
if she sincerely does so at all, for the hypocrisy that the world
forces on her instead of being what she is.” That “master-hand,” of
which Shaw speaks, is now well known to the English public through the
instrumentality of the Court, the Savoy and the Repertory Theatres. But
at the time of writing this, and many another intolerant criticism,
Shaw was violently battering away at the gates of tradition, and,
Joshua-like, blowing his horn for the fall of the walls of the Jericho
of the English stage. In _The Author's Apology_ to his _Dramatic
Opinions and Essays_, Shaw frankly says:
“I must warn the reader that what he is about to study is not a
series of judgments aiming at impartiality, but a siege laid to
the theatre of the nineteenth century by an author who had to
cut his own way into it at the point of the pen and throw some
of its defenders into the moat.
“Pray do not conclude from this that the things hereinafter
written were not true, or not the deepest and best things I
know how to say. Only, they must be construed in the light
of the fact that all through I was accusing my opponents of
failure because they were not doing what I wanted, whereas
they were often succeeding very brilliantly in doing what they
themselves wanted. I postulated as desirable a certain kind of
play in which I was destined ten years later to make my mark as
a playwright (as I very well foreknew in the depth of my own
unconsciousness); and I brought everybody--authors, actors,
managers--to the one test: were they coming my way or staying
in the old grooves?”
In private, Shaw laughingly declares that the old criticisms of Pinero
and Jones were all fudge, that Pinero and Archer were personal friends,
and Shaw and Jones personal friends; so that Archer took on the job of
cracking up Pinero and Shaw that of cracking up Jones, who were both
“doing their blood best” for the drama. Later on the old criticisms
proved no bar to the most cordial personal relations between Shaw and
Pinero; and the latter's knighthood, unsought and, indeed, undreamt of
by himself, was persistently urged on the Prime Minister by Shaw.
Granting all Shaw's unfairness, his confessed partiality and domination
by an _idée fixe_ for the English stage, it is nevertheless astounding
to read Mr. Archer's declaration that Shaw's “critical campaign,
conducted with magnificent energy and intellectual power, was as
nearly as possible barren of result.” On the contrary, it has been
remarked that Shaw's dramatic criticisms supply one of the most notable
examples of cause and effect modern literary history can show. Far
from being barren of result, Shaw's assaults produced an effect little
short of remarkable. His theories and principles found free expression
in the Court Theatre. Indeed, they may be said in large measure to
have created it, controlled it, and achieved its success. To Bernard
Shaw and Granville Barker belong the credit for giving London, in
the Court Theatre, a school of acting and a repertory--or rather,
short-run--theatre such as England had never known before.
It would take me too far afield to attempt to do full justice to the
variety and multiplicity of Shaw's functions as a critic of the drama,
the stage, and the art of acting. The annoying part of his career, as
Mr. W. L. Courtney somewhere says, is that he was more often right
than wrong--“right in substance, though often wrong in manner, saying
true things with the most ludicrous air in the world, as if he were
merely enjoying himself at our expense.” He agitated again and again
for a subsidized theatre; and fought the censorship with unabating
zeal.[130] He championed Ibsen at all times and in all places,
realizing full well, as in the days of his musical criticism, that Sir
Augustus Harris's prejudices against Wagner were no whit greater than
Sir Henry Irving's prejudices against Ibsen. While he classed Irving as
“our ablest exponent of acting as a fine art and serious profession,”
he considered all Irving's creations to be creations of his own
temperament. Shaw took Irving sternly to task for his mutilations of
Shakespeare and his inalienable hostility to Ibsen and the modern
school. On the day of Irving's death, Shaw wrote: “He did nothing for
the drama of the present, and he mutilated the remains of the dying
Shakespeare; but he carried his lifelong fight into victory, and saw
the actor recognized as the prince of all other artists is recognized;
and that was enough in the life of a single man. _Requiescat in
pace._”[131] Shaw held Irving responsible for the remorseless waste
of the modernity and originality of Ellen Terry's art upon the old
drama, despite the fact that she succeeded in climbing to its highest
summit. Shaw found consolation in the reflection that “if it was
denied Ellen Terry to work with Ibsen to interpret the indignation of
a Nora Helmer, it was her happy privilege to work with Burne-Jones and
Alma-Tadema.”[132] It was only after Irving's death, and after Ellen
Terry had reached the age of fifty-eight, that she at last interpreted
the Lady Cicely Waynflete of Shaw's own _Captain Brassbound's
Conversion_.
After ten years of continuous criticism of the arts of music and the
drama, Shaw gave up, exhausted.[133] The last critical continent was
conquered. “The strange Jabberwocky Oracle whom men call Shaw,” began
to attain to the eminence of the “interview” and the “celebrity at
home” column. In his first _feuilleton_, Max Beerbohm, Shaw's successor
on the _Saturday Review_, said of him: “With all his faults--grave
though they are and not to be counted on the fingers of one hand--he
is, I think, by far the most brilliant and remarkable journalist in
London.” _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, then just published, were
creating unusual interest. Shaw was doubtless influenced thereby
to devote himself, as artist, exclusively to the writing of plays.
In order to make as much as the stage royalties from _The Devil's
Disciple_ alone, for example, he would, as he said, have had “to
write his heart out for six years in the _Saturday_.” The superhuman
profession of journalism began to pall upon him: excellence in it
he regarded as quite beyond mortal strength and endurance. “I took
extraordinary pains--all the pains I was capable of--to get to the
bottom of everything I wrote about.... Ten years of such work, at
the rate of two thousand words a week or thereabouts--say, roughly,
a million words--all genuine journalism, dependent on the context of
the week's history for its effect, was an apprenticeship which made
me master of my own style.” Shaw's income as a journalist began in
1885 at one hundred and seventeen pounds and threepence; and it ended
at five hundred pounds. By this time he had reached the age at which
one discovers that “journalism is a young man's standby, not an old
man's livelihood.” Shaw had said all that he had to say of Irving and
Tree; and concerning Shakespeare he boasted: “When I began to write,
William was a divinity and a bore. Now he is a fellow-creature.” But,
above all, he had gloriously succeeded in the creation of that most
successful of all his fictions--G. B. S. “For ten years past, with an
unprecedented pertinacity and obstination, I have been dinning into the
public head that I am an extraordinarily witty, brilliant, and clever
man. That is now part of the public opinion of England; and no power in
heaven or on earth will ever change it. I may dodder and dote; I may
pot-boil and platitudinize; I may become the butt and chopping-block
of all the bright, original spirits of the rising generation; but
my reputation shall not suffer: it is built up fast and solid, like
Shakespeare's, on an impregnable basis of dogmatic reiteration.”
FOOTNOTES:
[119] _Shakespeare's 'Merry Gentlemen,'_ in the _Saturday Review_,
February 26th, 1898.
[120] Concerning Shaw's general attitude towards Shakespeare, compare
the _Letter from Mr. G. Bernard Shaw_ appended to _Tolstoy on
Shakespeare_. Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1906.
[121] _Blaming the Bard_, in the _Saturday Review_, September 26th,
1896.
[122] As Mr. Will Irwin has it in his _Crankidoxology: Being a Mental
Attitude from Bernard Pshaw_:
I'm bored by mere Shakespere and Milton, Tho' Hubbard compels me to
rave; If _I_ should lay laurels to wilt on That foggy Shakesperean
grave, How William would squirm in his grave!
[123] One day at a reception at the Playgoers' Club, in London, Mr.
Osmon Edwards delivered an address on “The superiority of Shaw to
Shakespeare.” He showed that Shakespeare was a bad dramatist, because
he was a great poet; he asserted that his humour was vulgar and his
tragedy puerile; and he endeavoured to prove that Shaw was far superior
to Shakespeare in his realism, in his critical sense of life, in the
depth of his thought, in his stage technique.
At this point, Shaw himself, who was among the audience, rose to his
feet and begged to say a few words _in favour of his famous rival_.
What a delicious situation--and one not unworthy of Bernard Shaw!
Compare _The English Stage of To-Day_, by Mario Borsa, pp. 152-3. John
Lane, London and New York, 1908.
[124] Cf. preface to _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_ for its history
and the causes which led to its publication. In July, 1890, Mr. Shaw
read his _Quintessence of Ibsenism_ in its original form, a study of
the socialistic aspect of Ibsen's writings, before the Fabian Society.
It is interesting to record what appears to be a reference to this
lecture, made by Henrik Ibsen. In a letter to Hans Lien Braekstad
(_Letters of Henrik Ibsen_, translated by John Nilsen Laurvik and Mary
Morison, pp. 430-1), a Norwegian-English man of letters (since 1887
resident in London), who has done much for the spread of Norwegian and
Danish literature in England, Ibsen wrote from Munich, August, 1890,
referring to a garbled report of a newspaper interview with him:
“What I really said was that I was surprised that I, who had made it my
chief life-task to depict human character and human doctrines, should,
without conscious or direct intention, have arrived in several matters
at the same conclusions as the social-democratic philosophers had
arrived at by scientific processes.
“What led me to express this surprise (and, I may here add,
satisfaction), was a statement made by the correspondent to the effect
that one or more lectures had lately been given in London, dealing,
according to him, chiefly with _A Doll's House_.”
The latter statement appears to be in error; although the correspondent
may possibly have had in mind some lectures, delivered by Eleanor Marx,
I believe, on _A Doll's House_.
[125] This seems to me a very superficial judgment, and one which Shaw
himself would doubtless repudiate to-day. How thoroughly inappropriate
and erroneous is the use of the word “happiness” in this connection!
[126] _The Author's Apology_--preface to the first English edition of
_Dramatic Opinions and Essays_, by Bernard Shaw.
[127] _Le Temps_, August 28th, 1905.
[128] _Meredith on Comedy_, in the _Saturday Review_, March 27th, 1897.
[129] _Playhouse Impressions_, article _The Dramatic Critic as Pariah_,
pp. 5-6.
[130] Compare, for example, his ablest and most exhaustive essays on
the subject: _The Author's Apology_ to the Stage Society edition of
_Mrs. Warren's Profession_; _Censorship of the Stage in England_, in
the _North American Review_, Vol. CLXIX., pages 251 _et seq._; _The
Solution of the Censorship Problem_, in the _Academy_, June 29th, 1907;
_The Censorship of Plays_, in the _Nation_ (London), November 16th,
1907.
[131] Owing partially to mistakes in re-translation into English,
partially to certain statements made therein, Shaw's article in the
_Neue Freie Presse_ of Vienna (Feuilleton: _Sir Henry Irving, von
Bernhard Shaw_, October 20th, 1905, written shortly after Irving's
death) aroused a heated discussion and controversy, which raged
even in America until the _Boston Transcript_ let the disputants
down heavily by reprinting the article, which was found to be quite
reasonable and absolutely void of the innuendo of which Shaw was
accused, namely, that Irving had played the sycophant to obtain a
knighthood. It is noteworthy that certain matters as to which Shaw was
erroneously supposed to have misrepresented Irving, were solemnly and
publicly denied in letters to the _Times_, yet when the time came for
biographies of Irving to appear, they contained ample proof that Shaw
might have made all the denied allegations had he chosen to do so. For
the facts in the case, compare the essay in the _Neue Freie Presse_
with the true text of the essay, in the original English, with Shaw's
own notes, in the _Morning Post_, London, December 5th, 1905.
[132] Shaw's fine essay on the art of Ellen Terry also appeared in
the _Neue Freie Presse_ late in 1905. For the English version of the
article, cf. the _Boston Transcript_, January 20th, 1906.
[133] His _Valedictory_ appeared in the _Saturday Review_, May 21st,
1898.
THE PLAYWRIGHT--I
“In all my plays my economic studies have played as important
a part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the works of
Michelangelo.”--Letter to the author, of date June 30th, 1904.
“Plays which, dealing less with the crimes of society, and
more with its romantic follies, and with the struggles of
individuals against those follies, may be called, by contrast,
Pleasant.”-_-Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, Vol. I., Preface.
CHAPTER X
While resting from the over-exertions of the political campaign at the
time of the General Election in 1892, Shaw came upon the manuscript
of the partially finished play begun in 1885. “Tickled” by the play,
and urged by Mr. Grein, Shaw began work upon it anew. “But for Mr.
Grein and the Independent Theatre Society,” Shaw confessed, “it would
have gone back to its drawer and lain there another seven years, if
not for ever.”[134] With this play, _Widowers' Houses_, Shaw made his
_début_ upon the English stage as a problem dramatist with the avowed
purpose of exposing existent evils in the prevailing social order.
_Widowers' Houses_ is the first native play of the New School in
England consciously devoted to the exposure of the social guilt of the
community.
In 1885, shortly after the completion of the novels of his nonage,
Shaw began this play in collaboration with Mr. William Archer. After
learning to know Shaw by sight in the British Museum reading-room, as
a “young man of tawny complexion and attire,” studying alternately,
if not simultaneously, Karl Marx's _Das Kapital_ (in French), and an
orchestral score of _Tristan and Isolde_, Mr. Archer finally met him at
the house of a common acquaintance.
[Illustration: =Bernard Shaw.=]
_Joseph Simpson_
_Courtesy of the Artist._
From the original black and white wash-drawing.
Reproduced by permission of the owner, Mr. J. Murray Allison.
“I learned from himself that he was the author of several
unpublished masterpieces of fiction. Construction, he owned
with engaging modesty, was not his strong point, but his
dialogue was incomparable. Now, in those days I had still a
certain hankering after the rewards, if not the glories, of the
playwright. With a modesty in no way inferior to Mr. Shaw's,
I had realized that I could not write dialogue a bit; but I
still considered myself a born constructor. I proposed, and Mr.
Shaw agreed to, a collaboration. I was to provide him with one
of the numerous plots I kept in stock, and he was to write the
dialogue. So said, so done. I drew out, scene by scene, the
scheme of a twaddling cup-and-saucer comedy vaguely suggested
by Augier's _Ceinture Dorée_. The details I forget, but I know
it was to be called _Rhinegold_, was to open, as _Widowers'
Houses_ actually does, in an hotel garden on the Rhine, and was
to have two heroines, a sentimental and a comic one, according
to the accepted Robertson-Byron-Carton formula. I fancy the
hero was to propose to the sentimental heroine, believing
her to be the poor niece instead of the rich daughter of the
sweater, or slum-landlord, or whatever he may have been; and
I know he was to carry on in the most heroic fashion, and was
ultimately to succeed in throwing the tainted treasure of his
father-in-law, metaphorically speaking, into the Rhine. All
this I gravely propounded to Mr. Shaw, who listened with no
less admirable gravity. Then I thought the matter had dropped,
for I heard no more of it for many weeks. I used to see Mr.
Shaw at the Museum, laboriously writing page after page of the
most exquisitely neat shorthand at the rate of about three
words a minute, but it did not occur to me that this was our
play. After about six weeks he said to me: 'Look here: I've
written half the first act of that comedy, and I've used up
all your plot. Now I want some more to go on with.' I told him
that my plot was a rounded and perfect organic whole, and that
I could no more eke it out in this fashion than I could provide
him or myself with a set of supplementary arms and legs. I
begged him to extend his shorthand and let me see what he had
done; but this would have taken him far too long. He tried to
decipher some of it orally, but the process was too lingering
and painful for endurance. So he simply gave me an outline in
narrative of what he had done; and I saw that, so far from
using up my plot, he had not even touched it. There the matter
rested for months and years. Mr. Shaw would now and then
hold out vague threats of finishing 'our play,' but I felt no
serious alarm. I thought (judging from my own experience in
other cases) that when he came to read over in cold blood what
he had written, he would see what impossible stuff it was.
Perhaps my free utterance of this view piqued him; perhaps
he felt impelled to remove from the Independent Theatre the
reproach of dealing solely in foreign products. The fire of his
genius, at all events, was not to be quenched by my persistent
application of the wet blanket. He finished his play; Mr.
Grein, as in duty bound, accepted it; and the result was the
performance of Friday last at the Independent Theatre.”[135]
According to Shaw's account, he produced a horribly incongruous effect
by “laying violent hands on his (Archer's) thoroughly planned scheme
for a sympathetically romantic 'well-made play' of the type then in
vogue,” and perversely distorting it into a “grotesquely realistic
exposure of slum-landlordism, municipal jobbery, and the pecuniary and
matrimonial ties between it and the pleasant people of 'independent'
incomes who imagine that such sordid matters do not touch their own
lives.” Shortly before the production of _Widowers' Houses_, there
appeared an “Interview” with Shaw, purporting to give some idea of the
much-mooted play, but leaving the public in doubt as to the seriousness
with which this mock-solemn information was to be taken.[136] “Sir,”
said Shaw sternly to the interviewer (himself!), “it (my play) will
be nothing else than didactic. Do you suppose I have gone to all this
trouble to _amuse_ the public? No, if they want that, there is the
Criterion for them, the Comedy, the Garrick, and so on. My object
is to instruct them.” And to explain the allusion contained in the
title, concerning which speculation was rife, Shaw remarked to the
interviewer: “I have been assured that in one of the sections of the
Bible dealing with the land question there is a clause against the
destruction of widows' houses. There is no widow in my play; but there
is a widower who owns slum property. Hence the title. Perhaps you are
not familiar with the Bible.”[137]
After repeated calls from the audience Shaw made an impromptu speech
at the close of the first performance of _Widowers' Houses_. He said
that “he wished to assure his listeners that the greeting of the play
had been agreeable to him, for had the story been received lightly he
would have been disappointed. What he had submitted to their notice
was going on in actual life. The action of _Widowers' Houses_ depicted
the ordinary middle-class life of the day, but he heartily hoped the
time would come when the play he had written would be both utterly
impossible and utterly unintelligible. If anyone were to ask him where
the Socialism came in, he would say that it was in the love of their
art on Socialistic principles that had induced the performers to give
their services on that occasion. In conclusion, he trusted that, above
all, the critics would carefully discriminate between himself and the
actors who had so zealously striven to carry out his intentions.”
According to a contemporary account: “Warm cheers greeted the
playwright who thus candidly and gratefully acknowledged the excellent
work rendered by the players, whilst still proclaiming that his play
was in all particulars the faithful reflex of a sordid and unpitying
age.”
The play, a nine-days' wonder, was widely paragraphed in the
newspapers, and regarded in some quarters as a daring attack on
middle-class society. The storm of protest aroused by _Widowers'
Houses_ almost paralleled the howl of execration evoked by the
production of Ibsen's _Ghosts_ in England. _Widowers' Houses_ was
intended as neither a beautiful nor a lovable work. Shaw confessed
years afterwards that the play was entirely unreadable except for the
prefaces and appendices, which he rightly regarded as good. The art of
this play was confessedly the expression of the sense of intellectual
and moral perversity; for Shaw had passed most of his life in big
modern towns, where his sense of beauty had been starved, whilst
his intellect had been gorged with problems like that of the slums.
_Widowers' Houses_ is “saturated with the vulgarity of the life it
represents”; and, in the first edition of the play, Shaw confesses that
he is “not giving expression in pleasant fancies to the underlying
beauty and romance of happy life, but dragging up to the smooth surface
of 'respectability' a handful of the slime and foulness of its polluted
bed, and playing off your laughter at the scandal of the exposure
against your shudder at its blackness.”
Like Bulwer Lytton, Stevenson, and other nineteenth-century novelists
who turned to the writing of plays, Shaw approached the theatre lacking
due appreciation of the difficulties of dramatic art, the perfect
artistic sincerity it demands. Writing his play as a pastime, he
employed it as a means of shocking the sensibilities of his audience
as well as of winging a barbed shaft at its smug respectability.
Paying no heed to that golden mean of “average truth,” which Sainte
Beuve impressed with such high seriousness upon the youthful Zola,
Shaw indulges in that extreme form of depicting life, the mutilation
of humanity, which Brunetière pronounced to be the vital defect of
naturalism. A pair of lovers _dans cette galère_! As Mr. Archer said
at the time: “When they are not acting with a Gilbertian _naïveté_ of
cynicism, they are snapping and snarling at each other like a pair of
ill-conditioned curs.”
The accusation of indebtedness to Ibsen hurled at Shaw from all sides
as soon as his play was produced was promptly squelched by Shaw's
vigorous denial. It is worth remarking, however, that “tainted money,”
that bone of contention in America and the theme of Shaw's later
_Major Barbara_, is the abuse which serves as the mark for the satire,
both of Ibsen in _An Enemy of the People_, and of Shaw in _Widowers'
Houses_. The perverting effect of ill-gotten gains upon the moral sense
is the lesson of these two plays. Whereas Shaw was content to uncover
the social canker and expose its ravages in all directions, Ibsen,
through the instrumentality of Stockmann, holds out an ideal for the
regeneration of society.
_Widowers' Houses_ abounds in flashes of insight, in passages of
trenchant dialogue, in sardonic exposure of human nature; the keen
intellect of the author is everywhere in evidence. Shaw's vigorous
Socialism is largely responsible for the clarity and succinctness
with which the economic point is driven home; and the discussions of
social problems are tense with a nervous vivacity almost dramatic
in quality. And yet the structural defect of the play is the loose
dramatic connection between the economic elucidations and the general
psychological processes of the action.
Before the production of _Widowers' Houses_, Shaw publicly stated that
the first two acts were written before he ever heard of Ibsen; and
afterwards he asserted that his critics “should have guessed this,
because there is not one idea in the play that cannot be more easily
referred to half a dozen English writers than to Ibsen; whilst of his
peculiar retrospective method, by which his plays are made to turn
upon events supposed to have happened before the rise of the curtain,
there is not a trace in my work.”[138] Shaw laughed incontinently at
those people who excitedly discussed the play as a daringly original
sermon, but who would not accept it as a play on any terms “because
its hero did not, when he learned that his income came from slum
property, at once relinquish it (_i.e._, make it a present to Sartorius
without benefiting the tenants), and go to the goldfields to dig out
nuggets with his strong right arm, so that he might return to wed his
Blanche after a shipwreck (witnessed by her in a vision), just in time
to rescue her from beggary, brought upon her by the discovery that
Lickcheese was the rightful heir to the property of Sartorius, who had
dispossessed and enslaved him by a series of forgeries unmasked by the
faithful Cokane!”
For the sake of its bearing upon Shaw's subsequent career, one
important contemporary impression deserves to be placed on record.
Five months after the production of _Widowers' Houses_, in a review
(published May 4th, 1893) of the Independent Theatre edition of that
play, Mr. William Archer earnestly endeavoured to dissuade Shaw from
turning dramatist.
“It is a pity that Mr. Shaw should labour under a delusion as
to the true bent of his talent, and, mistaking an amusing _jeu
d'esprit_ for a work of creative art, should perhaps be tempted
to devote further time and energy to a form of production
for which he has no special ability and some constitutional
disabilities. A man of his power of mind can do nothing that is
altogether contemptible. We may be quite sure that if he took
palette and 'commenced painter,' or set to work to manipulate
a lump of clay, he would produce a picture or a statue that
would bear the impress of a keen intelligence, and would be
well worth looking at. That is precisely the case of _Widowers'
Houses_. It is a curious example of what can be done in art by
sheer brain-power, apart from natural aptitude. For it does not
appear that Mr. Shaw has any more specific talent for the drama
than he has for painting or sculpture.”
Shaw's next play, _The Philanderer_, is distinctly a _pièce d'occasion_
and should be read in the light of the attitude of the British public
toward Ibsen and Ibsenism at the time of its writing. After Miss Janet
Achurch's performance as Nora Helmer in _A Doll's House_, in 1889,
Ibsen became the target of dramatic criticism; and Shaw's _Quintessence
of Ibsenism_, published in 1891, was the big gun, going off when the
controversy was at its height. Sir Edwin Arnold made an editorial
attack on Ibsen, Mr. Frederick Wedmore echoed his denunciation, and
Clement Scott exhausted his vocabulary of vituperation in an almost
hysterical outcry against the foulness and obscenity of the shameless
Norwegian. _The Philanderer_ was written just when the cult of Ibsen
had reached the pinnacle of fatuity. From Shaw's picture, one is led
to suppose that society, with reference to Ibsen, was roughly divided
into three classes: the conservatives of the old guard, regarding
Ibsen as a _monstrum horrendum_; the _soi-disant_ Ibsenites, glibly
conversant with Ibsen's ideas but profoundly ignorant of their
meaning; and, lastly, those who really understood Ibsen, this class
being made up of two sorts of individuals, those who really intended
to adopt Ibsen principles, and those who were keen and unscrupulous
enough to exploit Ibsenism solely for the sake of the sustenance it
afforded parasitic growths like themselves. The ideal of the “womanly
woman” still prevailed in English society. Shaw here readily perceived
the possibilities for satire and tragi-comedy, both in the clash of
old prejudices with new ideas, and in the mordant contrast discovered
by the conflict of the over-sexed, passionate “womanly woman” with the
under-sexed, pallidly intellectual philanderer of the Ibsen school.
Had Shaw's performance been as able as his perception was acute, _The
Philanderer_ would have been a genuine achievement instead of a grimly
promising failure.
_The Philanderer_ serves as a link between the plays of Shaw's earlier
and later manners. Present marriage laws really have very little to do
with this play, which concerns itself with a study of social types.
Julia is the _fine fleur_ of feral femininity; woman's practice of
employing her personal charms unscrupulously and man's practice of
treating woman as a mere plaything both have a share in the formation
of her character. Grace Tranfield is the best type of the advanced
woman; she demands equality of opportunity for women, rejects the
“lord and master” theory, and fights always for the integrity of
her self-respect. Between these two women stands Leonard Charteris,
holding the average young cub's cynical ideas about women, sharpened
to acuteness through the intellectual astuteness of Bernard Shaw.
Charteris, in his bloodless Don Juanism, is the type of the degenerate
male flirt--the pallid prey of the _maladie du siècle_. “C'est un
homme qui ne fait la cour aux femmes ni pour le bon ni pour le mauvais
motif,” says M. Filon. “Que veut-il? S'amuser. Seulement--comme on
l'a dit des Anglais en général--il s'amuse tristement; il y a dans
l'attitude de ce séducteur glacial et dégoûté quelque chose qui
n'est pas très viril. On dit la société anglaise infestée de ces
gens-là.”[139]
[Illustration: =Playbill of _The Philanderer_. Hebbel-Theater, Berlin.
January 3rd, 1909. Sixty-eighth performance.=]
[Illustration: =Playbill of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_. Last “Gastspiel”
by the players of the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele in Berlin.
Schauspielhaus, Munich. July 31st, 1908. Ninth performance.=]
Upon the mind of any unprejudiced person, I think, _The Philanderer_
creates the impression that Shaw's attitude toward women in this play
must have been induced by unpleasant personal relations with women
prior to the time at which the play was written. Many people paid him
the insult of recognizing him in Charteris; and I have even been told
that Shaw was temperamentally not dissimilar to Charteris, at that
particular period. The play is marked by unnaturalness and immaturity
at every turn; but several scenes exhibit great nervous strength. Mr.
Robert Loraine once remarked to me that, in his opinion, the first act
of _The Philanderer_ was unparalleled in its verisimilitude, always
making him realize the truth of Ibsen's dictum that the modern stage
must be regarded as a room of which one wall has been removed. Mr.
Loraine's impression is fully justified by the fact that the scene is a
more or less accurate replica of a scene in Mr. Shaw's own life.
As a play, _The Philanderer_ is crude and amateurish, revolving upon
the pivot of Charteris's satire, and presenting various features in
turn--now extravaganza, now broad farce, now comedy, now tragi-comedy.
With all its brilliant mental vivisection, the conversation of
Charteris is never natural, but supra-natural; the utterly gross and
caddish indecency of his exposures would never be tolerated for an
instant in polite or even respectable society. And yet Mr. Shaw once
vehemently assured me: “Charteris is not passionless, not unscrupulous,
and a sincere, not a pseudo, Ibsenist”! Cuthbertson is a caricature of
Clement Scott; and, in virtually the same words used by Scott in his
attacks upon Ibsen, Cuthbertson avows that the whole modern movement
is abhorrent to him “because his life had been passed in witnessing
scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by
womanly women and manly men.” The mannerisms of Craven, “Now really”
in especial, are taken directly, Mr. Shaw once told me, from Mr. H. M.
Hyndman, the English Socialist leader. Dr. Paramore is the puppet of
broad farce, immune to all humane concern through inoculation with the
deadly germ of scientific research; while Sylvia is merely the pert
little _soubrette_. The inverted Gilbertism of Colonel Craven's: “Do
you mean to say that I am expected to treat my daughter the same as
I would any other girl? Well, dash me if I will!” faintly strikes the
note of Falsacappa, the brigand chief, in Meilhac and Halévy's _The
Brigands_: “Marry my daughter to an honest man! Never!”--a phrase with
which Mr. W. S. Gilbert afterwards did such execution in _The Pirates
of Penzance_.
When _The Philanderer_ was published in 1898, the public was puzzled
and astounded to read an “attack” on Ibsen by Ibsen's most valiant
champion in England! So shocked was Mr. Archer by this “outrage upon
art and decency” that he wanted to “cut” his colleague and friend
in the street. _The Philanderer_ thus laid the foundation of Shaw's
reputation as a cynic and a paradoxer. It is chiefly interesting to-day
as a foreshadowing and promise of the lines of development of the
later dramatist. Superficially, this play mirrors the glaring, even
tragic contrast between faddist idealization of Ibsen, and sincere
realization of Ibsenism. But, in the light of subsequent events, the
play rather teaches that Charteris as male flirt is the model for the
sketchy Valentine, that Julia is the Ann Whitefield of a more natural
and less self-conscious phase. Throughout the play we are reminded of
the brutal laughter of Wedekind, the sardonic humour of Becque, and,
in places, even of the dark levity of Ibsen himself. The portrayal of
Julia is remarkable, in spite of the damaging error of representing her
as fit subject for the police court--mentally arrested in development,
victim of violent “brain-storms,” unscrupulous, treacherous, deceitful,
feline. And yet, by some marvellous trick of subtle art, the author has
caused this creature to win our profound sympathy in the end. After
all, her love for Charteris is genuine and sincere; and the scene
between Grace and Julia, after the latter has accepted Dr. Paramore, is
profoundly touching:
GRACE (_speaking in a low voice to Julia alone_): So you
have shown him that you can do without him! Now I take back
everything I said. Will you shake hands with me? (_Julia gives
her hand painfully, with her face averted._) They think this a
happy ending, Julia--these men--our lords and masters! (_The
two stand silent, hand in hand._)
The human drama of this play, merely sketched though it be, is the
conflict in Julia's soul between her violent passion for Charteris
and her true impulse toward self-respect. The quintessence of her
tragedy is expressed in her last tilt with Charteris. He walks up to
congratulate her, proffering his hand.
JULIA (_exhausted, allowing herself to take it_): You are
right. I am a worthless woman.
CHARTERIS (_triumphant, and gaily remonstrating_): Oh, why?
JULIA: Because I am not brave enough to kill you.
Shaw's next play, _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, completed his first cycle
of economic studies in dramatic form; and at one stroke demonstrated
Shaw to be a dramatist of marked powers and ability. Shaw's account of
the genesis of this play is an important link in its history. In regard
to the title, Shaw says: “The tremendously effective scene--which a
baby could write if its sight were normal--in which she (Mrs. Warren)
justifies herself, is only a paraphrase of a scene in a novel of my
own, 'Cashel Byron's Profession' (hence the title, _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_), in which a prize-fighter shows how he was driven into the
ring exactly as Mrs. Warren was driven on the streets.” Shaw met the
charge of indebtedness to Ibsen and De Maupassant with the statement
that, if a dramatist living in the world of multifarious interests,
duties and experiences in which he lived has to go to books for his
ideas and his inspiration, he must be both blind and deaf. “Most
dramatists are,” he laconically added. So _Mrs. Warren's Profession_
came about in this way:
“Miss Janet Achurch mentioned to me a novel by some French
writer as having a dramatizable story in it. It being hopeless
to get me to read anything, she told me the story, which was
ultra-romantic. I said, 'Oh, I will work out the real truth
about that mother some day.' In the following autumn I was
the guest of a lady of very distinguished ability--one whose
knowledge of English social types is as remarkable as her
command of industrial and political questions. She suggested
that I should put on the stage a real modern lady of the
governing class--not the sort of thing that theatrical and
critical authorities imagine such a lady to be. I did so; and
the result was Miss Vivie Warren, who has laid the intellect
of Mr. William Archer in ruins.... I finally persuaded Miss
Achurch, who is clever with her pen, to dramatize the story
herself on the original romantic lines. Her version is called
_Mrs. Daintry's Daughter_. That is the history of _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_. I never dreamt of Ibsen or De Maupassant,
any more than a blacksmith shoeing a horse thinks of the
blacksmith in the next county.”[140]
Of course, one blacksmith cannot possibly know what another blacksmith
in the next county is doing. But Shaw was not only aware of what Ibsen
was doing and had done: he had actually written a remarkable analysis
of Ibsen's plays and, with his utmost critical skill, defended Ibsen's
art and philosophy, on the platform and in the press, against the
ablest critics in England. As clearly as _Ghosts_ does _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ reveal the truth of George Eliot's dictum that consequences
are unpitying; a true drama of catastrophe, employing Ibsen's peculiar
retrospective method, Shaw's play exemplifies, in Amiel's words, the
fatality of the consequences which follow every human act. Nora as
daughter, instead of Nora as wife, Vivie leaves her home under the same
profound conviction of her duty to herself as a human being--a duty
infinitely more obligatory than any she may be conventionally imagined
to owe to a Magdalen mother, who has educated and purposes to support
her out of the profits of a profession which has its roots in the most
hideous of all social evils.[141]
_Mrs. Warren's Profession_ towers high above his first two plays, and
places Shaw in the front rank of contemporary dramatic craftsmen. Its
strength proceeds from the depth displayed in the consideration of the
motives which prompt to action, the intellectual and emotional crises
eventuating from the fierce clash of personalities and the sardonically
unconscious self-scourging of the characters themselves. The scenes
are so admirably ordered, the procedure so swift, the situations so
charged with significance that one can find little to wonder at in Mr.
Cunninghame Graham's characterization of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ as
“the best that has been written in English in our generation.” Tense,
nervous, vigorous, the great scenes are full of “that suppleness, that
undulation of emotional process,” which Mr. Archer pronounces one of
the unmistakable tokens of dramatic mastery. The tremendous dramatic
power of the specious logic with which Mrs. Warren defends her course;
the sardonic irony of the parting between mother and daughter! Goethe
said of Molière that he chastises men by drawing them just as they
are. True descendant of Molière, whom he once declared to be worth a
thousand Shakespeares, Shaw wields upon vice the shrieking scourge,
not of the preacher, but of the dramatist. Out of the mouths of the
characters themselves proceeds their own condemnation. Devastating in
its consummate irony is the passage in which Mrs. Warren, conventional
to her heart's core, lauds her own respectability; and that in which
Crofts propounds his own code of honour:
CROFTS: My code is a simple one, and, I think, a good one:
Honour between man and man; fidelity between man and woman;
and no cant about this or that religion, but an honest belief
that things are making for good on the whole.
VIVIE (_with biting irony_): “A power, not ourselves, that
makes for righteousness,” eh?
CROFTS (_taking her seriously_): Oh, certainly, not ourselves,
of course. _You_ understand what I mean.
Dr. Brandes called Ibsen's _Ghosts_, if not the greatest achievement,
at any rate the noblest action of the poet's career. _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ is not only what Brunetière would call a work of combat: it
is an act--an act of declared hostility against capitalistic society,
the inertia of public opinion, the lethargy of the public conscience,
and the criminality of a social order which begets such appalling
social conditions. Into this play Shaw has poured all his Socialistic
passion for a more just and humane social order.
As an arraignment of social conditions, the play is tremendous. As a
work of art, it presents marked deficiencies. Shaw sought to dispose of
one charge--that Vivie is merely Shaw in petticoats--in these words:
“One of my female characters, who drinks whisky and smokes cigars and
reads detective stories and regards the fine arts, especially music, as
an insufferable and unintelligible waste of time, has been declared by
my friend, Mr. William Archer, to be an exact and authentic portrait of
myself, on no other grounds in the world except that she is a woman of
business and not a creature of romantic impulse.” It is clear that this
is not a satisfactory answer to Mr. Archer's charge; but even in more
minor details, the play is open to criticism: the futility of Praed,
save as a barefaced confidant; the cheap melodrama of Frank and the
rifle; the series of coincidences culminating in the Rev. Mr. Gardner's
miserably confused “Miss Vavasour, I believe!” at the end of the first
act. More important still, as Mr. Archer once pointed out,[142] there
is nothing of the inevitable in the meeting of Frank and Vivie,
despite Shaw's assertion that “the children of any polyandrous group
will, when they grow up, inevitably be confronted with the insoluble
problem of their own possible consanguinity.” Had Vivie not happened
to take lodgings at that particular farmhouse in Surrey, she would
never have seen or heard of Frank, and the “inevitable” would never
have happened. But this single lapse of logic, together with the
other defects mentioned, are comparatively venial faults--which Shaw
probably classes among those “relapses into staginess” betraying, as
he confessed, “the young playwright and the old playgoer in this early
work of mine.”
It is the predominance of a certain hard, sheer rationalism, and a
defiant, irresponsible levity in places, which mars the artistic unity
of the play, and denies it the exalted rank to which it well-nigh
attains. At the fundamental morality of the play there is no cause to
cavil. Instead of maintaining an association in the imagination of
the spectators between prostitution and fashionable beauty, luxury
and refinement, as do _La Dame aux Caméllias_, _The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray_, _Iris_, _Zaza_ and countless other modern plays, _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_ exhibits the life of the courtesan in all its
arid actuality, and inculcates a lesson of the sternest morality. It
is because she is what she is that Mrs. Warren loses her daughter
irrevocably. In general, the logic of the play is unimpeachable;
but the rationalist character imparted to the conversations of the
principal characters by their persistence in arguing everything out
logically gives the play a sort of glacial rigidity. The principal
defect of the play is the discrepancy between the tragic seriousness
of the theme and the occasional depressing levity of its treatment.
Consonance between theme and tone is the prime requisite of a work of
art. This remarkable play falls just short of real greatness because
its whimsical, facetious, irrepressible author was unable to discipline
himself to artistic self-restraint. _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ is
calculated to produce an almost unendurable effect because, as Mr.
Archer wisely says, Bernard Shaw is “the slave of his sense of the
ridiculous.”
The close of the year 1893 marks the beginning of a new phase in
the evolution of Shaw's art as a dramatist. As Brunetière said to
the Symbolists, so the English public said to Mr. Grein and his
supporters of the Independent Theatre Society: “Gentlemen, produce your
masterpieces!” Shaw eagerly took up the case; and rather than let it
collapse, he “manufactured the evidence.” His first play met with a
_succès de scandale_; his second failed of production; and his third,
the expected “masterpiece,” was debarred by the censorship. The union
of economics and Socialism in thesis-plays met with no favour at the
hands of the British public. Shaw was forced to relinquish for the time
being his purpose of reforming the public through the medium of the
stage. His original disavowal of any intent to amuse the public went
for naught in default of a platform from which to deliver instruction.
Shaw's social determinism, as M. Auguste Hamon once expressed it to
me, is “absolute”: his fundamental Socialism throws the blame, not
upon Trench, Charteris, Crofts and Mrs. Warren, as _individuals_, but
upon the _prevailing social order_, the capitalistic _régime_, which
offers them as alternatives, not morality and immorality, but two sorts
of immorality.[143] Upon each individual in his audience, whether in
the study or in the theatre, Shaw threw the burden of responsibility
for defective social organization, and for those social horrors which
can only be mitigated, and, perhaps, ultimately abolished, by public
opinion, public action and public contribution. Mr. Shaw once described
this play to me as a faithful presentment of the “economic basis of
modern commercial prostitution.” But the managers well knew that the
public was averse to being forced to face the unpleasant facts set
forth in Shaw's three “unpleasant” plays. The rigour of the censorship
and prevailing theatrical conditions in London were hostile to Shaw's
initial efforts.
“You cannot write three plays and then stop,” Shaw has explained.
Accordingly, for obvious reasons, social determinism ceased to be the
motive force of Shaw's dramas; and he began to write plays concerned
more particularly with the comedy and tragedy of individual life and
destiny. Shaw did not cease to be a satirist, did not desist from his
effort to startle the public out of its bland complacency: he merely
diverted for the time being the current of his satire from social
abuses to the shams, pretences, illusions and self-deceptions of
individual life. Having learned to beware of solemnity, Shaw makes the
satiric jest his point of departure. From this time forward he occupies
and operates upon a new plane. He has ceased to be purely the social
scavenger. Bernard Shaw's comedy of manners and of character now enters
into the history of British drama.
_Arms and the Man_--obviously deriving its title from the _Arma
virumque cano_ of the opening line of Virgil's _Æneid_--is one of
Shaw's most delightful comedies--a genuine comedy of character and yet
_theatrical_ in the true sense, Dr. Brandes has called it. Not the
least of its virtues is the implicitness of its philosophy; perhaps
this is one reason why Mr. Shaw (as he lately remarked to me) now
considers it a very slight and immature production! From one point of
view, this play may be regarded as a study of the psychology of the
military profession.[144] From another point of view--the standpoint
of the regular playgoer--the play has for its dramatic essence the
collision of romantic illusion with prosaic reality.
[Illustration: =Playbill of _Arms and the Man_. Avenue Theatre, London.
April 21st, 1894. First production on any stage.=]
To many people the play appeared as a “damning sneer at military
courage,” an attempted demonstration of the astounding thesis
that heroism is merely a sublimated form of cowardice! When King
Edward--then Prince of Wales--witnessed a performance of the play, he
could not be induced to smile even once; and afterwards it was reported
that “his Royal Highness regretted that the play should have shown so
disrespectful an attitude toward the Army as was betrayed by the
character of the chocolate-cream soldier.”[145] Bluntschli is a natural
realist, to whom long military service has taught the salutary lesson
that bullets are to be avoided, not sought; that the main object of the
efficient soldier is not the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth,
but practical success and the preservation of life. Shaw had never seen
service, never participated in a battle--save the battle of Trafalgar
Square. But he happened to be a modern realist with a tremendous fund
of satire and fantasy. And although he had to get his data at second
hand, he experienced no difficulty in finding abundant material, to
authenticate his presentment of the common-sense soldier, in great
realistic fiction such as Zola's _La Débâcle_, in classic autobiography
such as Marbot's _Memoirs_, and in the recorded experiences of English
and American generals, notably Lord Wolseley and General Horace Porter.
People were inclined to laugh Shaw's play out of court as an exercise
no more serious than that of a “mowing down military ideals with
volleys of chocolate creams.” Yet Shaw knew a man who lived for two
days in the Shipka Pass on chocolate; while some years later, during
the Boer war, Queen Victoria presented every soldier in the British
army with a ration of chocolate--chocolate which Liebig pronounced
the most perfect food in the world. The idea of an officer carrying
an empty pistol! And yet Lord Wolseley mentions two officers who
seldom carried any weapons, and one of them was Gordon. Bluntschli's
hysterical condition in the first act finds its analogue in General
Porter's account describing the condition of his troops after a battle.
And Bluntschli's delightful description of a cavalry charge finds its
analogue, not in the Tennysonian _Charge of the Light Brigade_, but in
the account of this charge as given by the popular historian Kinglake;
and, as a matter of fact, Shaw's description was taken almost verbatim
from an account given privately to a friend of Shaw's by an officer
who served in the Franco-Prussian war. The catalogue might easily
be extended; suffice it to say that, _irrespective of the totality
of impression_, there can be no question of the credibility of the
separate incidents in the play, which furnished such ready targets for
critical marksmanship.[146]
From the dramatic side, _Arms and the Man_ is far less a “realistic”
comedy than a satiric exposure of the illusions of warfare, of love,
of romantic idealism. Of course, Shaw imparts an air of pleasing
likelihood to the racial traits or characters, and the local colour of
the scenes; and, as Dr. Brandes has remarked, in Bernard Shaw's choice
of themes one feels the mental suppleness of the modern critic, with
his ability to throw himself sympathetically into different historic
periods and into the minds of different races. In _Arms and the Man_,
“the whole environment is characteristic, the people of most refinement
being proud of washing themselves 'almost every day,' and of owning
a 'library,' the only one in the district. Everything smacks of the
Balkan Peninsula, even to the waiting-maid and the man-servant, with
their half-Asiatic mingling of forwardness and servility.”[147] To
be accurate, Shaw sketches in his _milieu_ with the very lightest of
strokes. Bluntschli might just as well have served in a war between
Peru and Chili, or Greece and Turkey; while for all practical purposes,
the scene might just as well have been laid along the coasts of
Bohemia. I have long contended that _Arms and the Man_ was not a play,
but a light opera; and now comes Oscar Straus to compose the music for
the libretto adapted from Shaw's Bulgarian fantasy.
Mr. Shaw once told me that his two friends, Sidney Webb, the solid and
the practical, and Cunninghame Graham, the hidalgesque and fantastic,
suggested the contrast between Bluntschli and Saranoff. “The identity,”
he explained, “only lies on the surface, of course. But the true
dramatist must always find his contrasts in real life.” And it will
be recalled that the rodomontade placed with such ludicrous effect
in the mouth of the Bulgarian braggadocio, had actually been used,
with equally telling effect, by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in a speech
in the House of Commons. Shaw promptly stole the potent phrase, “I
never withdraw,” for the sake of its perfect style, and used it as a
cockade for Sergius the Sublime. The great charm of the play consists
in the disillusionment of the romantic Raina and the sham-idealist
Saranoff by the practical realism of the common-sense Bluntschli. A
Bulgarian Byron, Sergius is perpetually mocked by the disparity between
his imaginative ideals and the disillusions which continually sting
his sensitive nature. And the true tragedy of the idealist, in the
Shavian frame of mind, is summed up in his words, “Damnation! mockery
everywhere! Everything that I think is mocked by everything that I do.”
And Shaw himself has said:
“My Bulgarian hero, quite as much as Helmer in _A Doll's
House_, was a hero shown from the modern woman's point of
view. I complicated the psychology by making him catch glimpse
after glimpse of his own aspect and conduct from this point
of view himself, as all men are beginning to do more or less
now, the result, of course, being the most horrible dubiety on
his part as to whether he was really a brave and chivalrous
gentleman, or a humbug and a moral coward. His actions,
equally of course, were hopelessly irreconcilable with either
theory. Need I add that if the straightforward Helmer, a very
honest and ordinary middle-class man misled by false ideals of
womanhood, bewildered the public and was finally set down as a
selfish cad by all the Helmers in the audience, _a fortiori_ my
introspective Bulgarian never had a chance, and was dismissed,
with but moderately spontaneous laughter, as a swaggering
impostor of the species for which contemporary slang has
invented the term 'bounder'?”[148]
_Arms and the Man_ has laid its hold upon the modern imagination, and
has been produced all over the world. What more delightful than to
have seen Bluntschli interpreted by the actors of our generation--by
Mansfield, with his quaintly dry cynicism, by Jarno, with a humour racy
of the soil, by Mantzius, with scholarly accuracy, by Sommerstorff,
with a touch of romance!--by Loraine, Nhil, Stephens, Daly. It is quite
true that the play is loose in form, oscillating between comedy and
fantastic farce, and that even now it is already beginning to “date.”
But its fantasy, its satire, and its genial philosophy will amply
suffice to give it a long lease on life.[149] Shaw's own confidence in
his power as a dramatist and in the future of the play is humorously
expressed in characteristic style in the following letter written in
response to an apologetic note from his American agent, Miss Elisabeth
Marbury, accompanying a meagre remittance for royalties on _Arms and
the Man_:
“RAPACIOUS ELISABETH MARBURY,
“What do you want me to make a fortune for? Don't you know
that the draft you sent me will permit me to live and preach
Socialism for six months? The next time you have so large an
amount to remit, please send it to me by instalments, or you
will put me to the inconvenience of having a bank account. What
do you mean by giving me advice about writing a play with a
view to the box-office receipts? I shall continue writing just
as I do now for the next ten years. After that we can wallow
in the gold poured at our feet by a dramatically regenerated
public.”
_Arms and the Man_ is an injunction to found our institutions, in
Shaw's little-understood phrase, not on “the ideals suggested to our
imagination by our half-satisfied passions,” but on a “genuinely
scientific natural history.”
A distinguished dramatic critic once said to me that he regarded all of
Shaw's works as derivative literature. Shaw's first three plays were
traced to Ibsen, to De Maupassant, to Strindberg; and won for him the
flattering title of the “second-hand Brummagem Ibsen” (William Winter)!
And after witnessing two acts of _Arms and the Man_ at the Avenue
Theatre, Mr. Archer began to have a misgiving that he had wandered by
mistake into The Palace of Truth. The relation of the art of Bernard
Shaw to the art of W. S. Gilbert is one of much delicate intricacy; and
deserves more than casual mention. Shaw has declared that those who
regard the function of a writer as “creative” are the most illiterate
of dupes, that in his business he knows _me_ and _te_, not _meum_ and
_tuum_, and that he himself is “a crow who has followed many plows.” In
a vein of mocking acknowledgment, Shaw once spoke of the seriousness
with which he had pondered the jests of W. S. Gilbert. A careful
critical examination of the methods of Shaw and Gilbert reveals the
undoubted resemblance, as well as the fundamental dissimilarity, of
these two satiric interpreters of human nature.[150]
One particular incident in _Arms and the Man_ seems to derive directly
from an incident in Gilbert's _Engaged_. The scene in which Nicola
advises Louka, his betrothed, to gain a hold over Sergius, marry him
ultimately, and so “come to be one of my grandest customers, instead
of only being my wife and costing me money,” is but a paraphrase and
inversion of that ludicrous scene in _Engaged_, in which “puir little
Maggie Macfarlane” advises her lover, Angus Macalister, to resign her
to Cheviot-Hill for the princely consideration of two pounds. Aside
from this one minor similarity, _Arms and the Man_ is very different
from a Gilbert play. For purposes of general comparison, turn once
more to _Engaged_--which will serve as well as any of the works of
Gilbert--for this passage:
CHEVIOT-HILL (_suddenly seeing her_): Maggie, come here. Angus,
do take your arm from around that girl's waist. Stand back,
and don't you listen. Maggie, three months ago I told you I
loved you passionately; to-day I tell you that I love you as
passionately as ever; I may add that I am still a rich man. Can
you blige me with a postage-stamp?
Here, not only is the comic note struck by the juxtaposition of two
essential incongruities: in addition, the farcicality of the idea
stamps it as impossible. It is an admirable illustration of that
exquisite sense of quaint unexpectedness, evoked by the plays of both
Gilbert and Shaw. Take now a scene of somewhat cognate appeal in _Arms
and the Man_. In both scenes the bid is for sudden laughter, through
the startle of surprise. Bluntschli flatly tells Raina to her face that
he finds it impossible to believe a single thing she says.
RAINA (_gasping_): I! I!!! (_She points to herself
incredulously, meaning, “I, Raina Petkoff, tell lies!” He meets
her gaze unflinchingly. She suddenly sits down beside him, and
adds, with a complete change of manner from the heroic to the
familiar._) How did you find me out?
BLUNTSCHLI (_promptly_): Instinct, dear young lady. Instinct,
and experience of the world.
RAINA (_wonderingly_): Do you know, you are the first man I
ever met who did not take me seriously?
BLUNTSCHLI: You mean, don't you, that I am the first man that
has ever taken you quite seriously?
RAINA: Yes, I suppose I do mean that. (_Cosily, quite at her
ease with him._) How strange it is to be talked to in such a
way!...
Gilbert employs a device of the simplest mechanism, giving merely
the shock of unexpected contrast. Shaw's spiritual adventure is an
excogitated bit of psychology, of intellectual content and rational
crescendo. It is the Shavian trick of putting into dialogue the
revealing, accusatory words seldom spoken in real life.
This calls to mind a resemblance--with a difference--between Shaw and
Gilbert. In Gilbert's _The Palace of Truth_ each character indulges in
frank self-revelation. Enchanted by the spell of a certain locality,
everyone is compelled to speak his whole thought without disguise,
under the delusion that he is only indulging in the usual polite
insincerities. All this self-analysis and self-exposure goes for naught
but to evoke laughter; for, lacking either profound insight into
human nature or cynical distrust of humanity, Gilbert is incapable of
trenchant generalization. In Shaw's plays, people play the game of
“Truth” for all there is in it; and perhaps Shaw's greatest capacity
is the capacity for generalization. Shaw's incomparable superiority to
Gilbert consists in his acute perception and subtle delineation of the
comic, and often tragic, inconsistencies of genuine human character.
Shaw has succeeded in revealing certain subconscious sides of human
nature that usually remain hidden because dramatists fail to put into
the mouths of their creations the real thoughts that clamour for
expression. One almost always hears their superficial selves speaking
solely through the voluble medium of society or the reticent medium of
self.
Not only in philosophic grasp, but also in imagination, does Shaw excel
Gilbert; an incident will suffice to explain. Mr. John Corbin once told
me that in comparing Shaw and Gilbert, he had instanced to Mr. Henry
Arthur Jones the play of _Pygmalion and Galatea_, as showing that,
after all, Gilbert had a heart and an imagination for beauty. “Ah,
yes!” replied Mr. Jones. “But Gilbert never could have written that
line in _Cæsar and Cleopatra_:
CÆSAR: What has Rome to show me that I have not seen already?
One year of Rome is like another, except that I grow older,
whilst the crowd in the Appian way is always the same age.”
Philosophically speaking, Gilbert's characters accept without question
the current ideals of life and conduct; and make ludicrous spectacles
of themselves in the effort to live up to them. Shaw's creations
discover the hollowness and vanity of these same current ideals, and
gain freedom in escape from their obsession. As Mr. Walkley once put
it: “Gilbertism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of the
spectacle of a number of people hypocritically pretending, or naïvely
failing, to act up to ideals which Mr. Gilbert and his people hold to
be valid.... Shavianism consists in the ironic humour to be got out of
the spectacle of a number of people trying to apply the current ideas
only to find in the end that they won't work.”[151] Let us have done
with rating of Shaw as a cheap imitator of Gilbert. It is quite true
that Gilbert anticipated Shaw by many years in the use of the device
of open confession--the characters naïvely “making a clean breast”
of things; but the device was handed on to Shaw for legitimate use
instead of for farcical misuse. In any deep sense, Shaw owes nothing
to Gilbert; and his paradoxes, unlike Gilbert's, are the outcome of
a profound study of human nature and of contemporary civilization.
“Gilbert would have anticipated me,” Mr. Shaw once assured me, “if
he had taken his paradoxes seriously. But it does not seem to have
occurred to him that he had found any real flaw in conventional
morality--only that he had found out how to make logical quips at
its expense. His serious plays are all conventional. Most of the
revolutionary ideas have come up first as jests; and Gilbert did not
get deeper than this stage.”
_Arms and the Man_ is the first of four plays which I class in a
category by themselves--the plays constructed in the loose and
variegated comedic form, presumably designed to be “popular” and
to amuse the public, fantastically treated, and imbued with a mild
philosophy held strictly implicit.[152] These four plays are _Arms
and the Man_, _You Never Can Tell_, _How He Lied to Her Husband_
and _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. In _You Never Can Tell_ Shaw
deliberately made concessions to that coy monster, the British public.
Thitherto he had in large measure disdained the task of complying with
the demands of London audiences for a popular comedy, combining his
oft-praised cynical brilliancy and his talent for “giving furiously to
think,” with his unquestioned ability to amuse. Shaw's realization of
the truth of Molière's words: “_C'est une étrange entreprise que celle
de faire rire les honnêtes gens_,” did not in the least deter him from
embarking upon this perilous undertaking. In _You Never Can Tell_ he
gave himself up wholly to the hazardous task, tentatively inaugurated
in _Arms and the Man_, of attempting to amuse that public which had so
persistently refused, so defiantly scorned, his instruction. _You Never
Can Tell_ was Shaw's propitiatory sacrifice to recalcitrant London.
Strange to say, this deliberate concession to popular demand even his
most lenient censors refused to validate.[153] London, matching Shaw
for whimsicality, was no whit propitiated by his proposal of a _mariage
de convenance_ with that doubtful character, public opinion. Shaw
has taken Shakespeare himself to task for pandering to public taste
in a play coolly entitled _As You Like It_. When the “Dramatist of
Donnybrook Fair,” as Mr. Corbin calls him, sets out to write _As You
Like It_, what is the result? “You Never Can Tell!” It was nine years
before Shaw was able to change his tentative and dubious, “You Never
Can Tell!” into a triumphant, “I told you so!”
“I think it must have been in the year 1895,” one reads in some
reminiscences by Mr. Cyril Maude, the well-known English actor,
“that the devil put it into the mind of a friend of mine to tempt
me with news of a play called _Candida_, by a writer named Bernard
Shaw, of whom until then I had never heard.”[154] Mr. Maude wrote to
Shaw, suggesting that he be allowed to see the play in question. In
characteristic vein, the author replied that the play would not suit
the needs of the Haymarket Theatre, offering, however, to write a new
play instead; which Mr. Maude protests he never asked Shaw to do, yet
to which he interposed no objection. Whereupon Shaw took a chair in
Regent's Park for the whole season, and sat there, in the public eye,
we are told, writing the threatened play.
It was not until the winter of 1897 that this play, _You Never Can
Tell_, came into Mr. Maude's hands. It was accepted, and actually put
into rehearsal. From that very moment things began to go wrong. Shaw
proposed impossible casts, dictated to each actor in turn, equalled
his own John Tanner in endless and torrential talk. Actor after actor,
led by the genial Jack Barnes, withdrew in fatigue and disgust. One
day Shaw insulted the entire cast and the entire profession by wanting
a large table on the stage, on the ground that the company would fall
over it unless they behaved as if they were coming into a real room
instead of, as he coarsely observed, “rushing to the float to pick up
the band at the beginning of a comic song.”
After a first reading of the manuscript, Mr. Maude's misgivings had
been aroused to such an extent that he went to Shaw and plainly told
him that certain lines would have to be cut out.
“Oh, no!” replied Shaw. “I really can't permit that.”
“But in this shape,” protested the alarmed actor-manager, “the play can
never be produced.”
“My dear fellow, you delight me,” was the truly Shavian reply.
It was unbearable to the cast to be lectured and grilled unmercifully
by a red-headed Mephistopheles dressed like a “fairly respectable
carpenter” in a suit of clothes that looked as though it had originally
been made of brown wrapping paper. The rehearsals continued, however,
with the entire cast in a state of the most profound dejection.
“The end came suddenly and unexpectedly. We had made a special effort
to fulfil our unfortunate contract.... We were honestly anxious to
retrieve the situation by a great effort, and save our dear little
theatre from the disgrace of a failure.
“Suddenly the author entered, _in a new suit of clothes_!!” Nobody
who had seen Shaw sitting there day after day in a costume which the
least self-respecting plasterer would have discarded months before
could possibly have understood the devastating effect of the new suit
upon the minds of the spectators. “That this was a calculated _coup
de théâtre_ I have not the slightest doubt.” Shaw played the part of
benevolent rescuer, and the play was withdrawn. “I met him in Garrick
Street not long ago and noticed that he still wore the suit which he
had purchased in 1897 in anticipation of the royalties on _You Never
Can Tell_!”
“The only thanks that people give me for not 'boring them,'” Shaw
once said, “is that they laugh delightedly for three hours at the play
that has cost many months of hard labour, and then turn round and say
that it is no play at all and accuse me of talking with my tongue in
my cheek. And then they expect me to take them seriously!” No one can
accuse Shaw of taking the world seriously in _You Never Can Tell_.
Never was more playful play, more irresponsible fun. It is all a pure
game of cross-purposes, a contest of intellectual motives, a conflict
of ideas and sentiments.
This play is especially interesting to me because it was the first of
Shaw's plays I saw produced, and led me to a study of his works. And
yet I should be the last to deny that it is a farce, in which fun as a
motive takes precedence over delineation of character. The characters
are no more faithful to actuality than is the dialogue to ordinary
conversation. Indeed, the play is almost a new _genre_, differing from
the ordinary farce, in which action predominates over thought, in the
respect that here thought, or rather vivacious mentalization, takes
precedence over everything--the antics are psychical, not physical.
Shaw maintains, not that the play is a comedy, but that it is cast in
the ordinary practical comedy form. I take this to mean that Shaw has
utilized the stock characters and devices of ordinary comedy--not to
mention those of farce, burlesque and extravaganza!--purely for his own
ends, giving them a fresh and unique interest by animating them with
the infectious mirth of his own personality. At last Shaw has found
that loose, variegated, kaleidoscopic comedic form which freely admits
of the intrusive antics of the Shavian whimsicality.
There is not a single play of Shaw's that starts nowhere and never
arrives; and here the fault is not that the play has no meaning, but
that it has too many meanings. And it is perhaps just as well that
there is no clear line of thought-filiation running through the play.
It is quite possible, as Hervieu would say, to “disengage” one, or even
several motives, inter-linked with one another, from the play. Shaw,
however, seems content to put everyone on the defensive, to search out
the weak points in their armour, and to give to each in turn the _coup
de grâce_.
The play is notable in two respects--for its treatment of the emotions
and for the figure of William. Valentine is the imperfect prototype of
John Tanner. His sole equipment is his tongue; instead of a conscience
and a heart, he has only a brain. George Ade would have called him
“Gabby Val, the conversational dentist.” Gloria succumbs to the
scientific wooing of the new “duellist of sex”; her armour of frigid
reserve, the heritage of twentieth-century precepts, melts before the
calculated warmth of Valentine's advances. After allowing her to belong
to herself for years, Nature now seizes her and uses her for Nature's
own large purposes. And Valentine, but now the triumphant victor in
the duel of sex, realizes when it is too late that, after all, he is
only the victimized captive. All comedies end with a wedding, because
it is then that the tragedy begins! The real distinction of the play
consists in Shaw's portrayal of his conception of love as it exhibits
itself in the contemporary human being. As Mr. Walkley has put it,
love, in Shaw's view, is not, as with Chamfort, the _échange de deux
fantaisies_, but the _échange de deux explications_. With Shaw, the
symbol of love is not a Cupid blindfold, but the alertest of Arguses.
His intellectual reflection of the erotic illusion exhibits neither
tender sentiment, emotive abandon, nor sexual passion. Shaw's lovers,
as Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has pertinently put it, “instead of using the
language of admiration and affection, in which this sexual passion
is so often cloaked, simply convey by their words the kind of mental
tumult they are in. Sexual infatuation is stripped bare of all the
accessories of poetry and sympathy. It is represented as it is by
itself, with its own peculiar romance, but with none of the feelings
which may, and often do, accompany it.”[155]
The one really admirable figure in the play is the immortal William. A
master figure of classic, rather than modern, comedy, he suggests, with
exquisite subtlety, the graceful unobtrusiveness that dignifies his
calling. Whenever he loses sight of his menial position long enough to
utter one of his kindly bits of philosophy, it is always to fade back
again into the waiter attitude with such deference and such celerity
as to accentuate the pathos of the contrast between his station and the
rare humanity of his genial philosophy.
_You Never Can Tell_, which Mr. Archer found to be a “formless and
empty farce,” achieved immense popular success in New York and
London, has been produced with gratifying results throughout German
Europe, as well as all over Great Britain, and justifies Mr. Norman
Hapgood's characterization: “The best farce that has been upon the
English-speaking stage in many years.”
Before turning to the last of the fantastic farce-comedies, I would
mention very briefly the three little topical pieces which exhibit
the joker Shaw at his Shawest. First, there is that _petite comédie
rosse_, so slight as to be dubbed by Shaw himself a “comediettina,”
_How He Lied to Her Husband_--written in 1905 to eke out Mr. Arnold
Daly's bill in New York. “I began by asking Mr. Shaw to write me a play
about Cromwell,” relates Mr. Daly. “The idea appealed to him in his
own way. He said he thought it good, but then he raced on to suggest
that we might have Charles the First come on with his head under his
arm. I pointed out to Shaw that it would be highly inconvenient for
a man to come on the stage with his head under his arm, even if he
were an acrobat. Shaw, however, said he thought it could be done. In
the end, he said he would compromise. 'Write the first thirty-five
minutes of that play yourself,' said he, 'and let me write the last
five minutes.'”[156] What a convenient recipe for Shaw's formula of
anti-climax! The point of the little topsy-turvy, knockabout farce
is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the “Candidamaniacs”; but the
penny-a-liners usually paragraphed it as a travesty on Shaw's own play
of _Candida_. Shaw finally cabled: “Need I say that anyone who imagines
that _How He Lied to Her Husband_ retracts _Candida_, or satirizes it,
or travesties it, or belittles it in any way, understands neither the
one nor the other?” This comediettina is a bright little skit, but it
is no more amusing than it is untrue to the _intellectuels_ who made
_Candida_ a success in New York and laid the foundations of Shaw's--and
Daly's--success in America.
[Illustration: =Playbill of _You Never Can Tell_. Vasa-Theater,
Stockholm. Director: Albert Ranft. February 27th, 1908. Thirty-seventh
performance.=]
[Illustration: =Playbill of _The Man of Destiny_. Schauspielhaus,
Frankfurt. April 20th, 1903. First performance in the German language.=]
On July 14th, 1905, in a booth in Regent's Park, London, for the
benefit of the Actors' Orphanage, was “performed repeatedly, with
colossal success,” a “tragedy,” entitled _Passion, Poison and
Petrifaction; or The Fatal Gazogene_, written by Shaw at the request of
Mr. Cyril Maude. It is an extravagant burlesque on popular melodrama,
and the main incident of the “tragedy” is the petrifaction of the
hero caused by swallowing a lot of lime as an antidote to the poison
administered to him by the jealous husband of his _inamorata_, Lady
Magnesia Fitztollemache. “The play has a funny little history,” Mr.
Shaw told me, “having its origin in a story I once made up for one of
the Archer children. In the early days of William Archer's married life
I was down there one night, and one of the children asked me to tell
him a story. 'What about?' I asked. 'A story about a cat,' was the
eager reply. It seems that at one time my aunt was interested in making
little plaster-of-paris figures; and one day the cat came along, and,
thinking it was milk, lapped up some of the moist plaster-of-paris.
And so the sad result, as I told the Archer children, was that the
poor cat petrified inside. 'And what did they do with the cat?' one
of the children asked. 'Well, you see,' I replied, 'one of the doors
of the house would never stay shut, so my mother kept the cat there
ever afterwards to hold the door shut.' The funny part of it all was
that Mrs. Archer said that she had caught me in a lie--and to her own
children at that. To this day she never believes a single thing I say!”
“_Passion, Poison and Petrifaction_ is, of course, the most utter
nonsense,” Shaw continued. “But, would you believe it,”--with a
chuckle--“it was recently successfully produced in Vienna, and
seriously praised as a characteristic play of the brilliant Irish
dramatist and Socialist, Bernard Shaw!”[157]
Slightest of all three is _The Interlude at The Playhouse_, written
for Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Maude, and delivered by them at the opening
of The Playhouse, Mr. Maude's new theatre, on Monday, January 28th,
1907.[158] The little piece extracts all the comedy to be got out of
the embarrassment of an actor-manager over having to deliver a certain
speech, and the solicitude of his wife in making an appeal to the
audience on his behalf, but without his knowledge, for sympathy and
encouragement. The genuine delicacy and lightness of touch with which
the situation is handled, and the absence of Shavian intrusiveness,
unite in making of the interlude a little gem, quite perfect of its
kind.
The last of the comedies of character is _Captain Brassbound's
Conversion_, classified by Shaw as one of the _Three Plays for
Puritans_. This play might never have been written, but for the fact
that Ellen Terry made no secret of the fact that she was born in 1848.
When her son, Gordon Craig, became a father, Ellen Terry, according to
Shaw, said that now no one would ever write plays for a grandmother!
Shaw immediately wrote _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_ to prove the
contrary. And seven years later Ellen Terry portrayed Lady Cicely
Waynflete with a charm, a waywardness, and a grace that gave pleasure
to thousands in England and America.
Just as, in _The Devil's Disciple_, Shaw reduces the melodramatic form
to absurdity, so in _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_ does he reduce to
absurdity the melodramatic view of life. The scene of the play is an
imaginary Morocco, a second-hand, fantastic image vicariously caught
for Shaw by Mr. Cunninghame Graham. Not only did Shaw want to write
a good part for Ellen Terry: he also wanted to write a good play.
So he wrote a whimsical fantasy, half melodrama, half extravaganza,
conditioned only by his own mildly philosophic bent and the need for
developing Lady Cicely's character. The result, as he is fond of
saying, is simply a story of conversion--a Christian tract!
The protagonist, the pirate Brassbound, orders his life upon the
principle that, as Bacon puts it, “revenge is a sort of wild justice.”
He is imbued with mediæval concepts of right and wrong. In opposition
to him, he discovers his opposite--a cool, tactful, unsentimental
woman of the world, disarming all opposition through her Tolstoyism.
With sympathetic interest, she soon wins from Brassbound the secret
of his life, and with quiet and delicious satire, opens his eyes to
the pettiness of his mock-heroics, the absurdity of the melodramatic
view-point--the code of the Kentucky feud, the Italian vendetta. The
revulsion in Brassbound is instant and complete: he is wholly disarmed
by the discovery that, instead of being the chosen instrument for the
wild justice of lynch-law, he is only a ridiculous twopence coloured
villain.
“My uncle was no worse than myself--better, most likely,” is his final
confession to Lady Cicely. “Well, I took him for a villain out of a
story-book. My mother would have opened anybody else's eyes: she shut
mine. I'm a stupider man than Brandyfaced Jack even; for he got his
romantic nonsense out of his penny numbers and such-like trash; but I
got just the same nonsense out of life and experience.”
Lady Cicely Waynflete is the most charming woman that Shaw has ever
drawn. Shaw has intimated that he found in the friendship of Ellen
Terry, who served as the model for Lady Cicely, the “best return which
could be expected from a gifted, brilliant and beautiful woman, whose
love had already been given elsewhere, and whose heart had witnessed
thousands of temptations.”[159] In speaking of the character of Lady
Cicely Waynflete, Miss Florence Farr once said: “As a sex, women must
be for ever grateful to Miss Ellen Terry for teaching Mr. Shaw that
lesson about woman.” Nothing could be simpler or more effective than
the secret of command possessed by this charming woman. She knows that
to go straight up to people, with hand outstretched and a frank “How
d'ye do?” is all that is needed to win their confidence. The dastardly
sheikh, into whose hands she is about to be delivered, is stupefied and
“almost persuaded,” when she assures her friends that he will treat her
like one of Nature's gentlemen: “Look at his perfectly splendid face!”
Combining as she does the temperament of Ellen Terry with the genial
_esprit_ of Bernard Shaw, Lady Cicely is a thoroughly delightful and
unique type of the eternal feminine. She is just at the “age of charm,”
her actions are unhampered by sentiment, and her chief attractions
are frank _naïveté_, the trait of attributing the best of qualities
to other people, and an innocent assumption of authority that quietly
pinions all opposition. She always manages to do just what she likes
because she is bound by no ties to her fellow-creatures, save the bonds
of sympathy and innate human kindness. In one respect is she a true
Shavienne: toward law, convention, propriety, prejudice, she takes an
attitude of quaintly humorous scepticism. What a delicious touch is
that when Sir Howard protests that she has made him her accomplice in
defeating justice! “Yes,” is her delightfully feminine reply: “aren't
you glad it's been defeated for once?”
The moral of this charming but very slight and superficially fantastic
play is that revenge is not wild justice, but childish melodrama,
and that the justice of the courts of law, enforced by melodramatic
sentences of punishment, is often little else than a very base sort of
organized revenge. The fable is rather trivial; and the long arm of
coincidence puts its finger into the pie more than once, playing that
part of timely intervention at which Shaw is so fond of railing. The
mixture of Shavian satire with Tolstoyan principles is both novel and
piquant; and the mildly Ibsenic ending is a good “curtain”--Brassbound
discovering at last the secret of command, _i.e._, selflessness and
disinterested sympathy, and Lady Cicely ecstatically felicitating
herself upon her escape from--the bonds of love and matrimony.
One other feature of the play is the hideous language of the cockney,
Felix Drinkwater, _alias_ Brandyfaced Jack. It takes quite an effort,
even with the aid of the key which Shaw has considerately appended,
to decipher the jargon of this unhappy hooligan, “a nime giv' us pore
thortless lads baw a gint on the _Dily Chronicle_.” In Drinkwater, Shaw
sought to fix on paper the dialect of the London cockney, and he once
told me that he regarded this as the only accurate effort of the kind
in modern fiction. Interested in the study of phonetics through his
acquaintance and friendship with that “revolutionary don” and academic
authority, Henry Sweet of Oxford, Shaw put his knowledge to work to
represent phonetically the lingo of the Board-School-educated cockney.
“All that the conventional spelling has done,” Shaw once said in one
of his numerous journalistic controversies, “is to conceal the one
change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes
in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the
half-rural cockney of Sam Weller, and the modern metropolitan cockney
of Drinkwater in _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_.... Refuse to teach
the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs
on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you right!”
FOOTNOTES:
[134] Compare the account of Mr. Eden Greville, one of Mr. Grein's
associates in the Independent Theatre Society, in _Munsey's Magazine_,
March, 1906, entitled, _Bernard Shaw and His Plays_.
[135] Mr. William Archer, writing in the _World_ (London), for
Wednesday, December 14th, 1892.
[136] The _Star_, November 29th, 1892. Mr. Archer once told me that
there was little doubt that Shaw wrote the “Interview” _in toto_.
[137] Matthew xxiii., 14; Mark xii., 38-40; Luke xx., 46-47.
[138] Appendix I., _Widowers' Houses_; Independent Theatre edition.
Henry and Co., London, 1893.
[139] _M. Bernard Shaw et son Théâtre_, by Augustin Filon. _Revue des
Deux Mondes_, November 15th, 1905; p. 424.
[140] _Mr. Shaw's Method and Secret_, letter to the editor of the
_Daily Chronicle_, April 30th, 1898, signed G. Bernard Shaw. In the
first draft, the play was entitled _Mrs. Jarman's Profession_.
[141] It should be clearly pointed out that Shaw is in no sense
indebted to Ibsen for dissatisfaction with the existent social order.
The facts of Shaw's life disprove the statement of Dr. Georg Brandes
(_Bernard Shaw's Teater_, in _Politikken_, Copenhagen, December 29th,
1902): “What Shaw chiefly owes to Ibsen, whose harbinger he was,
seems to be a tendency towards rebellion against commonly recognized
prejudices, dramatic as well as social.” Shaw's attacks upon modern
capitalistic society, both in _Widowers' Houses_ and in _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_, are the immediate fruits of his Socialism and his economic
studies.
[142] _Study and Stage_, by William Archer, in the _Daily News_, June
21st, 1902.
[143] Compare _The Author's Apology_, the preface to the Stage Society
edition of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ (Grant Richards, London, 1902),
pp. xxvii. and xxviii. in especial; and also _Mainly About Myself_, the
preface to Vol. I. of _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, pp. xxix-xxxi.
in the American edition (H. S. Stone and Co., Chicago, 1902).
[144] Compare _La Psychologie du Militaire Professionel_, by Auguste
Hamon, which appeared in November, 1893. I have no reason to believe
that Shaw was under any indebtedness to this book in writing _Arms and
the Man_.
[145] Compare the reminiscences on the Avenue Theatre production, by
Mr. Yorke Stephens, who played the part of Bluntschli; _Music and the
Drama_, in the _Daily Chronicle_, November 6th, 1906. It was at the
_première_ at the Avenue Theatre that Shaw, called before the audience,
found himself disarmed by lack of opposition. A solitary malcontent in
the gallery began to boo: Bernard was himself again. Looking up at the
belligerent oppositionist, he said with an engaging smile: “My friend,
I quite agree with you--but what are we two against so many?”
[146] Compare Shaw's brilliant article, _A Dramatic Realist to His
Critics_, in the _New Review_, September, 1894, appearing two months
after the close of the run of _Arms and the Man_ at the Avenue Theatre.
In _A Word about Stepniak_, in _To-Morrow_, February, 1896, Mr. Shaw
says: “He (Stepniak) studiously encouraged me to think well of my own
work, and went into the questions of Bulgarian manners and customs
for me when I was preparing my play _Arms and the Man_ for the stage
as if the emancipation of Russia was a matter of comparatively little
importance.... To him I owe the assistance I received from that
Bulgarian admiral in whose existence the public, regarding Bulgaria as
an inland State, positively declined to believe.”
[147] _Der Dramatiker Bernard Shaw_: in _Gestalten und Gedanken_, by
Georg Brandes, München-Langen, 1903. “Human nature is very much the
same, always and everywhere,” Shaw explained. “And when I go over my
play to put the details right I find there is surprisingly little to
alter. _Arms and the Man_, for example, was finished before I had
decided where to set the scene, and then it only wanted a word here and
there to put matters straight. You see, I know human nature”!
[148] From Shaw's preface to Mr. Archer's _The Theatrical World of
1894_, pp. xxvii-xxviii. In view of the interest manifested in _Arms
and the Man_ at the time of its first production in 1894, Mr. Archer
requested Mr. Shaw to say something about it in this preface.
[149] _Arms and the Man_ has, most appropriately, furnished the “book”
for a comic opera, entitled _The Chocolate Soldier_, written by
Bernauer and Jacobson, music by Oscar Straus, the popular composer.
It was to be expected that there would be many “comic” attractions in
the adaptation of Mr. Shaw's play. Of course, all the complications,
such as the incident of the incriminating photograph, are multiplied
by three: Nicola disappears and Louka makes way for Mascha, now the
cousin of Raina. In the end all are happily mated. In consequence of
the “comic variations” from the original play, Mr. Shaw insisted that
the programme contain a frank apology for this “unauthorized parody of
one of Mr. Bernard Shaw's comedies.” First successfully produced at the
Theater des Westens, Berlin, 1909, _The Chocolate Soldier_, both for
the borrowed, if parodied, cleverness, and the delightful music, has
since won great popularity through the productions of Mr. F. C. Whitney
(English version by Mr. Stanislaus Stange), in New York (May, 1910) and
London (September, 1910).
[150] Shaw has been charged with indebtedness, not only to W. S.
Gilbert, but to earlier topsy-turvyists. In April, 1906, there appeared
in the _New York Tribune_ a “deadly parallel” between _Arms and the
Man_ and _Used Up_, adapted from the French by Charles Mathews in 1845.
As a matter of fact, the passage cited--Bluntschli's proposal for the
hand of Raina (compared with Sir Charles Coldstream's for the hand of
Lady Clutterbuck)--is neither an imitation of Mathews, nor a triumph of
eccentric invention, but a paraphrase, Shaw unqualifiedly asserts, of
an actual proposal made by an Austrian hotel proprietor for the hand of
a member of Mr. Shaw's own family.
[151] _Mr. Bernard Shaw's Plays_, in _Frames of Mind_ (Grant Richards,
London, 1889), p. 47.
[152] By this method of treatment, chronology is of necessity
sacrificed to logic.
[153] Preferring to see Shaw fail seriously rather than succeed
farcically, Mr. Archer sternly admonished him to “quit his
foolishness”; and Mr. Shaw's former champion of Independent Theatre
days, Mr. J. T. Grein, gently but firmly advised him never again to
send up any more such _ballons d'essai_.
[154] _The Haymarket Theatre_ (Grant Richards, London, 1903). Chapter
XIV. (from which the above and following quotations are taken), Mr.
Maude says, “was sent to me as an aid to the completion of this work.
It professes to deal with that period of our management when we
rehearsed a piece by the brilliant Mr. Bernard Shaw. The writer, I am
assured, is well fitted to deal with that period. I leave it to the
reader to judge, and to guess its authorship.” Needless to say that the
author was Bernard Shaw himself!
[155] _The Court Theatre, 1904-1907_, by Desmond MacCarthy (A. H.
Bullen, London, 1907), p. 57.
[156] _Post-Express_ (Rochester, N. Y.), December 3d, 1904.
[157] _Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction; or the Fatal Gazogene_;
originally appeared in _Harry Furniss's Christmas Annual_ for 1905
(Arthur Treherne and Co. Ltd., Adelphi, London), pp. 11-24, with
illustrations by Mr. Harry Furniss.
[158] The text of this dainty little interlude is to be found in the
_Daily Mail_, January 29th, 1907. Mr. and Mrs. Maude were playing in
_Toddles_ at the time.
[159] The figure of Lady Cicely Waynflete possesses an unique interest
in view of the fact conveyed in the following record of Ellen Terry's:
“At this time (1897), Mr. Shaw and I frequently corresponded. It
began by my writing to ask him, as musical critic of the _Saturday
Review_ (!), to tell me frankly what he thought of the chances of a
composer-singer friend of mine. He answered 'characteristically,' and
we developed a perfect fury for writing to each other. Sometimes the
letters were on business, sometimes they were not, but always his were
entertaining, and mine were, I suppose, 'good copy,' as he drew the
character of Lady Cicely Waynflete in _Brassbound_ entirely from my
letters. He never met me until after the play was written.” _From Lewis
Carroll to Bernard Shaw_, in _McClure's Magazine_, September, 1908.
THE PLAYWRIGHT--II
“I have, I think, always been a Puritan in my attitude towards
Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome buildings as
Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they
were becoming the instruments of a systematic idolatry of
sensuousness, I would hold it good statesmanship to blow every
cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all,
without the least heed to the screams of the art critics and
cultured voluptuaries.”--_Why for Puritans?_ Preface to _Three
Plays for Puritans_, p. xix.
“I do not satirize types. I draw individuals as they are. When
I describe a tub, Archer and Walkley say it is a satire on a
tub.”--Conversation with the author.
CHAPTER XI
_Cæsar and Cleopatra_, unique in Bernard Shaw's theatre, alike in
subject matter and _genre_, warrants individual consideration. To an
interviewer, on April 30th, 1898, Shaw related that he was just in the
middle of the first act of a new play, in which he was going “to give
Shakespeare a lead.” Unlike Oscar Wilde, who once said that the writing
of plays for a particular actor or actress was work for the artisan in
literature, not for the artist, Shaw freely confessed that he wrote
_Cæsar and Cleopatra_ for Forbes Robertson, “because he is the classic
actor of our day, and had a right to require such a service from
me.”[160] Asked if he had not been reading up “Mommsen and people like
that,” Shaw replied, “Not a bit of it. History is only a dramatization
of events. And if I start telling lies about Cæsar, it's a hundred to
one that they will be just the same lies that other people have told
about him.... Given Cæsar and a certain set of circumstances, I know
what would happen, and when I have finished the play you will find I
have written history.”[161]
In an opening scene of rare beauty and mystery, Cæsar discovers the
child-truant Cleopatra reclining between the paws of her “baby-sphinx.”
What possibilities, what previsions are packed in this prophetic hour,
which witnesses the meeting of these two supreme representatives of
two alien worlds, two diverse civilizations! From the sublime we are
hurled down to the ridiculous. Cæsar, dreamer and world-conquerer,
apostrophizing the sphinx in the immemorial moonlight of Egypt,
is suddenly feazed out of countenance by a childish voice: “Old
gentleman!--don't run away, old gentleman.” It is the voice of Shaw to
his public: “I may take unpardonable liberties with you; but--don't run
away.”
[Illustration: =In Consultation.=]
From the original monochrome, made at 10, Adelphi Terrace,
London, W.C., August, 1907.
_Éduard J. Steichen._
In the main, Shaw follows, as far as time, place and historical events
go, such facts of history as are to be found in Plutarch and in _De
Bello Gallico_; in every other respect the play is modern, colloquially
modern, in tone and in spirit. Shaw approaches his theme under the
domination of an _idée fixe_: scorn of tradition and of the science
of history. The notion that there has been any progress since the
time of Cæsar is absurd! Increased command over Nature by no means
connotes increased command over self; if there has been any evolution,
it has been in our conceptions of the meaning of greatness. When
Shaw wrote his celebrated preface _Better than Shakespeare?_ he had
a very definite claim to make; that his Cæsar and Cleopatra are more
credible, more natural, to a modern audience, than are the imaginative
projections of a Shakespeare. Shaw maintains that, in manner and art,
nobody can write better than Shakespeare, “because, carelessness
apart, he did the thing as well as it can be done within the limits
of human faculty.” But Shaw did profess to have something to say by
this time that Shakespeare neither said nor dreamed of. “Allow me to
set forth Cæsar in the same modern light,” pleads Shaw, in speaking of
the hero-restorations of Carlyle and Mommsen, “taking the same liberty
with Shakespeare as he with Homer, and with no thought of pretending
to express the Mommsenite view of Cæsar any better than Shakespeare
expressed a view that was not even Plutarchian....”[162] “Shakespeare's
Cæsar is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the real Julius Cæsar,” Mr.
Shaw once remarked to me; “my Cæsar is a simple return to nature and
history.”
Are there many cases in dramatic psychology, asked M. Filon, as
interesting as the _liaison_ which would have had “Cæsarion” as
result? But in _Cæsar and Cleopatra_, there is no battle of love,
no dramatic conflict. Shaw might have produced a drama of the nations,
in which the cunning intrigues of Egypt are matched against the
forthrightness and efficiency of the Romans; or a drama of passion,
charged to the full with poetic imagination. But he has availed himself
neither of the historic sense, in which he appears to be deficient, nor
of the romantic violence of poetic imagination, against which he rages
with puritanical fervour. Shaw calls the play a “history”; certainly
it is not a “drama” in the technical sense.[163] And yet, despite the
numerous _longueurs_ of the play, the pyrotechnic flashes of wit which
only barely suffice to conceal the fact that the action is marking
time, the exciting incidents which separately give a semblance of
activity to the piece, there is a genuine thread of motive connecting
scene with scene.
_Cæsar and Cleopatra_ is, from one point of view, a study in the
evolution of character; and this play, and _Major Barbara_, are
the only exceptions to Shaw's theatre of static character. The
psychological action of the piece consists in the evolution, under the
guiding hand of Cæsar, of the little Egyptian sensualist, in the period
of plastic adolescence. Cæsar has the weak fondness of an indulgent
uncle for the adolescent Cleopatra, with her strange admixture of
childish _mauvaise honte_ and regal covetousness. Realizing with the
instinct of a king-maker Cleopatra's dangerous possibilities as a
ruler, Cæsar exercises upon her the plastic and determinative force
of an architect of states. Slowly the little Cleopatra learns her
lesson, glories in her newly-won power, tyrannizes inhumanly over
all about her, and eventually--with well-nigh disastrous effects to
herself--endeavours to teach her teacher the true secret of dominion.
From another point of view, this play is the portrait of a hero in
the light of Shavian psychology--a hero in undress costume, in his
dressing-gown as he lived, with all his trivial vanities and endearing
weaknesses. The halo of the “pathos of distance,” surrounding the head
of the demi-god, wholly fades away; and there stands before us a real
man, shorn of the romantic, the histrionic, the chivalric, it is true,
but a real man, every inch of him, for all that. Shaw clearly draws the
distinction:
“Our conception of heroism has changed of late years. The stage
hero of the palmy days is a pricked bubble. The gentlemanly
hero, of whom Tennyson's King Arthur was the type, suddenly
found himself out as Torvald Helmer in Ibsen's _Doll's
House_, and died of the shock. It is no use now going on with
heroes who are no longer really heroic to us. Besides, we
want credible heroes. The old demand for the incredible, the
impossible, the superhuman, which was supplied by bombast,
inflation, and the piling of crimes on catastrophes and
factitious raptures on artificial agonies, has fallen off;
and the demand now is for heroes in whom we can recognize
our own humanity, and who, instead of walking, talking,
eating, drinking, making love and fighting single combats in
a monotonous ecstasy of continuous heroism, are heroic in the
true human fashion: that is, touching the summits only at
rare moments, and finding the proper level of all occasions,
condescending with humour and good sense to the prosaic ones
as well as rising to the noble ones, instead of ridiculously
persisting in rising to them all on the principle that a hero
must always soar, in season or out of season.”[164]
Mr. Forbes Robertson recently said that he regarded _Cæsar and
Cleopatra_ as a “great play,” representing very truly what one would
imagine Cæsar said, thought and felt. “Possibly the play is before its
time--some people have said such curious things about it. There are
scenes of wonderful brilliancy and beauty, and I myself see nothing
farcical about the play, as some people seem to suggest. I see a great
wit and humour; and, as Mr. Shaw points out, by what right are we to
presuppose that Cæsar had no sense of humour? He meets this amusing
little impudent girl, and is very much amused with her, and interested
in her, quite naturally as a human being. Why should one expect him to
go strutting about, with one arm in his toga and the other extended,
spouting dull blank verse?” Indeed, Shaw's Cæsar is a remarkable
personality--in practice a man of business sagacity; in politics, a
dreamer; in action, brilliant and resourceful; in private, a trifle
vain and rhetorical--boyish, exuberant, humorous. When Pothinus
expresses amazement that the conqueror of the world has time to busy
himself with taxes, Cæsar affably replies: “My friend, taxes are the
chief business of a conqueror of the world.”
Like Mirabeau, he had no memory for insults and affronts received, and
“could not forgive, for the sole reason that--he forgot.” He answers
to Nietzsche's _differentia_: “Not to be able to take seriously for a
long time, an enemy, or a misfortune, or even one's own misdeeds--is
the characteristic of strong and full natures, abundantly endowed with
plastic, formative, restorative, also obliterative force.” Cæsar's
policy of clemency is constantly thwarted by the murderous passions
of his soldiers; the murder of Pompey he contemns as a stroke of
unpardonable treachery and revenge, the removal of Vercingetorix very
much as Talleyrand regarded the execution of the Due d'Enghien: it was
worse than a crime, it was a blunder. Sufficient unto himself, strong
enough to dispense with happiness, Cæsar is--to use a phrase of Mr.
Desmond MacCarthy's--“content in the place of happiness with a kind
of triumphant gaiety, springing from a sense of his own fortitude and
power.” Cæsar is a thoroughly good fellow, prosaically, patho-comically
looking approaching old age in the face and wearing his conqueror's
wreath of oak leaves--to conceal his growing bald spot. Were Rome a
true republic, Cæsar would be the first of republicans; he values
the life of every Roman in his army as he values his own, and makes
friends with everyone as he does with dogs and children. “Cæsar is an
important public man,” as Mr. Max Beerbohm puts it, “who knows that a
little chit of a girl-queen has taken a fancy to him, and is tickled
by the knowledge and behaves very kindly to her, and rather wishes
he were young enough to love her.” But when he is again recalled to
Rome, Cleopatra concerns him no more. Cæsar is the Shavian type of the
naturally great man--great, not because he mortifies his nature in
fulfilment of duty, but because he fulfils his own will.”[165]
_Cæsar and Cleopatra_, to employ a phrase of the elder Coquelin, is
a “combination of the most absolute fantasy with the most absolute
truth.” One feels at times that it belongs in the category of _Orphée
aux Enfers_ and _La Belle Hélène_, and only needs the music of
Offenbach to round it out. Shaw shatters the illusion of antiquity
with a multitude of the stock phrases of contemporary history: “Peace
with honour,” “Egypt for the Egyptians,” “Art for Art's sake,” etc.,
etc.[166] True to Shakespearean practice, Shaw revels in anachronisms,
and goes so far as to assert that this is the only way to make the
historic past take form and life before our eyes. If Shakespeare
makes a clock strike in ancient Rome, Shaw shows a steam engine at
work in Alexandria in 48 B.C.! If Shakespeare puts a billiard table
in Cleopatra's palace, Shaw alludes to the ancient superstition of
table-rapping in the year 707 of the Republic! Shaw gives free play
to his abounding humour, having long since learned that nothing can
be accomplished by solemnity. “Whenever I feel in writing a play,” he
frankly confesses, “that my great command of the sublime threatens to
induce solemnity of mind in my audience, I at once introduce a joke
and knock the solemn people from their perch.” The eighteenth-century
Irishman, with his contempt for John Bull, peeps out here and there;
and when Cleopatra asks Britannus, Cæsar's young secretary from
Britain, if it were true that he was painted all over blue, when Cæsar
captured him, Britannus proudly replies: “Blue is the colour worn by
all Britons of good standing. In war we stain our bodies blue; so that
though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they
cannot strip us of our respectability.”
In _Cæsar and Cleopatra_ Shaw has created something more or less than
drama--a tremendous fantasy surcharged and interpenetrated with deep
imaginative reality. In certain plays of which I shall now speak, Shaw
shows that he can play the dramatist, pure and simple, and write with
a concentration of energy, a compression of emotive intensity, that
seem very foreign to the prolixity and discursiveness of his later
manner. The stern artistic discipline to which he nearly succeeded in
schooling himself in _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, once more exhibits
itself in _The Man of Destiny_, _Candida_ and _The Devil's Disciple_.
The essential fact that these plays have proved popular _stage_
successes in the capitals of the world--New York, London, Berlin,
Vienna, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Buda-Pesth, Brussels, etc.--is in
itself testimony to the fact that--always allowing for the refraction
of the Shavian temperament--Bernard Shaw is a true dramatist, capable
of touching the deeper emotions and appealing to universal sentiments.
In speaking of his earliest works, Shaw airily refers to those “vain
brilliancies given off in the days of my health and strength.” Perhaps
something of their diffuseness, and the lack of concentrative thought
evident in their construction, are explained, not alone by reference
to Shaw's _intransigéance_, but in part by the conditions under which
they were written. A bit of reminiscence voiced by the great English
comedian, Sir Charles Wyndham, is illuminating:
“I shall never forget the first time Shaw called to see me.
In those days he would not have a bit of linen about him.
He wore soft shirts and long, flowing ties, which, with his
tawny hair and long, red beard, gave him the appearance of a
veritable Viking. Well, he came in and sat down at the table.
Then he put his hand into his right trousers pocket and slowly
drew out a small pocket memorandum-book; then he dug into the
left side-pocket and fished out another of the little books,
then still another and another. Finally, he paused in his
explorations, looked at me and said:
“'I suppose you're surprised to see all these little
pocket-books. The fact is, however, I write my plays in them
while riding around London on top of a 'bus.'”[167]
The How and Where of the composition of such plays might well account
for much inconsequence and aerial giddiness!
_The Man of Destiny_ has an origin not a little unique. Many plays are
written for some one great actor or actress--few are written for two.
And yet, according to Shaw's own confessions, _The Man of Destiny_ was
written for Richard Mansfield and Ellen Terry--Mansfield serving as
the model for Napoleon, Terry as the model for the Lady. At this time,
Shaw had seen Mansfield only in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ and _Richard
III._; and once in 1894 had chatted with him for an hour at the
Langham. The impression he received was so strong, the suggestion of
Napoleon so striking, that he resolved to write a play about Napoleon
based on a study of Mansfield.[168]
In a letter to Mansfield (September 8th, 1897), Shaw says: “I was much
hurt by your contemptuous refusal of _A Man of Destiny_, not because I
think it one of my masterpieces, but because Napoleon is nobody else
but Richard Mansfield himself. I studied the character from you, and
then read up Napoleon and found that I had got him exactly right.”[169]
Shaw frequently corresponded with Ellen Terry during the days he was
writing _The Man of Destiny_; he saw her numberless times on the stage,
but had never actually met her when he wrote _The Man of Destiny_. Shaw
escaped the “illusion” of the Lyceum, created by “Irving's incomparable
dignity and Terry's incomparable beauty”--simply because “I was a
dramatist and needed Ellen Terry for my own plays.... I had tried to
win her when I wrote _The Man of Destiny_, in which the heroine is
simply a delineation of Ellen Terry--imperfect, it is true, for who can
describe the indescribable!”[170]
_The Man of Destiny_, Shaw, in fact, confesses, was written chiefly
to exhibit the virtuosity of the two principal characters; and it
must be confessed that their virtuosity is so pervasively dazzling
as occasionally to distract attention from the dramatic procedure.
The unnamed possibilities of the situation have been exploited in
the subtlest fashion. This little “fragment” is a dramatic _tour de
force_; the rapid shifting of victory from one side to the other, the
excitingly unstable equilibrium of the balance of power, the fierce war
of wills are of the very essence of true drama. The serious underlying
issue, the struggle of Napoleon for a triumph that spells personal
dishonour, is a dramatic motive sanctioned by that great classic
example, the _Œdipus Rex_. Unlike Sophocles, whose listeners knew
in advance the story of the ill-fated king, Shaw withholds from the
spectator any foreknowledge of the outcome; but the growing curiosity
of Napoleon, instantaneously inducing like inquisitiveness on the part
of the spectator, is one of the chief factors of interest in the play.
Early in the development of the action, the purpose of the letter is
readily guessed by anyone familiar with such Napoleonic history as is
recorded, for example, in the _Memoirs of Barras_.[171]
As Shaw's Cæsar is his interpretation of the great man of ancient
history, so Napoleon is his interpretation of the great man of modern
history. Shaw's Napoleon is a strange mixture of noble and ignoble
impulses. He is strangely imaginative--a dreamer in the great sense,
with a touch of the superstition of a Wallenstein, a great faith in his
star. A ravenous beast at table, he feverishly gorges his food, while
his hair sweeps into the ink and the gravy; his absolute obliviousness
to surroundings is the mask of tremendous energy of purpose. Gravy
answers the purpose of ink, a grape hull marks a strategic point on
the map: the mark, not the material, is Napoleon's concern. And it
is the _imprévu_ of his decisions that so often puts his adversaries
to rout. M. Filon protests against Shaw's portrait of Napoleon as a
mere repetition of the caricatures of Gillray and the calumniating
distortions of the historian Seeley; but Shaw's Napoleon is, in great
measure, not the Napoleon of the glorified Bonapartist chromo, but the
Napoleon post-figured by his later career. Le Petit Caporal is the
ancestor of the Emperor Napoleon I.; and in this early phase, Napoleon
may be best described in the sneering characterization of the Lady as
“the vile, vulgar Corsican adventurer.” Says Mr. John Corbin: “The
final sensation of the character is of vast unquenchable energy and
intelligence, at once brutally real and sublimely theatrical. And is
not this the great Napoleon? By virtue of this mingling of seemingly
opposed but inherently true qualities this Man of Destiny, for all
the impertinences and audacities of Mr. Shaw's pyrotechnics, may be
reckoned the best presentation of Napoleon thus far achieved in the
drama, as it is certainly by far the most delightful.” I asked Mlle.
Yvette Guilbert one day if she thought _The Man of Destiny_ would
succeed in Paris. “I rather fear not,” she replied. “Shaw's portrait is
too true to the original to suit the French!”[172]
Towards the close of _The Man of Destiny_, Napoleon, taking for his
text the famous phrase: “The English are a nation of shop-keepers,”
launches forth into a perfect torrent of irrelevant histrionic
pyrotechnics. “Let me explain the English to you,” he says, and in
Shaw's most Maxim-gun style, proceeds to summarize the history of
England in the nineteenth century, in a half-critical, half-prophetic
philippic, beginning with discussion of the views of the Manchester
School, of British industrial and colonial policy, and of Imperialism,
and concluding with allusions to Wellington and Waterloo! In reading
the play, this passage appears to be a gross irrelevancy and an absurd
anachronism; but on the stage the speech appears to be quite in
character with Shaw's Napoleon. Still, this passage calls attention
to Shaw's most obvious and most deliberately committed fault:
self-projection through the medium of his characters. Shaw identifies
himself with his work as possibly no other dramatist before him has
ever done. I rejoice in Shaw as M. Filon rejoices in Dumas _fils_;
selfless reserve, abdication of personality, are as impossible for Shaw
as for Dumas _fils_, and I freely confess that what I enjoy most in
Shaw's plays is--Shaw.
Sir Charles Wyndham was once asked his opinion of the plays of Bernard
Shaw. “Shaw's works are wonderful intellectual studies, but,” he
replied firmly, “they are not plays!” And he continued: “At one time I
saw a great deal of Shaw and had great hopes of him as a dramatist.
But he wouldn't come down to earth, he wouldn't be practical. When he
had just completed _Candida_ he came and read it to me. I told him
it was 'twenty years too soon for England.' Well, he put it on at a
special _matinée_, and it was much applauded. Then Shaw went out and
addressed the audience. 'I read the play to Wyndham,' he said in his
speech, 'and he told me it was twenty years too soon. You have given
the contradiction to that statement.'” _Candida_ has been played on
some of the greatest stages of Europe, as well as all over England
and America, and leading critics have praised it as one of the most
remarkable plays of this generation.[173]
_Candida_ is an acute psychological observation upon the emotional
reverberations in the souls of three clearly imagined, exquisitely
realized characters; its connection with pre-Raphaelitism, as Mr.
Shaw confessed to me, is purely superficial and extrinsic. Aside from
its association with a certain stage in Shaw's own development, the
character of Marchbanks might just as well have been linked with the
name of Shelley,[174] or with the Celtic Renascence of to-day; but the
whole atmosphere of the play makes it inconceivable at any time in the
world's history save in the age of Ibsen. It bears marked resemblances
to _The Comedy of Love_ and _The Lady from the Sea_. _Candida_ portrays
the conflict between prose convention and poetic anarchy, concretely
mirroring that conflict of human wills which Brunetière announced
as the criterion of authentic drama. “Unity, however desirable in
political agitations,” Shaw once wrote, in reference to this play, “is
fatal to drama, since every drama must be the artistic presentation of
a conflict. The end may be reconciliation or destruction, or, as in
life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable: no
conflict, no drama.”
In striking contrast to many of Shaw's plays which are marked by a
hyper-natural, almost blatant psychology, _Candida_ reveals in Shaw a
mastery of what may be termed profound psychological secrecy. “This is
the play in which Bernard Shaw has tried to dig deepest, and has used
his material with the greatest economy,” wrote Dr. Brandes, in 1902.
“The quietude of the action, which works itself out purely in dialogue,
is here akin to Ibsen's quietude.... There is great depth of thought
in this play, and a knowledge of the human soul which penetrates far
below the surface.” A domestic drama--little more than a “scene from
private life”--_Candida_ is the latest form of Diderot's invention,
the _bourgeois_ drama. Abounding in scenes and situations tense with
emotional and dramatic power, it is stamped with the finish and
restraint of great art. The characters in this play, so chameleon-like
in its changing lustres, at every instant turn toward the light new
facets of their natures. We catch the iridescent and ever-varying
tints of life; and over all is a sparkle of fine and subtle humour,
lightening the tension of soul-conflicts with touches of homely
veracity.
The “auction scene” of the third act is transcendentally real, making
an almost imperceptible transition from verisimilitude to fantasy.[175]
Indulging his penchant for dialectic, Shaw here turns advocate, and
argues the case with all the surety of the lawyer, the art of the
_littérateur_. Men and women do not guide their actions in accordance
with the dictates of pure reason; as Alceste says to Philinte in _Le
Misanthrope_:
“'Tis true my reason tells me so each day;
Yet reason's not the power to govern love.”
And, after all, the auction scene is merely the _scène à faire_,
leaving the situation absolutely unchanged. As Shaw himself once
confessed: “It is an interesting sample of the way in which a scene,
which should be conceived and written only by transcending the ordinary
notion of the relations between the persons, nevertheless stirs
the ordinary emotions to a very high degree, all the more because
the language of the poet, to those who have not the clue to it, is
mysterious and bewildering, and, therefore, worshipful. I divined it
myself before I found out the whole truth about it.”
[Illustration: =Playbill of _Candida_.=]
Théâtre des Arts, Paris. Director: Robert d'Humières. May 7th,
8th, 9th, 1908. Twenty-five subsequent performances. Shaw's
only play to be produced in France to date.
_Candida_ well justifies its sub-title of a _Mystery_ in the number of
astounding interpretations given it by the critics. In France it was
regarded as a new solution of the Feminist problem. Candida remains
as the free companion of a weak man, we are told by certain foreign
critics, because “she understands that she has a duty to fulfil to
her big baby of a husband, who could no longer succeed in playing his
_rôle_ in society without the firm hand which sustains and guides
him.” M. Maurice Muret, who wrote me that he was induced to read
_Candida_ by laudatory articles in the German Press after Agnes Sorma's
production in Berlin, has thus betrayed his comic misunderstanding:
“From the mass of _femmes revoltées_ who encumber the contemporary
drama, the personage of Candida stands out with happy distinction.
Feminist literature has produced nothing comparable to this exquisite
figure. A tardy, but brilliant revenge of the _traditional_ ideal upon
the new ideal, is this victory of _la femme selon Titien_ over the
Scandinavian virago, this triumph of Candida over Nora”![176] And one
of the most eminent of German dramatic critics, after Lili Petri's
production in Vienna, said in an open letter to Shaw: “It is not
virtue; not prosaically _bourgeois_, nor vaguely romantic, feeling; nor
even the strength of this Morell, but simply his weakness, which chains
Candida to his side: because he needs her, the woman loves him more
than the young poet, who may perhaps recover from his disappointment
and learn to live without her. Shaw, Bernard, Irishman! I abjure thee!”
Not only with such interpretations, but even with Shaw's own dissection
of his greatest play, I find it quite impossible to sympathize or to
agree. Shaw seems merely to be taking a fling at the “Candidamaniacs,”
as he called the play's admirers; his “analysis” strikes me as a batch
of Shavian half-truths, rather than a fair estimate of the play's
true significance. In answer to Mr. Huneker's question _à propos_ of
Candida's famous “shawl” speech, Shaw wrote:
“Don't ask me conundrums about that very immoral female
Candida. Observe the entry of W. Burgess: 'You're the lady
as hused to typewrite for him?' 'No.' 'Naaow: _she_ was
younger?' And therefore Candida sacked her. Prossy is a very
highly selected young person indeed, devoted to Morell to the
extent of helping in the kitchen, but to him the merest pet
rabbit, unable to get the slightest hold on him. Candida is as
unscrupulous as Siegfried:
Morell himself sees that 'no law will bind her.' She seduces
Eugene just exactly as far as it is worth her while to seduce
him. She is a woman without character in the conventional
sense. Without brains and strength of mind she would be a
wretched slattern or voluptuary. She is straight for natural
reasons, not for conventional ethical ones. Nothing can be more
cold-bloodedly reasonable than her farewell to Eugene. 'All
very well, my lad; but I don't quite see myself at fifty with a
husband of thirty-five. It is just this freedom from emotional
slop, this unerring wisdom on the domestic plane, that makes
her so completely mistress of the situation.
“Then consider the poet. She makes a man of him by showing
him his own strength--that David must do without poor Uriah's
wife. And then she pitches in her picture of the home, the
onions, and the tradesmen, and the cossetting of big baby
Morell. The New York _Hausfrau_ thinks it a little paradise;
but the poet rises up and says: 'Out, then, into the night
with me'--Tristan's holy night. If this greasy fool's paradise
is happiness, then I give it to you with both hands, 'life
is nobler than that.' That is the 'poet's secret.' The young
things in front weep to see the poor boy going out lonely and
broken-hearted in the cold night to save the proprieties of New
England Puritanism; but he is really a god going back to his
heaven, proud, unspeakably contemptuous of the happiness he
envied in the days of his blindness, clearly seeing that he has
higher business on hand than Candida. She has a little quaint
intuition of the completeness of his cure: she says: 'He has
learnt to do without happiness.'”[177]
Candida quickly divines that Marchbanks is “falling in love with her,”
and whilst fully conscious of her charms, she is equally conscious
of the evil that may be wrought by unscrupulous use of them. She has
too much respect for Marchbanks' passion to insult him with virtuous
indignation. Her maternal insight enables her to sympathize with him
in his aspirations and in his struggles.
[Illustration: =Playbill of _Candida_. Théâtre Royal du Parc, Brussels.
Preceded by a _conférence_ on _The Theatre of Bernard Shaw_,
by M. A.Hamon. Four “Matinées Littéraires,”
February 7th, 14th, 17th, 21st, 1907.
First production of any of Shaw's plays in the French language.=]
It is quite true that Candida's standards are instinctively natural,
not conventionally ethical: “Put your trust in my love, James, not
in my conscience,” is her eminently sound point of view. It is her
desire to save Eugene from future pain, to show him quite gently the
hopelessness of his passion, that leads her to “seduce” him into
perfect self-expression, to make clear to him that he is a “foolish
boy” and that her love is not the inevitable reward for the triumph
of his logic. Marchbanks' magnificent bid of “his soul's need” does
not win her, because she loves Morell. Taught by Candida to recognize
the difference between poetic vision and prosaic actuality, Marchbanks
realizes that his hour has struck: it is the end of his youth. He has
made the inevitable Shavian discovery that service, not happiness, is
the nobler aim in life; and this episode in his soul's history, as
Friedrich Düsel suggests, should be entitled, “_Wie aus einem Knaben
ein Mann wird_.” He has learnt to do without happiness, not because
he has been completely cured of love, but because he has learnt that
his own love soars far above the unideal plane of Burgess--or is it
_bourgeois_?--respectability. This, indeed, is the “secret in the
poet's heart”; otherwise the golden-winged god of dreams shrivels up
into a pitiful shape of egoism. Candida is a miracle of candour and
sympathy; she lacks the one essential--true comprehension of his love.
Possessing some sort of spiritual affinity with the Virgin of the
Assumption, she lacks the faintest sympathy or concern with the art of
Titian; feeling some sort of sympathy with Marchbanks and what is to
her his comedy of calf-love, she lacks any true comprehension of the
fineness and spirituality of his passion.[178]
Whatever interpretation may be adopted, this drama of disillusion is
a work of true genius. In a series of productions by the Independent
Theatre in the English provinces in the spring of 1897, and again in
1898, Janet Achurch (Mrs. Charles Charrington) “created” the _rôle_
of Candida; the cast was notable, the parts of Morell and Marchbanks
being taken by Mr. Charles Charrington and Mr. Courtenay Thorpe
respectively. Doubtless Janet Achurch's interpretation of Candida as
the serene _clairvoyante_ remains unequalled to-day, even by Agnes
Sorma or Lili Petri. The play has been patronizingly spoken of as
an amusing little comedy; Oliver Herford, the humorist, hailed it
with great enthusiasm as a “problem-farce”! But _Candida_ has always
appealed to me, as to Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, “not only as the noblest
work of Mr. Shaw, but as one of the noblest, if not the noblest, of
modern plays: a most square and manly piece of moral truth.”
_The Devil's Disciple_ is the fourth and last play in the category of
authentically dramatic pieces, ranking just below _Candida_ in the
subtlety of its character-delineation and the magnetic force of its
appeal. The play had its genesis in a conversation between Shaw and
that remarkable romantic actor, William Terriss. In Shaw's words:
“One day Terriss sent for me, and informed me that since
witnessing the production of _Arms and the Man_ he regarded
me as one of the 'greatest intellectual forces of the present
day.' He proposed to combine my intellect with his knowledge
of the stage in the construction of a play. Whereupon he gave
me one of the most astounding scenarios I ever encountered....
When I endeavoured with all my reasoning powers to convince
this terrible Terriss that such a scenario contained far too
much action and far too little delineation of character, he
declared firmly: 'Mister Shaw, you have convinced me.' With
these words, and without the slightest hesitation, he threw the
whole scenario into the fire with the attitude and decision of
a man who well knows that he has another draft lying in his
desk. Nevertheless, the fact that he greeted me as a great
intellectual force and yet had implied that I was incapable of
writing a popular melodrama delighted me beyond words, and I
resolved to get together all the trite episodes, all the stale
situations, which had done such good service in the last ten
years in trashy plays, and combine them in a new melodrama,
which should have the appearance of a deeply thought-out,
original modern play. The result of it all was _The Devil's
Disciple_.”[179]
The spontaneity and naturalness which characterize the dialogue of
Shaw's plays are the results, in part, of his habit of writing his
plays on scraps of paper at odd times. And in the case of _The Devil's
Disciple_, Shaw achieved the incomparable feat of writing a brilliant
play and “looking pleasant” at one and the same time! “A young lady I
know,” relates Shaw, “wanted to make a portrait of me, sitting on the
corner of a table, which is a favourite attitude of mine. So I wrote
the play in a notebook to fill up the time.”
In that mock-modest preface, _On Diabolonian Ethics_, Shaw has
confessed his indebtedness to literary history and openly acknowledged
his thefts from the past. But in one place he quietly asserts that he
has put something original into this play. “_The Devil's Disciple_
has, in truth, a genuine novelty in it. Only, that novelty is not any
invention of my own, but simply the novelty of the advanced thought of
my own day.” How can one express more succinctly the end and aim of the
modern dramatist? Goethe once said that the great aim of the modern
intelligence should be to gain control over every means afforded by
the past, in order thereby to enable himself to exhibit those features
in which the modern world feels itself new and different and unique. A
remarkably subtle travesty upon melodrama, _The Devil's Disciple_ is a
picture of life seen through the refractory temperament of a thoroughly
modern intelligence.
The veiled satire underlying _The Devil's Disciple_ is found in
the fact that, whilst speciously purporting to be a melodrama, by
individual and unique treatment the play gives the lie to the specific
melodramatic formula. The comprehension of the dual rôle made this play
as presented by Richard Mansfield peculiarly appreciated by American
audiences; in England, the play was absurdly misunderstood, as related
in one of Shaw's prefaces.
If we consider the crucial moments of the play, we observe the
brilliant way in which Shaw has combined popular melodrama for the
masses and Shavian satire upon melodrama for the discerning few. How
the hardened old playgoer chuckles over his prevision of the situation
that is to result after Dick is arrested and led off to prison! Of
course, the minister will come back, Judith will waver between love for
her husband and desire to save the noble altruist, the secret will be
torn from her at last, her husband will prepare to go and take Dick's
place. She will adjure him to save himself, but he will remain firm as
adamant. What a tumult of passions, what a moving farewell, every eye
is moist--the genuine _scène à faire_! What a sense of exquisite relief
when Shaw has the minister take the natural, the business-like, and not
the melodramatic course! Again, in the third act, when Judith, like
a true Shakespearean heroine, disregards the convention of feminine
fastidiousness in order to penetrate to the profoundest depths of
Dick's heart, the melodramatic formula is clear: Dick will kneel at
Judith's feet, pour out his burning love for her, the two will revel in
the ecstasies of _la grande passion_. Reality is far subtler and more
complex than melodrama--not a game of heroics, but a clash of natures,
says Shaw.
“You know you did it for his sake,” charges Judith, “believing he was a
more worthy man than yourself.”
“Oho! No,” laughs Dick in reply; “that's a very pretty reason, I must
say; but I'm not so modest as that. No, it wasn't for his sake.”
Now she blushes, her heart beats painfully, and she asks softly: “Was
it for my sake?” “Perhaps a little for your sake,” he indulgently
admits; but when, emboldened by his words, she romantically charges
him to save himself, that he may go with her, even to the ends of the
earth, he takes hold of her firmly by the wrists, gazes steadily into
her eyes, and says:
“If I said--to please you--that I did what I did ever so little for
your sake, I lied as men always lie to women. You know how much I have
lived with worthless men--aye, and worthless women too. Well, they
could all rise to some sort of goodness and kindness when they were in
love. That has taught me to set very little store by the goodness that
only comes out red-hot. What I did last night, I did in cold blood,
caring not half so much for your husband or for you as I do for myself.
I had no motive and no interest: all I can tell you is that when it
came to the point whether I would take my neck out of the noose and
put another man's into it, I could not do it. I don't know why not: I
see myself as a fool for my pains; but I could not, and I cannot. I
have been brought up standing by the law of my own nature; and I may
not go against it, gallows or no gallows. I should have done the same
thing for any other man in the town, or any other man's wife. Do you
understand that?”
“Yes,” replies the stricken Judith; “you mean that you do not love me.”
“Is that all it means to you?” asks the revolted Richard, with fierce
contempt.
“What more--what worse--can it mean to me?” are Judith's final words.
Last of all, Shaw indulges in his most hazardous stroke of satire in
the scene of the military tribunal. Imagine the cloud of romantic gloom
and melodramatic horror that the author of _La Tosca_ would have cast
over this valley of the shadow of death! Shaw ushers in an exquisite
and urbane comedian to irradiate the gathering gloom with the sparks of
his audacious speech and the scintillations of his heartless wit. Thus
Shaw elevates the plane of the piece into a sublimated atmosphere of
sheer satire.
In _The Devil's Disciple_, Shaw succeeds in humanizing the stock
figures of melodrama, revealing in them a credible mixture of good
and evil, of reality and romance. In life itself, Shaw finds no proof
that a rake may not be generous, nor a blackguard tender to children,
nor a minister virile and human. All mothers are not angels, all
generals are not imposing dignitaries, all British soldiers are not
Kitcheners in initiative or Gordons in heroism. That Dick scoffs at
religion and breaks the social code does not prove that he is either
naturally vicious or depraved. In the stern asceticism of his nature,
he is a more genuine Puritan than his self-righteous mother. Under
every trial is he always valid to himself, obedient to the law of
his own nature; he might have chosen for his device the words of
Luther: “_Ich kann nicht anders_.” The play was written for Richard
Mansfield; and Mr. Shaw once told me that the part of Dudgeon was
modelled upon Mansfield himself. On the stage, Dudgeon is usually
represented either as the melodramatic type of hero, with white soft
shirt and bared neck--_e.g._, Karl Wiene, in Vienna; or as the gay
debonair rake, counterpart of the best type of those fascinating blades
of Sheridan and the other writers of earlier English comedy--_e.g._,
Richard Mansfield, in America. As a matter of fact, Dick is neither a
conventional stage hero nor a dashing rake. “Dick Dudgeon is a Puritan
of the Puritans,” says Shaw. “He is brought up in a household where the
Puritan religion has died and become, in its corruption, an excuse for
his mother's master-passion of hatred in all its phases of cruelty and
envy. In such a home he finds himself starved of religion, which is the
most clamorous need of his nature. With all his mother's indomitable
selfishness, but with pity instead of hatred as his master-passion,
he pities the devil, takes his side, and champions him, like a true
Covenanter, against the world. He thus becomes, like all genuinely
religious men, a reprobate and an outcast.” Unfortified by the power of
a great love, unconsoled by hope of future reward, Dick makes the truly
heroic sacrifice with all the sublime spirit of a Carton or a Cyrano.
Of such stuff are made not stage, but real heroes. “He is in one word,”
says Mr. J. T. Grein, “a man, spotted it is true, but a man, and, as
such, perhaps the most human creature which native fancy has put on our
modern stage.”
In _The Devil's Disciple_, as Hermann Bahr maintains, Shaw virtually
asserts the modern dramatic principle that every situation of
adventitious character, every external adventure which meets the
hero like a vagabond upon the highway, is undramatic; the sole aim
of modern drama is representation of the inner life, and all things
must be transposed into the key of spiritual significance.[180] This
principle is exemplified in the three leading characters. Like Raina
in _Arms and the Man_, Judith learns by bitter experience to distrust
the iridescent mirage of romance. Sentimental, spoiled, romantic, this
refined Lydia Languish does not know whether to hate, to admire, or to
love the fascinating, devil-may-care rake. In the briefest space of
time, her husband has become in her eyes a coward and a poltroon. Her
heart is in a tumult of emotions: like a willow she sways between duty
to her husband and love for the dashing Dudgeon. And when she puts all
to the touch, she discovers that her romance is only a pretty figment
of her fancy, powerless before the omnipotent passion of obligation to
self. And when her husband appears in the nick of time, and proves to
be a hero after all, her love floods back to him. Dick must promise
that _he will never tell_! Surely the figure of the minister's young
wife, says Heinrich Stümcke, is one of the most delicate creations of
the English stage. “In the recital of Judith's relations with Dick,”
writes Dr. Brandes, “there is convincing irony, and rare insight into
the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of the feminine heart.”
Among the minor excellences of the play, the figure of Burgoyne
stands out in striking relief. In Shaw's view, his Burgoyne is not a
conventional stage soldier, but “as faithful a portrait as it is in the
nature of stage portraits to be”--whatever that may mean! In reality,
Shaw's Burgoyne interests us, not at all as an historical personage,
but as a distinct dramatic creation. “Gentleman Johnny,” suave,
sarcastic, urbane--the high comedian with all the exquisite grace of
the eighteenth century--delights us by exchanging rare repartee with
Dick over the banal topic of the latter's death. Burgoyne's speech
of Voltairean _timbre_, quite in the key of De Quincey's _Murder as
a Fine Art_--beginning with “Let me persuade you to be hanged”--is
the finest ironical touch in English drama since Sheridan. “The
historic figure of the English General Burgoyne,” says Dr. Brandes,
“though he holds only a subordinate place in the play, stands forth
with a fresh and sparkling vitality, such as only great poets can
impart to their creations.” Shaw once modestly averred that “the most
effective situation on the modern stage occurs in my own play--_The
Devil's Disciple_.” I have always had the feeling that the first act
of this play, although actually delaying the beginning of the “love
story” until the second act, is the most remarkable act Shaw has ever
written--a _genre_ picture eminently worthy of the hand of a Hogarth
or a Dickens. And, to quote Dr. Brandes once more, “I consider _The
Devil's Disciple_ a masterpiece, whether viewed from the psychological
or the dramatic standpoint. Well acted, it ought to create a _furore_.”
FOOTNOTES:
[160] _Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor_, in _The Play_, No. 62,
Vol. X. In this same article Shaw says: “No man writes a play without
any reference to the possibility of a performance: you may scorn the
limitations of the theatre as much as you please; but for all that you
do not write parts for six-legged actors or two-headed heroines, though
there is great scope for drama in such conceptions.”
[161] _Mr. Shaw's Future: A Conversation_, in the _Academy_, April
30th, 1898. This interview is signed “C. R.”--presumably Clarence Rook.
[162] _Better than Shakespeare?_ Preface to _Three Plays for Puritans_.
[163] In Berlin the play was given in its entirety at the Neues
Theater; in London, at the Savoy Theatre, it proved quite feasible to
give the play omitting the entire third act. And yet the third act,
according to M. Jean Blum (_Revue Germanique_, November-December,
1906), contains the dramatic climax! Compare also, _Dramatische
Rundschau_, by Friedrich Düsel, _Westermann's Monatshefte_, June, 1906.
[164] _Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor_, in _The Play_, No. 62, Vol.
X.
[165] Cf. _Genealogy of Morals_ (Translated by William A. Hausemann,
the Macmillan Co.), where Nietzsche points out that in the case
of “noble men,” prudence is far less essential than the “perfect
reliableness of function of the regulating, _unconscious_ instincts
or even a certain imprudence, such as readiness to encounter
things--whether danger or an enemy, or that eccentric suddenness of
anger, love, reverence, gratitude and revenge by which noble souls at
all times have recognized themselves as such.”
[166] _Cæsar and Cleopatra_, in respect to its revolt against the
dogmas of classical antiquity, against the accepted conventions
in the reconstitution of past epochs, has been classed by Herr
Heinrich Stümcke with the _Cäsar in Alexandria_ of Mora and Thoele's
_Heidnischen Geschichten_. In a skit, _Cäsar (ohne Cleopatra)_, by the
German dramatic critic, Alfred Kerr, and dedicated “an Bernard Shaw mit
freundlichen Grüssen,” this feature is wittily satirized, in these two
verses:
“Könnt ich den Zweck des Blödsinns ahnen! Ich führte manchen schweren
Streich, Bezwang mit Mühe die Germanen-- Trotzdem kommt Sedan und das
Reich.
“Ein Zauberer, ihr grossen Götter, Ist jener nordische Poet; Herr
Arnold Rubek bleibt mein Vetter: Dich, Leben! Leben! spur ich spät....”
[167] The _New York Times_, November 20th, 1904.
[168] “Mansfield was always especially sympathetic with the character
of Napoleon, and, indeed--however extravagant the statement may seem
at first glance--his personality comprised some of the attributes of
that character--stalwart courage, vaulting ambition, inflexible will,
resolute self-confidence, great capacity for labour, iron endurance,
promptitude of decision, propensity for large schemes, and passionate
taste for profusion of opulent surroundings.”--William Winter's _Life
and Art of Richard Mansfield_, Vol. I., pp. 222-223; Moffat, Yard and
Co., New York, 1910.
[169] _Richard Mansfield: The Man and the Actor_, by Paul Wilstach, p.
264; Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1909.
[170] _Ellen Terry_, by Bernard Shaw. _Neue Freie Presse_, January,
1906; English translation, _Boston Transcript_, January 20th, 1906.
[171] On account of the vagueness of the story in certain details,
Mr. John Corbin has taken Shaw to task for not stating “who the Lady
is and why she was so heroically bent on rescuing Napoleon from
himself.” It suffices to know that she is Josephine's emissary, sent
to intercept the incriminating letter. Her duel with Napoleon is a
heroic effort, not to “rescue Napoleon from himself,” but, by playing
upon his boundless ambition, to prevent him from discovering the extent
of Josephine's perfidy, and to rescue Josephine from the consequences
of her indiscretion. That the Lady in the end proves faithless to
her trust merely transposes the key from tragedy to comedy; and
the dramatic excellence of the play is no whit impaired by this
characteristically Shawesque conclusion.
[172] I believe that Shaw's Napoleon has never been adequately
interpreted save possibly by Max Reinhardt in Berlin. The impersonation
I saw at the Court Theatre, London, in June, 1907, was an egregious
failure.
[173] Mr. W. K. Tarpey, who called _Candida_ “one of the masterpieces
of the world,” relates that some time at the end of 1894, or beginning
of 1895, Shaw fell into a calm slumber; in a vision an angel carrying
a roll of manuscript appeared unto him. To Shaw, who was no whit
abashed, the angel thus spoke: “Look here, Shaw! wouldn't it be rather
a good idea if you were to produce a work of absolute genius?” Shaw
granted that the idea was not half a bad one, although he did not
see how it could be carried out. Then the angel resolved his doubts:
“I've got a good play here, that is to say, good for one of us angels
to have written. We want it produced in London. The author does not
wish to have his name known.” “Oh!” replied Shaw, “I'll father it
with pleasure; it is not up to my form, but I don't care much for my
reputation.” Shaw undertook the business side of the matter, put in the
comic relief, and named the play _Candida: a Mystery_!
[174] Mr. Arnold Daly was in the habit of opening the third act of
_Candida_ by reading the familiar verses of Shelley to an unnamed love:
“One word is too oft profaned For me to profane it; One feeling too
falsely disclaimed For thee to disclaim it. One hope is too like
despair For prudence to smother, And pity from thee more dear Than that
from another. “I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept
not The worship the heart lifts above And the heavens reject not, The
desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The
devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?”
[175] In a notable _conférence_ on _Candida_ at the Théâtre des Arts,
in Paris, preceding a production of that play, during the latter part
of May, 1908, Mme. Georgette Le Blanc-Maeterlinck said: “La situation
du mari n'est pas neuve, mais elle se présente ordinairement au
troisième acte, et elle est toujours tranchée sans que la conscience
intervienne, elle est tranchée par la jalousie, par la douleur et la
mort. Ici, nous avons affaire à des intelligences meilleures, à des
êtres qui essayent de se conduire d'après leur raison et leur volonté
la plus haute.... C'est leur effort de sagesse qui les rend absolument
illogiques, les soustrait à l'analyse et les rend presque inadmissibles
à la lecture; mais c'est parce qu'ils sont illogiques, comme nous tous,
qu'ils sont si vivants, si curieux en scène.”--_Le Figaro_, May 30th,
1908; also _L'Art Moderne_, September 20th and 27th, 1908.
[176] _De Nora à Candida_, by Maurice Muret; _Journal des Débats_, No.
544, June 24th, 1904, pp. 1216-1218.
[177] _The Truth about Candida_, by James Huneker, _Metropolitan
Magazine_, August, 1904.
[178] Hermann Bahr has acutely observed: “In the Germanic world, the
woman wields power over the man only so long as he feels her to be
a higher being, almost a saint: so Candida is the transcendent, the
immaculate, the pure--the heaven, the stars, the eternal light. And
this Candida? There is no doubt that she is an angel. The only question
is in which heaven she dwells. There is a first heaven, and a second
heaven, and so on up to the seventh heaven. In the seventh heaven, as
you well know, Shaw, dwell only the poets; and of the seventh heaven
must the woman be, before the worshipful Marchbanks will once kneel
to her, if, indeed, it can be said that a poet ever kneels. But your
beloved Candida is of a lower heaven--a lesser alp, a thousand metres
below, in the region of the respectable _bourgeoisie_. There is she
the saint the Germanic mannikin needs. There she shines--shines for
the Morells, the good people who inculcate virtue and solve social
questions every Sunday. And it is there that she belongs.”
[179] _Vornehmlich über mich selbst_, in Program No. 88 of the
Schiller Theater, Berlin. This _Plauderei_ appeared originally in the
Vienna _Zeit_ in February, 1903, shortly before the production of
_Teufelskerl_ in Vienna.
[180] _Rezensionen. Wiener Theater, 1901-1903_, by Hermann Bahr;
article _Ein Teufelskerl_, pp. 440-453.
THE PLAYWRIGHT--III
“I find that the surest way to startle the world with daring
innovations and originalities is to do exactly what playwrights
have been doing for thousands of years; to revive the ancient
attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to
the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of
the pages of Charles Dickens.”--_Prophets of the Nineteenth
Century_ (Unpublished), by G. Bernard Shaw.
“I have honour and humanity on my side, wit in my head, skill
in my hand, and a higher life for my aim.”--G. Bernard Shaw, in
the _New York Times_, September 25th, 1905.
CHAPTER XII
_Man and Superman_ inaugurates another cycle of Shaw's theatre, and
first presents Shaw to the world as a conscious philosopher. By
reason of its bi-partite nature--it is sub-entitled _A Comedy and a
Philosophy_--this play furnishes the natural link between Shaw the
dramatist and Shaw the creator of a new form of stage entertainment.
It is worth recalling that at the time this play appeared Shaw had
not yet won the favour of the “great public” in England. He had,
however, won the attention and the enthusiastic, yet tempered, praise
of one of the ablest dramatic critics in England. Mr. William Archer
pronounced _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ a “masterpiece--yes, with all
reservations, a masterpiece,” and as each one of Shaw's plays appeared,
he discussed it in the fullest and most impartial way, bespoke for it
the attention of the British public, and roundly berated the managers
of the large West End theatres for letting slip through their fingers
the golden opportunities afforded by the brilliant works of the witty
Irishman.[181] For that matter, Shaw was not wanting in appreciative
students of his plays among the dramatic critics of the day; and even
Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. A. B. Walkley, though temperamentally Shaw's
opposites, took the liveliest interest in the Shavian drama.
Indeed, it was Mr. Walkley who asked Shaw to write a Don Juan play; and
the fulfilment of this request was _Man and Superman_. _Ab initio_,
Shaw realized that there are no modern English plays in which the
natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring
of the action. The popular contemporary playwrights, thinking to
emulate Ibsen, had produced plays cut according to a certain pattern,
_i.e._, plays preoccupied with sex, yet really devoid of all sexual
interest. In plays, of which _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ is the type
illustration, the woman through indiscretion is brought in conflict
with the law which regulates the relation of the sexes, while the man
by marriage is brought in conflict with the social convention that
discountenances the woman. Such dramas, portraying merely the conflict
of the individual with society, Shaw had railed at in the preface to
his _Three Plays for Puritans_; such “senseless evasions” of the real
sex problem serve in part to explain Shaw's partial lack of sympathy
with Pinero during Shaw's _Saturday Review_ period. Shaw was in no mind
to treat his friend Walkley to a lurid play of identical import; nor
did the Don Juan of tradition, literature and opera, the libertine of a
thousand _bonnes fortunes_, suit his wants any better. The prototypic
Don Juan of sixteenth-century invention, Molière's persistently
impenitent type of impiety, and Mozart's ravishingly attractive enemy
of God had all served their turn; whilst in Byron's Don Juan, Shaw saw
only a vagabond libertine, a sailor with a wife in every port. Even
that spiritual cousin of Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, although he had
passed far beyond mere love-making to altruism and humanitarianism, was
still almost a century out of date.
This _reductio ad absurdum_ process finally gave Shaw the clue to the
mystery; the other types being perfected, and in a sense exhausted,
a Don Juan in the philosophic sense alone remained. The modern type
of Don Juan “no longer pretends to read Ovid, but does actually read
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned
for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own
instincts.” Confronted with the stark problem of the duel of sex, Shaw
solved it with the striking conclusion that Man is no longer, like Don
Juan, the victor in that duel. Though sharing neither the prejudices
of the homoist nor the enthusiasms of the feminist, Shaw found it
easy to persuade himself that woman has become dangerous, aggressive,
powerful. The _rôles_ established by romantic convention, and evidenced
in the hackneyed phrase “Man is the hunter, woman the game,” are now
reversed: Woman takes the initiative in the selection of her mate. Thus
is Don Juan reincarnated; once the headlong huntsman, he is now the
helpless quarry. _Man and Superman_, in Shaw's own words, is “a stage
projection of the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman.”
[Illustration: =Program of _Man and Superman_.
Hudson Theatre, N. Y. May 21st, 1906. Second Season.=]
Shaw's solution of the problem was generally regarded as audaciously
novel and original. And yet, as Shaw points out in the Dedicatory
Epistle, and as I have indicated in a former chapter, the notion is
very far from novel. Beaumont and Fletcher's _The Wild Goose Chase_
furnishes the interesting analogy of Mirabell, a travelled Italianate
gentleman and cynical philanderer, pursued by Oriana, the “witty
follower of the chase,” who employs a number of more or less crude and
coarse artifices to entrap him; when the ingenuity of the dramatists
is exhausted, Mirabell succumbs to Oriana's wiles.[182] And those who
have a passion for attributing all Shaw's ideas to Nietzsche, might
find some support in that passage in _A Genealogy of Morals_: “The
philosopher abhors _wedlock_ and all that would fain persuade to this
state, as being an obstacle and fatality on his road to the _optimum_.
Who among the great philosophers is known to have been married?
Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer--they were
not; nay, we cannot even so much as _conceive_ them as married. A
married philosopher is a figure _of comedy_....”
The attitude toward woman exhibited by Shaw in _Man and Superman_ has
won for him the appellation, “the most ungallant of dramatists.” Mr.
Huneker has ventured to assert that Shaw is “practically the first
literary man who has achieved the feat of making his heroines genuinely
disagreeable persons.” Now to Wilde and to Strindberg, woman is an
inferior being, the history of woman being the history of tyranny in
its harshest form, _i.e._, the tyranny of the weak over the strong.
Shaw is quite as far from misogyny on the one hand as from gynolatry
on the other. From the beginning of his literary career, Shaw has
been imbued with the conviction that, to use his own words, “women are
human beings just like men, only worse brought up, and consequently
worse behaved.” In Shaw's plays it is a toss-up between the men and
the women as to which are the worse behaved. The women in Shaw's
plays seem always deliberately to challenge the conventional ideal of
the womanly Woman. As a dramatist, Shaw rebelled from the very first
against the long-established custom of making all heroines perfect, all
heroes chivalrous and gallant, all villains irretrievably wicked. Stock
characters, in Shaw's view, must be swept off from dramatic art along
with romance, the womanly woman, the ideal heroine, and all the other
useless lumber that so fatally cumbered the British stage. In Shaw's
first play, he confessedly “jilted _the_ ideal lady for _a_ real one,”
and predicted that he would probably do it again and again, even at the
risk of having the real ones mistaken for counter-ideals. Shaw has kept
his promise, and has been jilting the ideal lady ever since.
M. Filon finds Shaw's “_galerie de femmes_” nothing short of
astonishing in the veracity and vitality of the likenesses. Ann
Whitefield, whom Shaw once pronounced his “most gorgeous female,”
is really one of his least successful portraits. “As I sat watching
_Everyman_ at the Charterhouse,” says Shaw, “I said to myself, 'Why
not Everywoman?' Ann was the result; every woman is not Ann; but Ann
is Everywoman.” Thus the play takes on the character of a “morality,”
and purports to adumbrate a deep, underlying truth of nature.
Unfortunately, Shaw is not a flesh painter; Ann is not a successful
portrait of a woman who is “an unscrupulous user of her personal
fascination to make men give her what she wants.” She is deficient in
feminine subtlety--the obscurer instincts and emotions of sex. The
strong, heedless, unquestioning voice of fruitful nature voices its
command, not through the passion of a “mother woman,” but through
the medium of the comic loquacity of a laughing philosopher![183] In
the master works of that sovereign student of human nature, Thomas
Hardy, the Life Force holds full sway; Wedekind's _Erdgeist_ reveals
the omnivorous, man-eating monster, devouring her human prey with all
the ferocity of a she-lioness. Inability to portray sexual passion
convincingly is a limitation of Shaw's art. And yet in the present
instance we must not forget that, as Mr. Archer reminds us, “no doubt
the logic of allegory demanded that the case should be stated in its
extremest form, and that the crudest femineity should, in the end,
conquer the alertest and most open-eyed masculinity.” While concerned
with the problem of sex, _Man and Superman_ remains a drama of ideas.
And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, had the Life Force
in Ann been supreme, Maeterlinck would have been vindicated by her in
his fine saying: “The first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal which
thousands of hands, craving for birth, have impressed upon the lips of
the mother they desire.”
_Man and Superman_ is the most pervasively brilliant of all Shaw's
comedies. And in spite of the fact that the idea-plot is intricate and
requires to be disengaged from the action-plot the comedy, as I saw it
produced in both New York and London, gave rise to an almost unbroken
burst of merriment on the part of the audience. It is customary to
identify Shaw with Tanner; and in the first production of _Man and
Superman_ at the Court Theatre, Tanner (Mr. Granville Barker) was “made
up” to represent Shaw. As a matter of fact, Mr. Shaw once told me that
in Tanner, with all his headlong loquacity, is satirized Mr. H. M.
Hyndman, the great Socialist orator. One other detail in the play is
noteworthy--the extrinsically irrelevant incident which leaves everyone
at the end of the first act “cowering before the wedding-ring.” It is
an illustration of a curious device once or twice employed by Shaw--a
sort of comic “sell” of the audience, appearing beside the mark
because its relation with the action is ideological, not dramatic. In
general, the effect of _Man and Superman_ is to make one wish that
Shaw would write a comedy of matrimony furnishing the lamentable
spectacle pictured by Nietzsche of the married philosopher. Mr. Robert
Loraine has actually written a clever sketch upon this theme, entitled
_The Reformer's Revenge; or, the Revolutionist's Reconciliation to
Reality_;[184] and Mr. William Archer publicly urged Shaw to complete
his “Morality” and (following the precedent of _Lord Dundreary Married
and Settled_) give us _John Tanner Married and Done For_.
The play just discussed is the society comedy, as it appears in the
printed book, with the omission of the Shavio-Socratic scene in hell,
and one or two alterations and omissions in the printed play itself.
The dream in hell--Act III. of the printed book--is the ultimate form
of Shaw's drama of discussion, and has actually been successfully
presented at the Court Theatre, London. When I saw it produced there,
I was surprised to note the favour with which it was received, the
brilliancy and wit of the dialogue compensating in great measure for
the absence of all action and the exceptional length of the speeches.
At last Shaw's dream of long speeches, Shavian rhetoric, and a pit
of philosophers was realized. Upon the average popular audience, the
effect would doubtless have been devastating; and even under the most
favourable circumstances, the audience was partially seduced into
appreciative interest by well-executed scenic effects, exquisite
costumes specially designed by Charles Ricketts, and a long synopsis of
_Don Juan in Hell_, especially prepared by the author.[185]
The year 1904 marks a turning-point in the career of Bernard Shaw. The
average age at which artists create their greatest work is forty-six
to forty-seven, according to Jastrow's table; and so, practically
speaking, _John Bull's Other Island_ is chronologically announced as
Shaw's _magnum opus_. In the technical, no less than in the popular
sense, this path-breaking play registers the inauguration of a new
epoch in Shaw's career. In this new phase we find him breaking squarely
with tradition, and finding artistic freedom in nonconformity. A true
drama of national character, _John Bull's Other Island_ portrays the
conflict of racial types and exhibits its author as a descendant of
Molière, a master of comic irony, and at heart a poet.
Originally designed for production by Mr. W. B. Yeats under the
auspices of the Irish Literary Theatre, this play was found unsuited
both to the resources of the new Abbey Theatre and to the temper of
the neo-Gaelic movement.[186] Temperamentally incapable of visionarily
imagining Ireland as “a little old woman called Kathleen ni Hoolihan,”
Shaw drew a bold and uncompromising picture of the real Ireland of
to-day; and the sequel was the production of the play, not at the
Abbey, but at the Royal Court Theatre, London. That interesting
experiment in dramatic production inaugurated by Messrs. J. E.
Vedrenne and H. Granville Barker at the Royal Court Theatre in 1904,
furnishes material for the most interesting chapter in the history
of the development of the contemporary English drama.[187] The
companies trained by Mr. Barker, an able actor and already a promising
dramatist, wrought something very like a revolution in the art of
dramatic production in England. The unity of tone, the subordination
of the individual, the general striving for totality of effect, the
constant changes of bill, the abolition of the “star” system--all
were noteworthy features of these productions. There were given nine
hundred and eighty-eight performances of thirty-two plays by seventeen
authors; seven hundred and one of these performances were of eleven
plays by one author--Bernard Shaw. Plays of other authors--notably of
Mr. Barker himself--were produced, and often with noticeable success.
But in the main the whole undertaking may be regarded as a monster Shaw
_Festspiel_, prolonged over three years. Mr. Barker, Mr. Galsworthy,
the late Mr. Hankin, Miss Elizabeth Robins and Mr. Masefield, all came
prominently into public notice as dramatists of the “new” school.
The Court was not, in the strict sense, a repertory theatre; rather
it furnished a tentative compromise between the _théâtre à coté_ and
the actor-managed theatre backed by a syndicate of capitalists. The
Vedrenne-Barker enterprise did the imperatively needed pioneer work of
breaking ground for the repertory theatre idea; created a public of
intelligent playgoers with literary tastes, who had long since lost
interest in the theatre of commerce; developed a whole “school” of
playwrights, with Mr. Barker at their head; and brought to the English
public at large a belated consciousness of the greatness of Bernard
Shaw.
[Illustration: =H. Granville Barker.=]
_Alvin Langdon Coburn._ From the original monochrome, made in 1908.
Coming at a political _Sturm und Drang_ period, _John Bull's Other
Island_ achieved an immediate and immense success. Leading figures
in public life, including Mr. Arthur Balfour and the late Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, again and again heard the play with unmitigated
delight; and, finally, King Edward “commanded” a special
performance. The gods of English society, upon whose knees ever rests
the ultimate fate of the British artist, suddenly awoke at last to
the realization of the fact that a genius was living in their midst.
_John Bull's Other Island_ marked a new stage in Shaw's career; for
whilst the play itself is the _fine fleur_ of Shavian dramaturgy, the
characters are set firmly upon solid ground. In Shaw's former plays, as
a rule, the locality was not strikingly material, the characters often
supra-natural, and the ideas deftly bandied about at times, much as a
juggler manipulates glass balls. This new play exhibited nothing short
of a new type of drama. Emotion is subsidiary to idea, action is less
important than character, and conflict of ideas replaces the conflict
of wills of the dramatic formula.
In the Shavian _Anschauung_, the action and reaction of national types
inevitably takes precedence over the purely human problem of the love
story. The study in emotional psychology is the incidental underplot
to the larger study of England _versus_ Ireland; here we see the line
of cleavage between Shaw and the conventional dramatist. Shaw's hand,
so deft in the handling of national types, the portrayal of racial
traits, failed him in the delicate task of the exhibition of vital
emotion. “I do not accuse Mr. Shaw of dealing in symbols,” says Mr.
John Corbin, “but I shall not, I am sure, misinterpret him radically
in saying that _Nora_ is _Kathleen ni Hoolihan_--the embodiment of his
idea of Ireland. The real drama of the piece centres in the story of
how the Irishman loses Nora and the Briton wins her.... In his heart
Larry loves his countrywoman, as she has always loved him, and she has
no real affection for the Briton. Here lies the comic irony of the
_dénouement_, the very essence of Shaw's comment on his problem.”[188]
The “real drama,” one rather feels, is the death struggle of nations.
Ireland and England are the antagonist and protagonist, respectively,
of the drama; and the dramatic characters, in a broad sense, are both
individualized human beings and concrete impersonations of racial
traits. It seems to me quite improbable that _John Bull's Other
Island_ will “cross frontiers” as readily as many of Shaw's other
plays. For, despite the signal merits of the character-drawing, the
problem is essentially unique, and, as the title implies, peculiar to
the British Isles.
Roscullen, the scene of the play, is a segment of the living Ireland,
and here are encountered all those conflicting elements which have
made a hopeless enigma of the Irish question for so many generations.
In this miniature Ireland we find jostling each other the dreamer and
the bigot, the superstitious and the unilluded. Instead of the great
landowner, there is a group of small proprietors, who treat their
employees and tenants with a harshness and industrial cruelty that can
only result in the latter's ruin. Religion continues to be the dominant
force in the community; and the clergy exhibit that profound political
sagacity and that unscrupulousness in playing upon the superstition
of the credulous peasants which are such defining marks of the Roman
Catholic priesthood. Ireland's sense of her oppression and bitter
wrongs has not succeeded in destroying her sense of humour, her passion
for mysticism, and her native charm. These qualities we observe in
the ineffable merriment of the peasants over the comic spectacle of
Broadbent as an unconscious humorist; in the fascinating figure of the
Irish St. Francis, chatting amicably with the grasshopper and breaking
his heart over Ireland; and in Nora Reilly, quintessence of graceful
coquetry, _larmoyant_ piquancy and Celtic charm.
Thomas Broadbent, Shaw's conception of the typical Englishman,
approximates quite closely to Napoleon's description of the Englishman
in _The Man of Destiny_. To Mr. A. B. Walkley's characterization of
_John Bull's Other Island_ as a “Shavian farrago,” Shaw replied,
“Walkley is too thorough an Englishman to be dramatically conscious
of what an Englishman is, and too clever and individual a man to
identify himself with a typical averaged English figure. I delight in
Walkley: he has the courage of his _esprit_; and it gives me a sense
of power to be able to play with him as I have done in a few Broadbent
strokes which are taken straight from him.”[189] And in a letter to
Mr. James Huneker, of date January 4th, 1904, Shaw says, “I tell you,
you don't appreciate the vitality of the English.... Cromwell said
that no man goes farther than the man who doesn't know where he is
going.” In that you have the whole secret of the “typical averaged
English figure.” Endowed with the stolid density and exaggerated
self-confidence of the average Englishman, Broadbent resolves to
study the apparently insoluble Irish question “on the ground”; but
his incurable ignorance of Ireland's plight stands revealed in his
declared faith that the panacea for all of Ireland's ills is to be
found in the “great principles of the great Liberal party.” Ireland
irresistibly appeals to his sentimentalities through its traditional
charms--the Celtic melancholy, the Irish voice, the rich blarney, the
poetic brogue. “Of the evils you describe,” he says to Keegan, “some
are absolutely necessary for the preservation of society and others
are encouraged only when the Tories are in office.” ... “I see no
evils in the world--except, of course, natural evils--that cannot be
remedied by freedom, self-government, and English institutions. I think
so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.”
With blundering shrewdness, Broadbent announces himself as a candidate
for the parliamentary seat, on the ground that he is a Home Ruler, a
Nationalist, and Ireland's truest friend and supporter. “Reform,” he
announces, “means maintaining these reforms which have already been
conferred on humanity by the Liberal party, and trusting for future
developments to the free activity of a free people on the basis of
these reforms.” In Shaw's description, he (Broadbent) is “a robust,
full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager and
credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes portentously solemn,
sometimes jolly and impetuous, always buoyant and irresistible, mostly
likable, and enormously absurd in his most earnest moments.”
Broadbent is a great comic figure, destined to take high rank in the
portrait-gallery of English letters. His foil, the Irishman, Larry
Doyle, without being less interesting, is less convincingly portrayed.
Doyle is cursed with the habitual self-questioning and disillusionment
of the self-expatriated Irishman. Realizing the charm of Ireland's
dreams and the brutality of English facts, Doyle longs discontentedly
for “a country to live in where the facts are not brutal and the dreams
not unreal.” His hope for a Greater Ireland is based on his own dream
of Irish intellectual lucidity mated with English push, the Irishman's
cleverness and power of facing facts grafted on the Englishman's
indomitable perseverance and high efficiency. And yet, he has absorbed
the English view of his own race; this “clear-headed, sane Irishman,”
so “hardily callous to the sentimentalities and susceptibilities and
credulities,” if we accept Shaw's estimate of the typical Irishman,
thus describes his own countrymen:
“Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding,
never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! No
debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can
take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An
Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces
him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't
face reality, nor deal with it, nor handle it, nor conquer
it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to
strangers,' like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. It's
all dreaming, all imagination. He can't be religious. The
inspired churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and
the importance of conduct is sent away empty, while the poor
village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story
of a saint has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of
the poor. He can't be intelligently political: he dreams of
what the Shan Van Vocht said in '98. If you want to interest
him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island
Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman. It
saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except
imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's such a
torture that you can't bear it without whiskey.”
A noticeable feature of the play's construction is its slow beginning;
the first act might more properly be called a prologue. The remainder
of the play, although it has little or no story worth recounting,
is constructed with unusual care; the interest inheres chiefly in
the dialogue and the traits of the principal characters. When Shaw
was charged with throwing all attempt at construction overboard, he
vehemently replied:
“I never achieved such a feat of construction in my life.
Just consider my subject--the destiny of nations! Consider my
characters--personages who stalk on the stage impersonating
millions of real, living, suffering men and women. Good
heavens! I have had to get all England and Ireland into three
hours and a quarter. I have shown the Englishman to the
Irishman and the Irishman to the Englishman, the Protestant to
the Catholic and the Catholic to the Protestant. I have taken
that panacea for all the misery and unrest of Ireland--your
Land Purchase Bill--as to the perfect blessedness of which all
your political parties and newspapers were for once unanimous;
and I have shown at one stroke its idiocy, its shallowness,
its cowardice, its utter and foredoomed futility. I have
shown the Irish saint shuddering at the humour of the Irish
blackguard--only to find, I regret to say, that the average
critic thought the blackguard very funny and the saint very
unpractical. I have shown that very interesting psychological
event, the wooing of an unsophisticated Irishwoman by an
Englishman, and made comedy of it without one lapse from
its pure science. I have even demonstrated the Trinity to
a generation which saw nothing in it but an arithmetical
absurdity. I have done all this and a dozen other things so
humanely and amusingly that an utterly exhausted audience,
like the wedding guest in the grip of the Ancient Mariner, has
waited for the last word before reeling out of the theatre as
we used to reel out of the Wagner Theatre at Bayreuth after
_Die Götterdämmerung_. And this they tell me is not a play.
This, if you please, is not constructed.”[190]
Not the least noticeable feature of the play is the omission of the
character which, in former plays, appeared as Shaw in disguise. The
characters are sharply individualized, each is a personality as well
as a type. Moreover, Shaw has seized the situation with the hand of a
master; we discern an Irish Molière revelling in the comic irony of
character-reactions, and observing the rigid impartiality of the true
dramatist. This very fairness allows Shaw a free play of intellect
that partisanship would have stifled; every situation is transfused
with the Shavian ironic consciousness. I once asked Mr. William Archer
which play he regarded as Shaw's _magnum opus_. “I suppose _Man and
Superman_ is Shaw's most popular play,” said Mr. Archer, “but I have
always regarded it, somehow, as beneath--unworthy of--Shaw. I should be
inclined to rate _John Bull's Other Island_ as Shaw's greatest dramatic
work.” I remember remarking to Mr. Shaw one day that _John Bull's
Other Island_ revealed greater solidity of workmanship and greater
self-restraint than any of his former plays. “Yes, that is quite true,”
replied Mr. Shaw; “my last plays, beginning with _John Bull_, are set
more firmly upon the earth. They have ceased to be fantastic, and tend
to grow more solid and more human.” The cleverest and truest remark
about _John Bull_ was made by W. B. Yeats: “_John Bull's Other Island_
is the first play of Bernard Shaw's that has a genuine geography.”
While no character in the play can be called essentially Shavian, it
is noteworthy that Keegan, the unfrocked parish priest, is the “ideal
spectator”; in his mouth Shaw places his own poignant criticisms
penetrating to the heart of the situation. At last the mystic in Shaw's
temperament utters his noble message. And the true poet, vaguely
shadowed forth in that essentially romantic figure Marchbanks, speaks
from the heart of Bernard Shaw in the accents of Keegan, the mystic:
“In my dreams heaven is a country where the State is the Church
and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is
a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in
one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the
worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one
and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human
and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is,
in short, the dream of a madman.”
[Illustration: =Program of _Candida_. The Princess Theatre, New York,
Director: Arnold Daly. December 8th, 1903. The first professional
performance in the United States.=]
[Illustration]
In _Major Barbara_, Shaw's next play, we discover a reversion to
the earlier economic tone of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ combined
with a more specific elaboration of the “Shavian dramaturgy.” This
“Discussion in three acts” has aroused so much discussion as to its
meaning and purpose that the story of its genesis may throw some light
upon its obscurities. Mr. Shaw once related to me the circumstances
under which the germ ideas of the play first took form in his mind.
It seems that, while spending some time at his county place, Ayot St.
Lawrence, in Hertfordshire, he formed an acquaintance with a young man
who was a near neighbour, Mr. Charles McEvoy, the author of a play
entitled _David Ballard_, produced under the auspices of the London
Stage Society. At the close of the War between the States in America,
Mr. McEvoy's father, who had fought on the side of the Confederacy,
and was a most gentle and humane man, established a factory for the
manufacture of torpedoes and various high-power explosives. The
idea of this grey-haired gentleman, of peculiarly gentle nature and
benignant appearance, manufacturing the most deadly instruments for
the destruction of his fellow-creatures appealed to Shaw as the
quintessence of ironic contrast. Here, of course, we have the germ
idea of Andrew Undershaft. The contrast of the mild-mannered professor
of Greek with the militant armourer occurred to Shaw as the result
of his acquaintance with a well-known scholar, Professor Gilbert
Murray, admirably kodaked by Shaw in the stage description: “Cusins
is a spectacled student, slight, thin-haired and sweet voiced.... His
sense of humour is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an
appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament
and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce
impatience has set up a chronic strain which has visibly wrecked
his constitution. He is a most implacable, determined, tenacious,
intolerant person, who, by mere force of character, presents himself
as--and actually is--considerate, gentle, explanatory, even mild
and apologetic, capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or
coarseness.”
In 1902, when _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ was produced in London,
Shaw said in the _Author's Apology_ affixed to the Stage Society
edition of that play, “So well have the rescuers (of fallen and social
outcasts) learnt that Mrs. Warren's defence of herself and indictment
of society is the thing that most needs saying, that those who know me
personally reproach me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my
energies on 'pleasant plays' for the amusement of frivolous people,
when I can build up such excellent stage sermons on their own work.”
_Major Barbara_ marks a return to Shaw's earlier preoccupation with
economic themes and is a profound study of some of the greatest social
and economic evils of the contemporary capitalistic _régime_. In
conversation, Mr. Shaw gave me the reasons which led him to write this
play.
“For a long time,” he said, “I had had the idea of the religious play
in mind; and I always saw it as a conflict between the economic and
religious views of life.
“You see, long ago, I wrote a novel called _Cashel Byron's Profession_,
in which I showed the strange anomaly of a profession which has the
poetry and romance of fighting about it reduced to a perfectly and
wholly commercial basis. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the
profession of prize-fighting.
“After a while, I wrote a play which I called _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_. I showed that women were driven to prostitution, not at
all as the result of excessive female concupiscence, but because the
economic conditions of modern capitalistic society forced them into a
life from which, in another state of society, they would have shrunk
with horror. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession
of prostitution.
“Finally, there came _Major Barbara_. Perhaps a more suitable title for
this play, save for the fact of repetition, would have been _Andrew
Undershaft's Profession_. Here we see the pressure of economics
upon the profession of dealing in death and destruction to one's
fellow-creatures. I have shown the conflict between the naturally
religious soul, Barbara, and Undershaft, with his gospel of money, of
force, of power and his doctrine not only that money controls morality,
but that it is a crime not to have money. The tragedy results from the
collision of Undershaft's philosophy with Barbara's.”
_Major Barbara_ is Shaw's presentment, as Socialist, of the problem
of social determinism. Undershaft began as an East Ender, moralizing
and starving, until he swore that he would be a full-fed free man
at all costs. “I said, 'Thou shalt starve ere I starve'; and with
that word I became free and great.” As in the case of Mrs. Warren,
“Undershaft is simply a man who, having grasped the fact that poverty
is a crime, knows that when society offered him the alternative of
poverty or a lucrative trade in death and destruction, it offered him
not a choice between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between
energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy.” The doctrine of the direct
functionality of money and morality is no new doctrine. Colonel Sellers
maintained that every man has his price. Becky Sharp averred that any
woman can be virtuous on five thousand pounds a year. The penniless De
Rastignac on the heights of Montmartre, shaking his fist at the city
that never sleeps, bitterly exclaimed: “Money _is_ morality.” Shaw has
declared again and again in the public prints and on the platform, that
money controls morality, that money is the most important thing in the
world, and that all sound and successful personal and social morality
should have this fact for its basis. So Undershaft, asked if he calls
poverty a crime, replies:
“The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtue beside
it: all the other dishonours are chivalry itself by comparison.
Poverty blights whole cities: spreads horrible pestilences;
strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound
or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here
and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they
matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life:
there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London.
But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty
people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally
and physically: they kill the happiness of society; they force
us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural
cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us
down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear
poverty. Pah! you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham;
you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well,
bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to
salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight
shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a
permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat;
in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end
of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose
League meeting, and join the Conservative party.... It is cheap
work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a
slice of bread-and-butter in the other. I will undertake to
convert West Ham to Mahommedanism on the same terms.... I had
rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer
than a slave. I don't want to be either; but if you force the
alternative on me, then, by Heaven! I'll choose the braver
and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any
other crime whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and
slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading
articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't
preach at them: don't reason with them. Kill them.”
Now it is patent on reflection that poverty _per se_ is not a crime,
but frequently an incentive to crime; poverty is an evil that must
be remedied by social reforms.[191] The casuistry of Undershaft's
arguments lies in the assumption that good ends justify the worst
of crimes; but the very strongest case can be made out against this
materialist Socialism, inasmuch as it leaves out of consideration all
sense of individual integrity and personal honour. The implication
of _Major Barbara_ is that the _summum bonum vitæ_ is not virtue,
or honour, or goodness, or personal worth, but material well-being,
if not worldly prosperity. Undershaft expresses the doctrine of
those industrial captains of the predatory rich class whom Mr.
Roosevelt has entitled “malefactors of great wealth.” Mr. John D.
Rockefeller is publicly quoted as preaching to his Sunday School
class that it is every man's _religious_ duty to make as much money
as he possibly can--adding the sardonic parenthesis, “honestly, of
course.” Undershaft, whose motto is “Unashamed,” finds the parenthesis
superfluous--his expressed doctrine is to acquire money at all
hazards--_recte si possit, si non, quocumque modo rem_. He would
displace the Christian doctrine of submission with the Shavian doctrine
of self-assertion. If the present practice of the Christian religion
is found inadequate to modern social conditions, Undershaft asserts,
why, scrap the Christian morality, and try another--the Undershaft
morality, say, _faute de mieux_. But with that comic irony which never
deserts Shaw even in treating the characters most akin to himself in
temperament, he betrays the discrepancy in Undershaft's position: the
lack of connection between his “tall talk” and his perfectly legitimate
actions. There is no evidence that Undershaft employed dishonest
means in the acquisition of his wealth, or committed any violence in
the furtherance of his commercial ambition. Lady Britomart acutely
pricks the bubble in the assertion that she could not get along with
Undershaft because he gave the most immoral reasons for the most moral
conduct!
Shaw suffered the customary fate of the dramatist in having
Undershaft's Nietzschean doctrine of the “will to power” laid at
his own door. It is an historic fact that Shaw once dissuaded a mob
from going on another window-smashing excursion in the West End, by
convincing them of its futility: and yet in the preface to _Major
Barbara_ he says, “The problem being to make heroes out of cowards,
we paper apostles and artist magicians have succeeded only in giving
cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every
domination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression.” As
a Fabian, Shaw is a strict advocate of procedure by constitutional
means; he constitutionally agitated for Old Age Pensions, threatening
the Liberal Party all the while with speedy dissolution if this measure
were not carried into effect. It is quite evident that in _Major
Barbara_, Shaw is endeavouring to awake public thought and arouse
public sentiment in England upon the momentous problems of poverty
and the unemployed. To rich and poor alike, he quite consistently and
impartially preaches Socialism, finding this to be most effectively
accomplished by putting in the mouths of his dramatic characters
extremes of opinion expressed in the extremest ways. Shaw advises
the malefactor of great wealth, after acquiring a swollen fortune,
to turn Socialist and, emulating the examples of Carnegie and Rhodes
in educational and other fields, to employ his wealth in improving
the conditions of life for the working classes.[192] To the poor,
Shaw points out the inadequacy of the “paper apostles and artist
magicians,” and the imperative necessity of militant opposition to
oppression, revolt against subjection and poverty. In speaking of
Undershaft's “hideous gospel,” Sir Oliver Lodge pertinently says,
“Perhaps, after all, it is only the wealthy cannon-maker's gospel that
is being preached to us; why should we take it as the gospel of Shaw
himself? Shaw must have a better gospel than that in the future, and
some day he will tell it us, but not yet. As yet, perhaps, it has not
dawned clearly on him.... In nearly all Bernard Shaw's writings ...
the background of strenuous labour, of poverty and overwork, which
constitutes the foundation of modern society, is kept present to the
consciousness all the time, is borne in upon the mind even of the most
thoughtless: it is not possible to overlook it, and that is why his
writings are so instructive and so welcome.”[193]
From the dramatic standpoint, _Major Barbara_ is the most remarkable
demonstration yet given by Shaw of the vitality of a type of
entertainment in complete contradistinction to the classical model.
Shaw has created a form of stage representation, not differing
externally from the conventional form of drama, in which material
action attains its irreducible minimum, and the conflict takes place
absolutely within the minds and souls of the characters. _Major
Barbara_ consists in a succession of logical demonstrations, flowing
from conflicting reactions set up in the souls of the leading
characters by the simplest actions, externally trivial but subjectively
of vital significance. In this play Shaw fully justifies his cardinal
tenet of dramatic criticism that _illumination of life_ is the prime
function of the dramatist, and that the life of drama is not merely
the passion of sexual excitement, but the social, _religious and
humanitarian passions_. The drama of the future will concern itself
with the passion of humanity for all great ends.
_Major Barbara_ is epoch-making in virtue of its theme: the evolutional
struggle of the religious consciousness in a single personality. The
stage upon which the drama is enacted is the soul of the Salvation
Army devotee. “Since I saw the Passion Play at Oberammergau,” said Mr.
W. T. Stead in writing of _Major Barbara_, “I have not seen any play
which represented so vividly the pathos of Gethsemane, the tragedy
of Calvary.”[194] I do not see how anyone can read this story of a
soul's tragedy, or see the play upon the stage, without a quickening
of the nobler emotions, and a realization that Bernard Shaw is a man
of profound feeling and of sentiment, in the best sense. The second
act is the acme of great art, alike in the validity of its emotive
power and the marvellous portraiture of true practical Christianity in
the character of Major Barbara. The sanity and sweetness of her noble
nature, the positive divination of her religious sense which inspires
her to sink self and go straight to the heart of the religious problem,
are revelations in the art of character-portrayal. Her loss of faith
appears insufficiently motived in the play; her conversion in the last
act is even less convincing. Undershaft's intellectuality dominates
Barbara's emotionality; slight reflection might well have convinced
her that the Salvation Army accepted Undershaft's and Bodger's
“tainted money” without explicit or tacit obligation of any sort
whatsoever.[195] But perhaps she saw--as Shaw intends us to see--that
the Salvation Army is foredoomed to failure so long as its chief means
of support is derived from the very class against which it animadverts.
If the Salvation Army goes so far as actually to threaten the incomes
of the predatory rich, it will at once discover that its means of
support derived from that quarter, will be forthcoming no longer.
Not without its significance is the fact that, in _Major Barbara_,
leading dramatic critics found fantastic and absurd what leading
publicists found momentous and profound. To Mr. Walkley, _Major
Barbara_ was a “farrago,” to Mr. Archer, a play in which there are
“no human beings.” On the other hand, Sir Oliver Lodge and Mr. W. T.
Stead were immensely impressed with this play as a vital study of
contemporary religious and social manifestations. These contrasted
views tend to emphasize the facts that the plot of _Major Barbara_ is
quite obviously fantastic, and Undershaft a mystic whose ideas are
dangerously unpractical. And yet the separate characters in the play,
with the exception of Undershaft--and even in his case, we should
remember that no character is impossible in a world which holds a
Bernard Shaw--are all perfectly natural and perfectly comprehensible.
Shaw's practically unlimited acquaintance with all ranks of society
enables him to exhibit characters so diametrically diverse as Bill
Walker and Major Barbara, Lady Britomart and Mrs. Baines, Undershaft
and Cusins, Lomax and “Snobby” Price. The play's greatest faults
are the fantastic plot, the exaggerated discursiveness degenerating
toward the close into rather wearisome prolixity, and the lack of
conviction inspired by Barbara's “conversion” to Undershaftism at the
close. The seriousness of the theme is everywhere lightened by the
brilliancy of the dialogue, the deadly accuracy of the paradoxes,
and the satiric portraiture of social types. But Shaw's incorrigible
dialecticism leaves something to be desired; and we feel toward Shaw
the playwright much as Lady Britomart felt towards Undershaft. “Stop
making speeches, Andrew,” she says. “This is not the place for them”;
to which Undershaft (_punctured_) replies: “My dear, I have no other
way of conveying my ideas.”
Shaw recently asserted that the “way to get the real English public
into the theatre was to give them plenty of politics, to suffuse the
politics with religion, and have as many long speeches as possible.
I knew this because I was in the habit of delivering long speeches
to British audiences myself.” At the Court Theatre, and later at
the Savoy, Shaw drew the real English public to the theatre with
the politics of _John Bull's Other Island_, the religion of _Major
Barbara_, and the long speeches of these two and _Man and Superman_.
In his next play, which he told me he regarded as his most human and
most rational drama, Shaw's active and long-continued interest in
modern medicine found full vent. “The theme of my new play is modern
serumpathy; and the hero is a doctor,” he wrote me while engaged upon
the first act of _The Doctor's Dilemma_.
One day in the summer of 1906, during a visit to the Shaws at
Mevagissey on the seacoast of Cornwall, Mr. Granville Barker told
Mrs. Shaw about a friend of his, a Dr. W----, who had recently been
treated for tuberculosis at a London hospital. Mrs. Shaw was struck
by the recital, which prompted the consideration of the vast pains
often taken by medical scientists to preserve the lives of people who,
unlike Dr. W----, were quite useless to the world. Such people, whose
constitutions were hopelessly undermined, should not be dabbled over
for endless time to no purpose: it was agreed that they ought to be put
into the lethal chamber.
“Why, yes,” exclaimed Mrs. Shaw in a moment of inspiration, “there's a
play in that!”
Mr. Shaw replied: “Sure enough, I believe you are right. Hand me my
tablet and I will go to work on it at once.” The necessary writing
materials were immediately handed him; this was the beginning of _The
Doctor's Dilemma_.
Upon the leading motive of the play hinges the principal criticism
which might be directed against Shaw as a realist. Almost everyone is
inclined to maintain that, whereas problems of the most serious ethical
significance confront even the most ordinary practitioner, the dilemma
in which Ridgeon finds himself placed is one that would never arise in
actual experience. The truth of the matter is that the play is based
upon an actual incident; and Mr. Shaw once related the story to me in
detail. One day he was at St. M----'s Hospital, London, visiting a
famous physician, Sir A---- W----. The size of the hospital admitted
of only a few patients for treatment, say fifteen all told. In the
course of the conversation, an assistant came in to report to the head
of the hospital that some unknown man had made an urgent request to
be taken in as a patient at the hospital. “Is he worth it?” asked the
eminent physician. “This gave me the clue to _The Doctor's Dilemma_,
you see,” explained Mr. Shaw. “A choice between those worthy and those
unworthy to be treated, and presumably saved, was an ethical question
inevitably arising in virtue of the cramped facilities of the hospital.
The question whether the patient was physically worthless or not was in
no sense an inhuman question; and my own treatment, you see, is in no
sense either freakish or inhuman.”
After Ibsen's death Shaw wrote a critical appreciation of Ibsen's work,
in the course of which he said: “Ibsen seems to have succumbed without
a struggle to the old notion that a play is not really a play unless
it contains a murder, a suicide, or something else out of the _Police
Gazette_.... The Brand infant and Little Eyolf are as tremendously
effective as a blow below the belt; but they are dishonourable as
artistic devices, because they depend on a morbid horror of death
and a morbid enjoyment of horror.”[196] Loyally championing Ibsen and
the fundamental principles of drama--for the above quotation appeared
to be nothing short of an attack upon tragedy--Mr. William Archer
characterized Shaw's charge as “the æstheticism of the fox without a
tail ... the instinctive self-justification of the dramatist fatally at
the mercy of his impish sense of humour.” In a challenging tone he went
on to aver that Shaw “eschews those profounder revelations of character
which come only in crises of tragic circumstance. He shrinks from that
affirmation and consummation of destiny which only death can bring.
Death is, after all, one of the most important incidents of life, not
only to him or her who dies, but to those who survive.... If, in Mr.
Shaw's own phrase, 'the illumination of life' is the main purpose of
drama, what illuminant, we may ask, can be more powerful than death?...
It is not the glory but the limitation of Mr. Shaw's theatre that it is
peopled by immortals.”[197]
A few weeks later--as Mr. Archer himself has recorded[198]--a paragraph
appeared in the _Tribune_, “from an unexceptionable source,” announcing
the practical completion of _The Doctor's Dilemma_. This was its
substance:
“Mr. Bernard Shaw has been taking advantage of his seaside
holidays in Cornwall to write a new play.... It is the outcome
of the article in which Mr. William Archer penned a remarkable
dithyramb to Death, and denied that Mr. Shaw could claim the
highest rank as a dramatist until he had faced the King of
Terrors on the stage. Stung by this reproach from his old
friend, Mr. Shaw is writing a play all about death.... He has
not evaded the challenge by a quip; the play is in five acts,
with the fatal situation in the correct position--at the end
of the fourth. The death scene will be unlike any ever before
represented.”
The conversation at Mevagissey and the incident at the hospital in
London prior thereto were the real clues to the creation of _The
Doctor's Dilemma_. Mr. Archer's “challenge,” as Mr. Shaw assured me,
happened to fit in conveniently with his already formulated dramatic
plan. When the play was actually produced, Mr. Archer triumphantly
declared that Shaw had ingeniously evaded his challenge to “keep a
straight face long enough to write a scene of pathos or of tragedy.”
He explained that “death, of all things, requires to be approached
in humility of spirit, and that humility has been omitted from Mr.
Shaw's moral equipment. He must always be superior to every character,
every emotion, every situation he portrays.... If the 'King of
Terrors' thinks he can perturb or overawe the cool, clear, quizzical
intelligence of G. B. S., his majesty is very much mistaken.... As
he (Mr. Shaw) is superior to life, there is no reason in the world
why he should not be superior to death.”[199] In a later article Mr.
Archer maintained that Shaw had “doctored” the situation of Dubedat's
death. Moreover, Mr. Archer gave his case away in the words: “He has
not treated death soberly, seriously, naturally, or, in a word, with
a straight face. He has chosen an extremely exceptional case, and
has treated it realistically in outward detail; ironically in spirit
and effect. It was not realism I demanded--it was poetry!”[200] Now,
to expect a man quintessentially an ironic and comedic dramatist to
throw around death a halo of imaginative poetry is to commit the
critical blunder of complaining of one author that he does not write
like another--say, that Shaw does not write like Shakespeare. If
there is anything that Shaw abhors, it is the spectacle of death made
stage-sublime. And it is quite unreasonable not to expect a man who
does not believe in personal immortality to be “superior to death”; and
Shaw once said, as I have remarked elsewhere, that he was looking for
a race of men who were not afraid to die. Death is approached in _The
Doctor's Dilemma_ with neither awe nor humility; not by the doctors
who are professionally callous, or by the amoral atheist, Dubedat. We
are made to realize Jennifer's anguish during Dubedat's dissolution;
her action following Dubedat's death--the action of a Ouida or a
Laurence Hope--is both logical and psychological. It is quite true that
Shaw has not complied with Mr. Archer's unreasonable and extravagant
request; but he has treated the scene, allowing for the indispensable
“heightening for dramatic effect,” with acute psychological
penetration, with wonderful art, and with absolute consistency to his
own view of life--an eminently honest and square course to pursue.
Various other incidents in the play, branded unqualifiedly by numerous
critics as impish, in execrable taste, or frankly impossible, are
based upon actual occurrences; the names of the parties concerned and
the details are quite well known to others besides Shaw himself. For
example, Dubedat's disgraceful suggestion about the worthless cheque,
which of necessity must eventually be paid by Jennifer to avert
Dubedat's disgrace, is an exact record of a similar proposal once made
to Shaw himself by a man whose name, because of its association with
that of one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, is
known all over the world. Dubedat's lack of any sense of obligation to
finish pictures paid for before execution is paralleled in an episode
in the life of a well-known sculptor. The incident of the reporter's
suggestion to interview the artist's widow five minutes after
bereavement on “How it feels to be a widow,” is founded on fact. “A few
years ago,” Shaw recounts, “when Mrs. Patrick Campbell's husband died
in South Africa, a leading London paper sent a man up on the instant
to interview her. Of course, she didn't see him, and next morning
the editor of the paper in his story of the death actually expressed
grieved surprise at her lack of hospitality.” There is a scene in the
play in which Dubedat attempts to justify his conduct on the ground
that he is a disciple of Bernard Shaw, whom he calls “the most
advanced man now living.” To remove any misapprehension in the public
mind on the subject, Shaw recently told the following story:
“Some people have thought that by allowing the immoral artist
to say he was my disciple, I have virtually admitted that
all my disciples die immoral and that immorality is what my
teachings amount to. Of course, that is not what I meant. The
incident, as I say, was founded on fact. About six months ago
a scampish youth tried to blackmail his own father, and the
old gentleman, a most respectable person, was actually forced
to prosecute him. At his trial the youth excused himself just
as the dying artist in my play attempted to excuse himself--by
asserting that he was a 'follower of Bernard Shaw.' Then the
youth said some irreligious things that scandalized the judge,
and finally got sent to prison, where he actually expected me
to go to visit him and act as a sort of chaplain to him.”[201]
Lastly, there is the creed of the dying artist, beginning
with the words: “I believe in Michelangelo, Velásquez, and
Rembrandt”--universally deplored as impossible, to say nothing of
its being in execrable taste. “This creed of the dying artist,” Shaw
found himself forced to explain, “which has been reprobated on all
hands as a sally of which only the bad taste of a Bernard Shaw could
be capable, is openly borrowed with gratitude and admiration by me
from one of the best known prose writings of the most famous man of
the nineteenth century. In Richard Wagner's well-known story, dated
1841, and translated under the title, _An End in Paris_, by Mr. Ashton
Ellis (Vol. VII. of his translation of Wagner's prose works), the
dying musician begins his creed with 'I believe in God, Mozart and
Beethoven.'”[202]
In _The Doctor's Dilemma_ medical quackery and humbug are portrayed
with a satiric verve truly Molièresque. The long first act does little
to further the action beyond indicating that “to put a tube of serum
into Bloomfield-Bonington's hands is murder--simple murder,” and
suggesting that Ridgeon has a temporary “idiosyncrasy” to fall in love
with the first pretty woman that comes along. The real purpose of
the first act is to portray the state of modern medical science; the
quackeries of M. Purgon and Mr. Diafoirus come at once to mind, and
one feels that the picture drawn by Shaw is done much as Molière would
have done it, had he been alive to-day. In Dubedat Mr. Max Beerbohm has
discovered a strong resemblance to the Roderick Hudson of Henry James.
One catches here and there, too, a suggestion of the Oscar Wilde who
said: “If one love art at all, one must love it beyond all things in
the world, and against such love the reason, if one listened to it,
would cry out. There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It
is something entirely too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives
it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure
visionaries.” This figure of a clever young artist, of rare charm of
temperament and phenomenal executive skill, who came to an early,
untimely end through disease had several prototypes in actual life; but
on the whole Dubedat must be regarded as a composite picture, and not a
portrait.” Dubedat raises the eternal question as to how far genius is
a morbid symptom.[203] The most notable passage in the play is the
discussion between Sir Colenso Ridgeon and Sir Patrick Cullen as to the
worthlessness of Dubedat, and the value of Blenkinsop.
“Well, Mr. Saviour of Lives,” asks Sir Patrick, “which is it to
be--that honest man, Blenkinsop, or that rotten blackguard of an
artist, eh?”
[Illustration: =Playbill of _The Doctor's Dilemma_. Schauspielhaus,
Cologne. January 23d, 1910. One hundred and sixty-first performance.=]
[Illustration: =Playbill of _Arms and the Man_. Schauspielhaus,
Frankfurt. October 6th, 1906. First performance at this theatre.=]
“It's not an easy case to judge, is it?” queries Ridgeon. “Blenkinsop's
an honest, decent man; but is he any use? Dubedat's a rotten
blackguard; but he's a genuine source of pretty and pleasant and good
things.”
“What will he be a source of for that poor innocent wife of his, when
she finds him out?”
“That's true. Her life is a hell.”
“And tell me this: Suppose you had this choice put before you: Either
to go through life and find all the pictures bad, but all the men and
women good, or to go through life and find all the pictures good and
the men and women rotten. Which would you choose?”
“That's a devilish difficult question, Paddy. The pictures are
so agreeable, and the good people so infernally disagreeable and
mischievous, that I really can't undertake to say off-hand which I
should prefer to do without.”
“Come, come! none of your cleverness with me: I'm too old for it.
Blenkinsop isn't that sort of good man; and you know it.”
“It would be simpler if Blenkinsop could paint Dubedat's pictures.”
“It would be simpler still if Dubedat had some of Blenkinsop's honesty.
The world isn't going to be made simpler for you, my lad: you must take
it as it is.”
After further discussion, Sir Patrick finally poses the issue in
clear-cut terms:
“It's a plain choice between men and pictures.”
“It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture,” parries
Ridgeon.
“Colly, when you live in an age that runs to pictures and statues and
plays and brass bands, because its men and women are not good enough
to comfort its poor aching soul, you should thank Providence that you
belong to a high and great profession, because its business is to heal
and mend men and women.”
“In short, as a member of a high and great profession, I am to kill my
patient.”
“Don't talk wicked nonsense. You can't kill him. But you can leave him
in other hands.”
“In B. B.'s, for instance, eh?” queries Ridgeon, looking at Sir Patrick
significantly.
“Sir Ralph Bloomfield-Bonington is a very eminent physician.”
“He is,” accedes Ridgeon.
“I'm going for my hat,” adds Sir Patrick, with conclusive finality.
Whilst all the characters are admirably drawn and sharply
individualized, Shaw's inspiration is singularly displayed in making
of Jennifer a native of Cornwall, that land of rhapsodic faith and
splendid religious enthusiasm. She is a true child of nature, impulsive
and romantic, to whom belief in Dubedat's genius, much more than love
for his personality, has become nothing short of a religion. To engarb
herself in the “purple pall of tragedy,” the instant Dubedat is dead,
is a perfectly characteristic action. “Jennifer is an impossible person
to live with, I grant you,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “but it is
clear to me that her impulsiveness and her unquestioning fidelity to
Dubedat's memory must find immediate expression in fulfilment of the
dying injunction of her King of Men. Even if I had been writing a
novel, in which the treatment is more leisurely”--this in answer to my
question--“I should have made her act precisely as she did.”
The first three acts of _The Doctor's Dilemma_ are as able in treatment
and solid in workmanship as anything Shaw has ever achieved. The
pervasive comic irony is tremendous; and if in the latter part of the
play there is a regrettable drop into farce-comedy, one should remember
that this is a fault shared in by the plays of Sheridan and Molière.
The anti-climax of the epilogue is banal--“a sell” of the true Shavian
brand. It is exceedingly amusing to the dispassionate onlooker to note
the discomfiture of the dismayed audience over the discovery that the
enigmatic author regards the identity of Jennifer's second husband as a
quite pointless secret between Jennifer and Bernard Shaw![204]
“I have just finished a crude melodrama in one act--the crudity and
melodrama both intentional,” Mr. Shaw wrote me on March 15th, 1909,
“which I should say will be played by Tree if it were not that my
plays have such an extraordinary power of getting played by anybody
in the world rather than by the people for whom they were originally
intended.” Even then, it seems, Mr. Shaw dimly foresaw the banning of
his play by the King's Reader of Plays, and the enforced alteration
of plans for its production entailed by that decision. Promised
initial production by Sir (then Mr.) H. Beerbohm Tree, “the first of
our successful West End managers to step into the gap left by the
retirement of Messrs. Vedrenne and Barker from what may be called
National Theatre work with his Afternoon Theatre,” _Blanco Posnet_
was driven away to far-off Dublin, where it first saw the light of
production. Upon no play of Shaw's, with the single exception of _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_, are we so fully “documented”--primarily due in
both cases to the interdict of the Censorship. Fortunately a letter
which Shaw wrote to Tolstoy in the autumn of 1909 gives a detailed
account of the genesis of the play. Tolstoy had been reading Shaw's
plays, and evinced much interest in the plot of _Blanco Posnet_ as it
had come to his ears. He expressed a wish to read the play, says Mr.
Aylmer Maude in his biography of Tolstoy, “because, as he said, to
many people the working of man's conscience is the only proof of the
existence of a God.”[205] When Mr. Maude repeated this conversation to
Mr. Shaw, the latter sent Tolstoy a copy of the play with the following
letter (quoted in part):
“MY DEAR COUNT TOLSTOY,--I send you herewith, through our
friend, Aylmer Maude, a copy of a little play called _The
Showing Up of Blanco Posnet_. 'Showing up' is American
slang for unmasking a hypocrite. In form it is a very crude
melodrama, which might be played in a mining camp to the
roughest audience.
“It is, if I may say so, the sort of play you do
extraordinarily well. I remember nothing in the whole range
of drama that fascinated me more than the old soldier in your
_Power of Darkness_. One of the things that struck me in that
play was the feeling that the preaching of the old man, right
as he was, could never be of any use--that it could only anger
his son and rub the last grains of self-respect out of him. But
what the pious and good father could not do, the old rascal of
a soldier did as if he was the voice of God. To me that scene
where the two drunkards are wallowing in the straw, and the
older rascal lifts the younger one above his cowardice and his
selfishness, has an intensity of effect that no merely romantic
scene could possibly attain; and in _Blanco Posnet_ I have
exploited in my own fashion this mine of dramatic material
which you were the first to open up to modern playwrights.
“I will not pretend that its mere theatrical effectiveness
was the beginning and end of its attraction for me. I am not
an 'Art-for-Art's sake' man, and would not lift my finger to
produce a work of art if I thought there was nothing more than
that in it. It has always been clear to me that the ordinary
methods of inculcating honourable conduct are not merely
failures, but--still worse--they actually drive generous and
imaginative persons into a dare-devil defiance of them. We
are ashamed to be good boys at school, ashamed to be gentle
and sympathetic instead of violent and revengeful, ashamed to
confess that we are very timid animals instead of reckless
idiots, in short, ashamed of everything that ought to be
the basis of our self-respect. All this is the fault of the
teaching which tells men to be good without giving them any
better reason for it than the opinion of men who are neither
attractive to them, nor respectful to them, and who, being much
older, are to a great extent not only incomprehensible to them,
but ridiculous. Elder Daniels will never convert Blanco Posnet:
on the contrary, he perverts him, because Blanco does not want
to be like his brother; and I think the root reason why we do
not do as our fathers advise us to do is that we none of us
want to be like our fathers, the intention of the Universe
being that we should be like God.”
It is inconceivable that this play should have been banned by the
Censorship.[206] It is a story of religious conversion, told with
sincerity and depth of conviction. So far is it from being irreverent
that it may, with truth, be described as the most sincerely religious
of all of Shaw's plays. “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the
Gods,” says Shakespeare: “they kill us for their sport.” Like pawns
in the great game of life are we to God, says Shaw; He uses us for
His own great purpose. “There's no good and bad,” says Posnet in his
puncheon-bench sermon; “but by Jiminy, gents, there's a rotten game,
and there's a great game. I played the rotten game; but the great game
was played on me; and now I'm for the great game every time. Amen.”
It is the final expression in Shaw of that neo-Protestantism which
had already found more or less adequate expression in _The Devil's
Disciple_ and _Major Barbara_. It needs no exposition here--especially
after Shaw's expository letter to Tolstoy.[207] One word only as to
the play's “crudity.” To an American, familiar with the scenes and
conditions described, its pseudo-realism is grotesque in its unreality.
Fortunately the import of the play is in no wise impaired by the fact
that Shaw has been unsuccessful in assimilating Bret Harte.
During the latter part of March, and the month of April, 1909, Mr.
Shaw, accompanied by Mrs. Shaw, went for his health on a motoring
tour through Algeria. His next play, which he had been requested to
write on the chosen subject by Mr. Forbes Robertson, was written at
odd moments during this trip. The play, described by Mr. Shaw as an
“ordinary skit,” was aptly entitled _Press Cuttings: A Topical Sketch
compiled from the Editorial and Correspondence Columns of the Daily
Papers_. In form, it is very like, though superior in characterization,
to a Paris _revue_; Julius Bab has pronounced it vastly above the
contemporary German _Witzblatt_. Its appearance just at the time when
the activities of the “militant” suffragettes were at their height,
was peculiarly _à propos_. Once again, the Censorship intervened to
ban one of Shaw's plays--this time on the ground that Mr. Shaw was
guilty, not of blasphemy, but of employing “personalities, expressed
or implied.” The Civic and Dramatic Guild was immediately created
to evade the interdict of the Censorship, and the play was produced
for the first time at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on July 9th,
1909.[208] The indignation aroused among dramatic authors and critics
by the banning of two of Mr. Shaw's plays in succession at last
focussed the opposition to the Censorship; and the dissatisfaction with
its operation, which had made itself felt vigorously, but more or less
intermittently, for a number of years thitherto, finally crystallized.
A special committee, from both Houses, was appointed by Parliament,
to examine into and report on the operation of the Censorship, and,
if necessary, to make recommendations as to its powers and functions
for the future. Many sittings were held, and a large number of the
leading men of letters in Great Britain, including Mr. Shaw himself,
actors, theatre-managers, bishops, men of various shades of opinion,
gave evidence before the committee. One result of the sittings of
that committee[209] has been the establishment of an advisory
board in connection with the Censorship. In many quarters hopes are
expressed that a Bill will be passed by Parliament for the purpose
of ameliorating the hardships of dramatic authors under the present
operation of the Censorship, and of giving greater encouragement to the
free development of a national English drama in the future.
[Illustration: =Playbill of _Press Cuttings_. The Kingsway Theatre,
London. June 21st, 1910. National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
Direction of Actresses' Franchise League.=]
_Press Cuttings_ is the most perfectly amusing thing Shaw has written
in many years. It recalls the days of delightful irresponsibility,
which seemed to have passed for ever--the days of _Arms and
the Man_ and _You Never Can Tell_. The adverse decision of the
Censorship is inconceivable, in the light of the sanction of Mr.
Barrie's _Josephine_, in which Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour were
“caricatured,” and even a number of their public utterances put in
the mouths of the characters obviously impersonating them. Mr. Shaw's
Balsquith (Balfour-Asquith) and Mitchener (Milner-Kitchener) bear not
the faintest resemblance to any of the personages suggested by their
names--representing merely, in a light of broadly farcical-comedy, a
prime minister and a head of the army. From the situation arising from
reversing the _rôles_ of man and woman, due to the agitation of the
“militant suffragettes”--woman developing all the “manly” qualities
of pugnacity and overbearing insolence, man developing the “womanly”
qualities of timidity and indecision--Shaw has extracted a comedy that
is breezily, devastatingly comical. But, even in a topical sketch, Shaw
from time to time “puts away childish things” and shows us the serious
sides of several subjects. Those who indulge in the futile claim that
men are more useful to the world than women will find food for serious
reflection in the passage in Shaw's play in which General Mitchener
tries to excuse himself for giving way to profanity. He is sternly
reproved by the Irish charwoman, Mrs. Farrell--admirably played by that
remarkable character-actress, Miss Agnes Thomas.
“When a man has risked his life on eight battlefields, Mrs. Farrell,”
pleads the General in extenuation, “he has given sufficient proof of
his self-control to be excused a little strong language.”
“Would you put up with strong language from me,” queries Mrs. Farrell
pertinently, “because I've risked me life eight times in childbed?”
“My dear Mrs. Farrell,” expostulates the General, “you surely would
not compare a risk of that harmless kind to the fearful risks of the
battlefield?”
“I wouldn't compare risks run to bear livin' people into the world to
risks run to blow them out of it,” replies Mrs. Farrell conclusively.
“A mother's risk is jooty; a soldier's is nothin' but divilment.”
The popular hysteria in the fear of German invasion is reflected with
great cleverness in the discussions between Mitchener and Balsquith,
and Mitchener's vigorous asseveration caps the climax.
“Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and
Zeppelin airships the question of the moon is becoming one of the
greatest importance. It will be reached at no very distant date. Can
you, as an Englishman, tamely contemplate the possibility of having to
live under a German moon?”
Shaw's admirable art in character-creation is portrayed in the figure
of the orderly, a very minor part. In a brief scene or two, he shows us
a definite, clear-cut character, full of humour, consistency and point.
The orderly, with the sharpened vision of common sense, has penetrated
the great drawback to military service in England. The National Service
League might well ponder Shaw's words: “With regard to military
service, the only real objection to it in this country is the fact
that at present the man who enlists as a soldier loses all his civil
rights and becomes simply an abject slave. Sooner than submit to such
conditions, which are wholly unnecessary and mischievous, the country,
I consider, would be perfectly justified in resisting any such measure
by violent revolution.
“On the other hand, there is no reason why a man should not be
compelled to do military service just as he is compelled to serve
on a jury or to pay his taxes, provided that his civil rights are
unimpaired.”
FOOTNOTES:
[181] In a subsequent volume will be indicated in detail Mr. Archer's
intimate relation to the growth of popular interest in Shaw's plays.
[182] This parallel was called to my attention by Professor William
Lyon Phelps, of Yale University. Compare, for example, Tanner's long
outburst against the chains of wedlock with Mirabell's, “I must not
lose my liberty, dear lady, and like a wanton slave cry for more
shackles,” etc., etc. In reply to a question of mine in regard to
indebtedness, Mr. Shaw replied: “Why, I never thought of such a thing!
As a matter of fact, the old English comedies are so artificial and
mechanical, that I always forget them before I have finished reading
them.”
[183] Compare the novel, _The Confounding of Camellia_, by Anne Douglas
Sedgwick, concretely imaging the thesis of Shaw's play. The pursuit
of man is portrayed in its natural colours, the pursuer and temptress
being a seductive siren who exploits all the intricate wiles and
complex arts of personal fascination to ensnare her struggling prey.
[184] _The Actor's Society Monthly Bulletin_, Christmas, 1905.
[185] “As this scene may prove puzzling at a first hearing,” reads
the leaflet, “to those who are not to some extent skilled in modern
theology, the Management have asked the Author to offer the Court
audience the same assistance that concert-goers are accustomed to
receive in the form of an analytical programme.” Follows the synopsis:
“The scene, an abysmal void, represents hell; and the persons of
the drama speak of hell, heaven and earth, as if they were separate
localities, like 'the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters
under the earth.' It must be remembered that such localizations are
purely figurative, like our fashion of calling a treble voice 'high'
and the bass voice 'low.' Modern theology conceives heaven and hell,
not as places, but as states of the soul; and by the soul it means, not
an organ like the liver, but the divine element common to all life,
which causes us 'to do the will of God' in addition to looking after
our individual interests, and to honour one another solely for our
divine activities and not at all for our selfish activities.
“Hell is popularly conceived not only as a place, but as a place of
cruelty and punishment, and heaven as a paradise of idle pleasure.
These legends are discarded by the higher theology, which holds that
this world, or any other, may be made a hell by a society in a state
of damnation: that is, a society so lacking in the higher orders of
energy that it is given wholly to the pursuit of immediate individual
pleasure, and cannot even conceive the passion of the divine will. Also
that any world can be made a heaven by a society of persons in whom
that passion is the master passion--a 'communion of saints' in fact.
“In the scene represented to-day hell is this state of damnation. It is
personified in the traditional manner by the devil, who differs from
the modern plutocratic voluptuary only in being 'true to himself'; that
is, he does not disguise his damnation either from himself or others,
but boldly embraces it as the true law of life, and organizes his
kingdom frankly on a basis of idle pleasure seeking, and worships love,
beauty, sentiment, youth, romance, etc., etc.
“Upon this conception of heaven and hell the author has fantastically
grafted the seventeenth century legend of Don Juan Tenorio, Don
Gonzalo, of Ulloa, Commandant of Calatrava, and the Commandant's
daughter, Dona Ana, as told in the famous drama by Tirso de Molina and
in Mozart's opera. Don Gonzalo, having, as he says, 'always done what
it was customary for a gentleman to do,' until he died defending his
daughter's honour, went to heaven. Don Juan, having slain him, and
become infamous by his failure to find any permanent satisfaction in
his love affairs, was cast into hell by the ghost of Don Gonzalo, whose
statue he had whimsically invited to supper.
“The ancient melodrama becomes the philosophic comedy presented to-day,
by postulating that Don Gonzalo was a simple-minded officer and
gentleman who cared for nothing but fashionable amusement, whilst Don
Juan was consumed with a passion for divine contemplation and creative
activity, this being the secret of the failure of love to interest him
permanently. Consequently we find Don Gonzalo, unable to share the
divine ecstasy, bored to distraction in heaven; and Don Juan suffering
amid the pleasures of hell an agony of tedium.
“At last Don Gonzalo, after paying several reconnoitring visits to
hell under colour of urging Don Juan to repent, determines to settle
there permanently. At this moment his daughter, Ana, now full of years,
piety, and worldly honours, dies, and finds herself with Don Juan in
hell, where she is presently the amazed witness of the arrival of her
sainted father. The devil hastens to welcome both to his realm. As Ana
is no theologian, and believes the popular legends as to heaven and
hell, all this bewilders her extremely.
“The devil, eager as ever to reinforce his kingdom by adding souls
to it, is delighted at the accession of Don Gonzalo, and desirous to
retain Dona Ana. But he is equally ready to get rid of Don Juan, with
whom he is on terms of forced civility, the antipathy between them
being fundamental. A discussion arises between them as to the merits
of the heavenly and hellish states, and the future of the world. The
discussion lasts more than an hour, as the parties, with eternity
before them, are in no hurry. Finally, Don Juan shakes the dust of hell
from his feet, and goes to heaven.
“Dona Ana, being a woman, is incapable both of the devil's utter
damnation and of Don Juan's complete supersensuality. As the mother
of many children, she has shared in the divine travail, and with care
and labour and suffering renewed the harvest of eternal life; but the
honour and divinity of her work have been jealously hidden from her
by man, who, dreading her domination, has offered her for reward only
the satisfaction of her senses and affections. She cannot, like the
male devil, use love as mere sentiment and pleasure; nor can she, like
the male saint, put love aside when it has once done its work as a
developing and enlightening experience. Love is neither her pleasure
nor her study: it is her business. So she, in the end, neither goes
with Don Juan to heaven nor with the devil and her father to the palace
of pleasure, but declares that her work is not yet finished. For though
by her death she is done with the bearing of men to mortal fathers, she
may yet, as Woman immortal, bear the Superman to the Eternal Father.”
[186] In W. B. Yeats's Collected Works, Vol. IV., p. 109 (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1908), appears a statement (dated 1903), with
reference to “the play which Mr. Bernard Shaw has promised us.” The
appended footnote reads: “This play was _John Bull's Other Island_.
When it came out in the spring of 1905, we felt ourselves unable to
cast it without wronging Mr. Shaw. We had no Broadbent, or money to get
one.”
[187] In a subsequent volume, dealing with the dramatic movement
inaugurated by Mr. Shaw, the production of his plays at the Court
Theatre will be fully discussed.
[188] _Bernard Shaw and His Mannikins_, in the _New York Sun_, October
15th, 1905.
[189] _George Bernard Shaw: A Conversation_, in _The Tatler_, November
16th, 1904.
[190] _George Bernard Shaw: A Conversation_, in _The Tatler_, November
16th, 1904.
[191] Several years ago, in a public address, Mr. Andrew Carnegie
made the remarkable statement: “You hear a good deal these days about
poverty. People wish it abolished. The saddest day civilization will
ever see will be that in which poverty does not prevail. Fortunately we
are assured that the poor are always to be with us. It is upon the evil
of poverty that virtue springs!”
[192] In the Fabian tract, _Socialism for Millionaires_, Shaw preaches
much the same gospel to the millionaire. This paper was first published
in the _Contemporary Review_, February, 1896.
[193] _'Major Barbara,' G. B. S., and Robert Blatchford_, by Sir Oliver
Lodge; in the _Clarion_ (London), December 29th, 1905.
[194] _Impressions of the Theatre.--XIV. Mr. Bernard Shaw's 'Major
Barbara,'_ in the _Review of Reviews_ (London), January 27th, 1906.
[195] Commissioner Nicol, of the Salvation Army, has pointed out
that a “real” Barbara, before sending in her resignation, would have
consulted General Booth as to the Army's policy in the matter of
accepting “tainted money.” He relates (the _Star_, November 29th,
1905), that General Booth accepted one hundred pounds from the Marquess
of Queensberry for his “Darkest England” project. A Christian friend
was astonished that he took the “dirty money.” Said the General: “We'll
wash it clean in the tears of the widow and orphan, and consecrate it
on the altar of humanity for Humanity's good.” It is quite clear that
Shaw's “Barbara” prefers to do her own thinking; if she had let General
Booth do it for her, there would have been no play.
[196] _Ibsen_, by G. Bernard Shaw; in the _Clarion_, June, 1906.
[197] _About the Theatre_, by William Archer; in the _Tribune_
(London), July 14th, 1906.
[198] _About the Theatre: 'The Doctor's Dilemma'_ by William Archer; in
the _Tribune_ (London), December 29th, 1906.
[199] This very able and profound discussion, in which Mr. Archer gave
the very fairest exposition of his real opinion of Shaw as personality
and dramatist, revealed the fundamental issues of the vexed question at
issue without in the least settling them.
[200] _About the Theatre: The Dissolution of Dubedat_, by William
Archer; in the _Tribune_ (London), January 19th, 1907.
[201] The _New York Times_, December 30th, 1906.
[202] '_The Doctor's Dilemma_,' in the _Standard_ (London), November
22d, 1906. Shaw's comment is characteristic: “It is a curious instance
of the enormous Philistinism of English criticism that this passage
should not only be unknown among us, but that a repetition of its
thought and imagery sixty-five years later should still find us with a
conception of creative force so narrow that the association of Art with
Religion conveys nothing to us but a sense of far-fetched impropriety.”
It is needless to remark that Dubedat omits God's name for the obvious
reason that he does not believe in God.
[203] Shaw recently said: “I do not see how any observant student of
genius from the life can deny that the Arts have their criminals and
lunatics as well as their sane and honest men ... and that the notion
that the great poet and artist can do no wrong is as mischievously
erroneous as the notion that the King can do no wrong, or that
the Pope is infallible, or that the power which created all three
did not do its own best for them. In my last play, _The Doctor's
Dilemma_, I recognized this by dramatizing a rascally genius, with
the disquieting result that several highly intelligent and sensitive
persons passionately defended him, on the ground, apparently, that high
artistic faculty and an ardent artistic imagination entitled a man
to be recklessly dishonest about money, and recklessly selfish about
women, just as kingship in an African tribe entitles a man to kill whom
he pleases on the most trifling provocation. I know no harder practical
question than how much selfishness one ought to stand from a gifted
person for the sake of his gifts or the chance of his being right in
the long run.”--_The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense
about Artists being Degenerate_, by Bernard Shaw, pp. 11-12; _The New
Age Press_ (London), 1908. This brochure is also published by Benjamin
R. Tucker, New York.
[204] I have had the privilege of reading Mr. Shaw's copy of _The
Doctor's Dilemma_. Consideration of _Getting Married_, _Misalliance_
and _The Dark Lady of the Sonnets_, all unpublished in English at this
time (November, 1910), is postponed for a subsequent edition of the
present work.
[205] _The Life of Tolstoy: Later Years_, by Aylmer Maude; Constable
and Co., 1910.
[206] The Censor objected to two passages; the second passage Mr. Shaw
was perfectly willing to alter, but not so the first--Blanco's story
of his conversion, so reminiscent of the style of Job, in which he
describes how God “caught him out at last.” This first passage, which
Mr. Shaw rightly considered to embody the crux and central meaning of
the play, he refused point-blank to alter. The play was next promised
production by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. A certain passage which was
subject to misinterpretation was willingly altered by Mr. Shaw at the
suggestion of Lady Gregory; and the phrase, “Dearly beloved brethren,”
and the use of the word “immoral” in description of Feemy's relations
with the men of the village, were omitted in deference to the wishes of
the Lord-Lieutenant. The directors of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory
and Mr. W. B. Yeats, were warned by the Lord-Lieutenant that their
patent for the theatre might be withdrawn in case the play offended
popular and religious sentiment in Ireland. Despite these warnings, the
play was successfully produced on August 25th, 1909. “The audience took
it in a very friendly manner,” wrote the dramatic critic of the _Times_
(London), “laughing heartily at its humours, passing over its dangerous
passages with attentive silence, calling loudly but in vain for the
author at the close.” There was no sensation and no excitement--and no
cause for any. The _Irish Times_ said that if ridicule were as deadly
in England and Ireland as it is in France, the Censorship would be
“blown away in the shouts of laughter that greeted _Blanco Posnet_.” In
September, 1909, the play was once again presented to the Censor for
consideration--in the meantime the author having rewritten an important
passage after it had been tested in rehearsal. Miss Horniman wished to
produce it at her Repertory Theatre in Manchester. “What the Censorship
has actually done,” said Mr. Shaw in comment on the decision, “exceeds
the utmost hopes of those who, like myself, have devoted themselves to
its destruction. It has licensed the play, and endorsed on the licence
specific orders that all its redeeming passages shall be omitted in
representation. I may have my insolent prostitute, my bloodthirsty,
profane backwoodsmen, my atmosphere of coarseness, of savagery, of
mockery, and all the foul darkness which I devised to make the light
visible; but the light must be left out. I may wallow in filth,
ferocity and sensuality, provided I do not hint that there is any force
in Nature higher and stronger than these.” Subsequently the play was
successfully produced under the auspices of the Incorporated Stage
Society, at the Aldwych Theatre, London, December 5th and 6th, 1909, by
the Irish National Theatre Society's Company from the Abbey Theatre,
Dublin.
[207] For detailed and excellent expositions of the purport of
the play--particularly helpful at the time of the banning by the
Censorship--compare _The Incorrigible Censorship_, in the _Nation_,
July 29th, 1909; and an open letter to the _Spectator_ of September
4th, 1909, by George A. Birmingham.
[208] The play was subsequently produced successfully at the Gaiety
Theatre, Manchester, October 18th, 1909, and at the Kingsway
Theatre, London, June 21st, 1910, at a benefit _matinée_ organized
by the Actresses' Franchise League. The Reader of Plays allowed the
production of the play after the change of the names of “Balsquith” and
“Mitchener” to “Johnson” and “Bones,” respectively.
[209] _Report of the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords
and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship), together
with the Proceedings of the Committee, and Minutes of Evidence_; Eyre
and Spottiswoode, 1909. The many questions which intimately concern
the free development of the national drama in England, arising in
connection with the investigation of the Censorship, fall outside the
scope of the present work. They will be considered in detail in a
subsequent volume dealing with the movements in dramatic art associated
with Mr. Shaw's name. Mr. Shaw, desiring to have his full views on the
Censorship included in the printed report, had a volume printed at his
own expense which he filed with the committee. The committee decided by
vote not to allow this printed evidence to be printed in their report.
This volume, entitled _Statement of the Evidence in Chief of George
Bernard Shaw before the Joint Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship
and Theatre Licensing)_, printed privately and marked “Confidential,”
constitutes a remarkable indictment against the Censorship, and an
elaborate exposition of grounds for the abolition of the Censorship as
at present constituted.
THE TECHNICIAN
“Like all dramatists and mimes of genuine vocation, I am a
natural-born mountebank.”--_On Diabolonian Ethics._ Preface to
_Three Plays for Puritans_.
CHAPTER XIII
The drama is the casual, not the inevitable, vehicle for the exposition
of Bernard Shaw's theories of conduct. This dramatist of “genuine
vocation,” as he once denominated himself, was literally “called” to
the post of dramatist for the New Movement. He was a “pressed” man, a
conscript in the service of the theatre. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that Shaw entered the ranks and took up arms against a sea of
twaddle, not initially impelled by the inner, imperious necessity
for creative expression, but fired with the desire to prove that he
could write plays. According to his own statement, he proceeded to
manufacture the evidence. At one time or another throughout his varied
career he has employed almost every conceivable medium--novelistic,
journalistic, critical, artistic, propagandist--for the communication
of his unique and peculiar views. For the last eighteen years the drama
has afforded him the most popular instrument for the wide diffusion of
his brilliance. The drama has never been the supreme interest of his
career; nor, indeed, as he recently told me, has it played any very
absorbing part in his life until within the last nine or ten years. The
American “discovery” of Shaw as a “new” dramatist amused him immensely,
even awoke in him a sense of slight disappointment. He had rather hoped
that he would not be “found out” until some years after his death! At
last he saw that he must reconcile himself to the inevitable and make
the best of the matter, since it could not be helped! “To me,” he said
in a letter to me, after the _Candida_ furore in New York, “all the
fuss about Candida is only a remote ripple from the splashes I made in
the days of my warfare long ago.”
Whether or not the drama has played a very absorbing part in Shaw's
own life, it is certain that this is the field in which he has been
most strikingly successful in making a world-wide reputation. Until
_Candida_ created such a stir in New York, he was regarded in America
as a phenomenally clever dilettante in novelism, in art, music, and
dramatic criticism; in fact, as anything but a dramatist. He was all
but unheard of on the Continent until his plays gained admittance to
the broadly catholic repertory of the German Theatre.[210] To-day Georg
Brandes writes of him, not as a critic, a novelist, or a Socialist,
but as the leader of the most modern, most advanced drama in England.
Julius Bab pronounces Shaw the greatest spiritual phenomenon since
Nietzsche, the greatest literary success since Ibsen. The time has
come for a serious consideration of the question whether he is a
good dramatist, a bad dramatist, or, in fact, whether, in the last
analysis, he is a dramatist at all. Remarkable as it may appear, it is
the last question upon which some of the acutest dramatic critics are
divided. Moreover, it remains vivid that Shaw has made some distinct
and original contributions to dramatic theory and practice. If Shaw
were to paint a portrait or model a piece of sculpture, there is no
doubt that he would produce a work presenting evidence of a keen and
searching intelligence. Upon the drama, from the questions of prefaces,
stage-directions, and technique down to that of punctuation, Shaw has
left the marks of an adroit and sagacious ratiocinative faculty.
In his search for a field other than fiction and criticism for the
free play of his “abnormally normal vision,” Shaw's eye fell upon the
stage. He recognized that the existing popular drama of the day is
“quite out of the question for cultivated people who are accustomed to
use their brains.” Looking about him, he soon perceived that under
present conditions the modern theatre creates the drama, despite the
fact that the reverse is the ideal state of affairs. No one more than
the idealistic Shaw deplores the present vogue of the musical comedy,
the problem play which substitutes sensuous ecstasy for intellectual
validity, and the well-made piece in which the plot is hatched by the
stage-setting. To him, as to another, modern dramas may be classified
under a few heads: neurotic, erotic, Pinerotic, and tommyrotic. The
whole difficulty has arisen through the drama of the day being written
“for the theatre instead of from its own inner necessity.” The only
way to reform the theatre was by constructive effort. Realizing that
reformation and regeneration could come only from within, and more
especially from the man of abnormally normal vision, George Bernard
Shaw--he set to work to effect the needed reforms.
Piquancy was imparted to the situation by the fact that Shaw was one
of those restless modern spirits who are out of patience with the
existing status, not only in the drama, but in the world at large. By
his own confession, he ran counter to all conventional standards.[211]
An Irishman by birth, an Englishman by adoption, he pretended to
patriotism neither for the land of his nativity nor for the country
to which it owed its ruin. A humanitarian, he detested warfare of any
kind; a vegetarian, he abhorred the slaughter of animals, in sport or
in the butcher's yard. An enthusiastic Ibsenist, he paralleled the
Master in having no respect for popular morality, no admiration for
popular heroics, no belief in popular religion. An art critic, he
had no taste for popular art; a Socialist, profoundly imbued with an
enthusiasm for social truth as an instrument of social reform, he was
out of patience with the lagging snail-pace at which the world moved.
The times were out of joint; but, unlike Hamlet, as Mr. Norman Hapgood
suggests, he deemed it no cursed spite that he was born to set them
right.
It is not to be wondered at that the acutely individualized
Shaw should feel the necessity of outlining his unusual, almost
unparalleled frame of mind. As a public speaker, his aim had always
been, not to awake the primitive feelings of the mob, but to make
each individual in his audience think new thoughts: elucidation, not
oratory, was the keynote of his public speeches. As a critic he had
sought to speak out his whole thought without disguise: he dallied with
no professional phraseology. He addressed the man who knew nothing
of technique; accordingly, he wrote in the vernacular of every day.
Clarity, lucidity and wit were the standards at which he aimed. In
like manner, his sincere effort toward the constructive achievement
of the “New Drama” necessitated the most elaborate elucidation of his
views, aims and methods. As Mr. Walkley has pointed out, Bernard Shaw
is nothing if not explanatory. By prefaces, appendices and epilogues,
he endeavours to raise the intellectual standard of public opinion,
which to him represents the will of the ignorant majority as opposed
to that of the discerning few. It is matter for no surprise that such
a strange phenomenon as Shaw should have led the critics astray. Few
men in their lifetime have been so fundamentally misunderstood, so
farcically misrepresented: Beyle, Shelley, Wilde, naturally come to
mind. Shaw resolved to fight against misrepresentation with the many
effective weapons, the use of which, from long and arduous practice, he
had so well learned. The haughty aloofness of an Ibsen with his “_Quod
scripsi, scripsi_,” the unconscious self-forgetfulness of a Browning
in the oft-recorded anecdote of “_me und Gott_,” the lofty injunction
of a Goethe “_Bilde, Kunstler, rede nicht_,” weighed with him not at
all. The man who had first caught the ear of the British public on
a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands, was not the man
soon to forget his lesson. Shaw has never discarded the trumpet and
the cart-wheel declamation. This is not merely the device to attract
attention for the moment, but to win a hearing long enough to awaken
thought upon the views he so adroitly and wittily expounds. He writes
prefaces and appendices because he believes that an author should not
merely allow his works to speak for themselves, but should present
their claims to intelligent consideration with his utmost literary
skill. Shaw avers that, like Dryden, he writes prefaces because he can.
The crass ignorance, the unspeakable fatuity of his critics have driven
him to it. Shaw writes prefaces not only because he can: he writes them
because he must.
The rare and ancient custom of preface-writing is now almost a lost
art. Shaw is virtually the only modern dramatist who writes expository
and critical prefaces. His prefaces are little masterpieces of
essay-writing. After _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, they measure the
high-water mark of Shaw's supreme talent as a polemist, a dialectician,
a gorgeous and extravagant paradoxer. “In finely polyglot style”
_j'en_ chortle, as chortled Stevenson over the admirable Bashville.
Inimitable, incomparable are these prefaces, vitally animate with the
fantastic humours of the prankish Max, the solemn absurdities of Mark
Twain, the mordant irony of Henry Becque. Shaw turns a paradox as
dexterously as Chesterton, bubbles with self-persiflage as delightfully
as Whistler, mocks the stolid British Philistine with an exasperating
acuity for which we have to go to Heine to find a parallel. William
Archer has said that one of the prefaces of Dumas _fils_ might have
been the product of collaboration between Isaiah, Tolstoy and Bernard
Shaw. Any of the prefaces of Bernard Shaw might have been the product
of a collaboration between Dumas _fils_, Friedrich Nietzsche, and that
great American showman, P. T. Barnum.
Shaw's incorrigible practice of writing prefaces is the perfectly
logical outcome of his point of view. The direct corollary of this
practice is Shaw's distinctly original contribution to the technology
of modern realistic drama in the matter of ample elucidative and
descriptive stage directions. For reasons similar to those that
actuated Gerhart Hauptmann to draw plans and write pages of stage
directions to compel a clear visualization of the scenes of his
early social drama, _Vor Sonnenaufgang_, Shaw describes in lucid and
illuminating stage directions of considerable length the traits,
qualities and characteristics of the people and places that play
determining parts in his dramas. From the standpoint of the dramatic
critic, he long ago recognized the bankruptcy of the old school of
acting. Its technique was wholly inadequate for the interpretation of
the plays of Ibsen and the modern school of realistic dramatists. A new
fingering of the dramatic keyboard was demanded. The sophistication
of the actor's consciousness by romance could be obviated only by
the most cunning portraiture of each character. To aid the actor in
every possible way to realize unusual states of mind and apparently
aberrant views of ethical conceptions, Shaw drew the most tersely
descriptive character sketches of the sort of person he meant the
actor to incarnate. These little thumb-nail sketches are marvels
of character-drawing in miniature. The German Shaw, Hermann Bahr,
has paralleled, if not followed, Shaw in describing each personage,
as he appears, with photographic minuteness, but with nothing like
the piquancy and originality of his predecessor. Shaw has always
fulminated against the romancer's habit of announcing his hero as a
man of extraordinary genius, and yet totally failing to reinforce this
announcement in his subsequent speech and action. Shaw complains even
of Ibsen that he has left entirely too much to the reader's and the
actor's imagination and insight. Is Borkman a real Napoleon of Finance
or only an hallucinated impostor? What reason have we to believe,
barring the author's statement, that Lövborg was actually a creative
genius, that Allmers was in the least degree capable of a masterwork on
Human Responsibility, or that Solness was an architect of exceptional
original power? When interrogated as to his meaning, for example,
Ibsen haughtily replies: “What I have said, I have said.” But, as Shaw
pertinently indicates, what he hasn't said, he hasn't said. Whether
uniformly successful or not, Shaw, as practical playwright, has made
a definite contribution to modern realistic drama by conscientiously
seeking to remedy in his own plays the defect he has discovered in
Ibsen, the consummate craftsman of the age. Shaw's descriptions, not
only of the characters, but of the scenes in which these characters
are set, are little essays in social criticism. The description of the
dentist's operating-room in _You Never Can Tell_, or of Ramsden's study
in _Man and Superman_, is at once the epitome and the indictment of an
entire social era, of a phase of ethical or industrial evolution. It
intrigues the fancy, as Whistler used to say, to make the ludicrous,
if futile, inquiry whether the fate of heroes, the destiny of humanity,
depend upon the upholstery of the chairs, the ornaments upon the
mantel-shelf, or the pattern of the wall-paper!
Among contemporary dramatists, Bernard Shaw is an exponent of
that modern movement of which, as Mr. Chesterton has recently
reminded us, Robert Browning, among modern poets, was the fount and
origin--the school whose chief characteristic is the apotheosis of
the insignificant. Like Browning, Shaw has “ceased to believe certain
things to be important and the rest to be unimportant.” He has resolved
to distil the quintessence of the unessential. By the cultivation
of subjective intensity, Maurice Maeterlinck has opened our eyes
to the miracle of the commonplace, the treasure of the humble. By
examining the neglected, George Gissing has revealed the importance
of the trivial. With an imaginative insight that subsequently finds
verification in real life, Henrik Ibsen depicts a soul's tragedy in a
married woman's loss of her dolls. In conformity with the realistic
logic of his race, Paul Hervieu traces the finger of fate in the colour
of a woman's bonnet. Realizing those queer mental experiences that the
ordinary observer would not see or could not describe, George Meredith
illumines the obscurity of fugitive and subconscious sensations.
Bernard Shaw arraigns a social era in his description of a parlour
because he has learnt the supreme importance of detail, the mystery and
immensity of little things.
Shaw was driven to the expedients of preface and exhaustive
stage-direction not alone by the false critical interpretations of
his plays, by the actor's failure to divine the _rationale_ of his
characters, and by the evolutionary trend of modern realistic art.
He also felt the necessity of falling back upon his own literary
expertness in order to restore the English drama to anything like its
former level of estimation in English literature. In that barren period
of dramatic unproductivity, approximately speaking, from 1835 to 1885,
the habit of reading plays, which had obtained in England from the
time of Shakespeare to that of Sheridan Knowles, fell into “innocuous
desuetude.” Against the notion that plays are essentially unreadable,
a legacy of that period of England's abject servitude to France in the
realm of the drama, Shaw has justly and finely protested as an author,
as a dramatic critic, as a dramatist. With Fontenelle and the younger
Dumas, he was united in the belief that “the spectator can give only
success, it is the reader who confers renown.” He has employed his
powers of literary expression in all their vigour and vitality to make
his plays, as published and readable artistic productions, worthy of
competition with such elaborate fiction as that of Bourget, James, or
D'Annunzio. Shaw's discouraging experience in the effort to have his
own plays published brought the subject forcibly to his attention.
As late as 1896, every publisher who was approached with a view to
publishing a play, Shaw asserts, at once said: “No use: people won't
read plays in England.”
Shaw rightly lays the blame for the passing of the printed play as a
marketable commodity at the doors, not of the publisher, but of the
playwright, on account of the absurd jargon in which stage directions
are customarily couched. There is a sign-language, a scenic chirography
pertaining peculiarly to the stage; it is essential, as Mr. Brander
Matthews recently said, that the playwright who wishes his play to be
generally read “should translate it out of the special dialect of the
stage folk into the language of the people.” And a number of years ago
Shaw wrote: “I suggest that it is the fault of the playwrights who
deliberately make their plays unreadable by flinging repulsive stage
technicalities in the face of the public, and omitting from their
descriptions even that simplest common decency of literature, the
definite article? I wonder how many readers Charles Dickens would have
had, or deserved to have, if he had written in this manner:
(SYKES _lights pipe--calls dog--loads pistol with newspaper,
takes bludgeon from R. above fireplace and strikes_
NANCY.) NANCY: Oh, Lord, Bill! (_Dies._ SYKES _wipes
brow--shudders--takes hat from chair O. P.--sees ghost, not
visible to audience--and exit L. U. E._)”
In this sort of thing, “literary people trying their hand at the drama
for the first time revel as ludicrously as amateur actors revel in
flagrant false hair, misfitting tunics and tin spears.” The abuse, as
Mr. William Archer has pointed out, arose at the time when the drama
ceased to be regarded as literature. Plays designed for “intending
performers,” amateur and professional, were often printed from the
actual prompt-books used in the theatre. Even when this was not the
case, they were closely modelled after the prompt-books.
Shakespeare and Ibsen, to mention two obvious examples, suffer from
this very deficiency. “What would we not give,” asks Shaw, “for
the copy of _Hamlet_ used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the
original 'business' scrawled by the prompter's pencil?... It is for
want of this (realistic) process of elaboration that Shakespeare,
unsurpassed as poet, story-teller, character draughtsman, humorist
and rhetorician, has left us no intellectually coherent drama, and
could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his
studies of character and society....” The literary product of two
years of Ibsen's life, exhibiting exhaustive knowledge not only of the
character of the individuals represented, but also of their personal
history and antecedents, reads to the actor-manager, Shaw declares,
exactly like a specification for a gas-fitter! It is an “insult” to
an exceptionally susceptible, imaginative, fastidious person like
Shaw. Frankly speaking, Ibsen in this respect occupies a position
intermediate between Pinero, with his dry enumeration, and Shaw, with
his breezy loquacity. Shaw swings to the furthest extreme, making his
stage-directions piquant and facetious essays for the edification
of the reader--discursive, argumentative, polemical, historical,
psychological, or social essays, varying in length from two lines to
five pages. With characteristic adroitness, Shaw has defended one
of his own stage-directions which has been rebuked as a silly joke.
“It runs thus: '_So-and-So's complexion fades into stone-gray, and
all movement and expression desert his eyes._' This is the sort of
stage-direction an actor really wants. Of course, he can no more
actually change his complexion to stone-gray than Mr. Forbes Robertson
can actually die after saying, 'The rest is silence.' But he can
produce the impression suggested by the direction perfectly. _How_ he
produces it is his business, not mine. This distinction is important,
because, if I wrote such a stage-direction as '_turns his back to the
audience and furtively dabs vaseline on his eyelashes_,' instead of
'his eyes glisten with tears,' I should be guilty of an outrage on both
actor and reader. Yet we find almost all our inexperienced dramatic
authors taking the greatest pains to commit just such outrages.”
The issue, however, is not to be confused by any such defence, however
adroit. In fact, in this particular instance Shaw makes a valid defence
of a stage-direction with which no fault can be found save that of
literary over-accentuation. Shaw has followed one safe rule in his
stage-directions: “Write nothing in a play that you would not write in
a novel”; but the converse: “Write everything in a play that you would
in a novel,” would be fatal. The great fictionist does not write: “A
keen pang shot through the mother's heart; for she saw at a glance that
her child had not many more chapters to live.” Similarly the dramatic
author should not tell the public that “part of the stage is removed
to represent the entrance to a cellar.” Shaw is perfectly correct in
saying that “a dramatist's business is to make the reader forget the
stage and the actor forget the audience, not to remind them of both at
every turn, like an incompetent 'extra gentleman' who turns the wrong
side of his banner towards the footlights.” But Shaw's practice of
obtruding the refractory lens of his own temperament between the reader
and the characters of the drama is open to very serious objection. The
prime incident in the history of the production of _Candida_ in both
New York and Vienna was the animated discussion over the concluding
sentence, which Georg Brandes regarded as wholly superfluous:
“James and Candida embrace. But they do not know the secret in the
poet's heart.” Shaw was so much amused by the futile guesses of the
Candida-maniacs that he wrote to Mr. James Huneker a Shavian _exposé_
of the “secret in the poet's heart.” A spurious interest was thus
tacked on to the play on account of Shaw's proposition of a riddle
of which he alone claimed knowledge of the solution. Again, Shaw
goes to the length of explaining dubious and laconic remarks of his
characters, thus totally destroying the realistic illusion that this
conversation is actually taking place. The following illustration from
_The Devil's Disciple_ seems to be a sort of first aid to the actor:
“_Judith smiles, implying 'How stupid of me!'_ ...” At one point in the
trial of Dick Dudgeon, Burgoyne remarks: “By the way, since you are
not Mr. Anderson, do we still----eh, Major Swindon?” [_Meaning “do we
still hang him?”_] When the party breaks up at the close of the first
act of the same play, Shaw pauses to give us the following historical
and social reminder: “Mrs. Dudgeon, now an intruder in her own home,
stands erect, crushed by the weight of the law on women.... For at
this time, remember, Mary Wollstonecraft is as yet only a girl of
eighteen, and her Vindication of the Rights of Women is still fourteen
years off.” The vital defect of Shaw's method is epitomized in that
single word “remember.” He might just as well write “Gentle Reader”
and be done with it. And yet Shaw is not alone in this defect; Bahr
not infrequently strikes the personal note, and some of D'Annunzio's
stage directions are little poems in themselves--delightful, but not
strictly artistic. Shaw has done genuine service to the modern English
drama by his conscientious effort to make his plays readable, to write
not mere drama, but genuine literature. Through his long training as
dramatic critic, he learned to effect the complete visualization of the
painted sets of the stage, thus preserving intact, in that respect,
the illusion of reality. He has replaced the old stocks and stones
of _French's Acting Edition_ by personal and scenic descriptions,
imaginatively, vividly, humorously--in a word, artistically--rendered.
But he has not avoided the intrusion of the personality of the
dramatist; he has imported into the English drama that pleasant vice
of English fiction: imperfect objectivity. Mr. Archer states the
plain common-sense of the matter when he says that stage-directions
should be clear, adequate, and helpful, but that they should always be
_impersonal_.[212] With all Shaw's praiseworthy efforts to create the
realistic illusion of life by making us forget that his characters are
only fictions of the stage, he occasionally destroys that illusion by
making us remember that they are only the puppets of Bernard Shaw.
However original and iconoclastic Shaw may be in respect to
interpretative prefaces and artistically cast stage-directions,
in the matter of dramatic construction and technique he has been
notably rigorous, rather than careless, in his attempt at realistic
representation. In minor matters of punctuation, it is true, he has
freely gratified his own preferences and likings--using spaced letters
for emphasis, omitting commas and apostrophes whenever no doubt as to
the sense is involved, avoiding quotation marks for titles and, indeed,
in Biblical fashion, dispensing with punctuation on every possible
occasion. All these things are merely matters of taste. But the
conventional technique of the drama, the customs, tricks and devices
of stage-craft, he ordinarily accepts without question. In _Widowers'
Houses_ in its first form, he made the explicit division into scenes;
since that time, he has made each of his plays, as far as scenes go,
a continuous whole, unbroken save only by division into acts, and by
a succession of asterisks where a lapse of time is to be understood.
In this respect, he has carefully preserved his rule of writing down
nothing that might remind the reader of an actual stage or a theatric
representation.[213]
The incidents, plot, construction and technical details of drama
Bernard Shaw manipulates for his own purposes, giving them novelty,
piquancy, and charm by the essentially modern use he makes of them.
As for indebtedness to Ibsen for his technique, he vigorously scorns
the idea. “It is quite the customary thing to say, nowadays,” Mr.
Shaw once remarked to me, “that Ibsen revolutionized the technique of
English drama. I cannot, for the life of me, find the least evidence
of such a thing. The objective side of Ibsen's technique is a part
of the common stock of modern dramatic realism. The symbolic side of
Ibsen's technique is incommunicable--peculiar to Ibsen alone. The
technique of such a play as _John Gabriel Borkman_, for example, is
inextricably bound up with the dramatic genius which devised it.” Shaw
asserts that his own plays have all the latest mechanical improvements.
In his plays there are no “asides,” no impossible soliloquies, no
long-winded recitals in the second act of what has taken place in the
first, no senseless multiplication of doors and windows, no incessant
stream of letters and telegrams. Shaw revolted against many of the
technical practices of Ibsen. “Go back to Lady Inger,” he recently
wrote, “and you will be tempted to believe that Ibsen was deliberately
burlesquing the absurdities of Richardson's booth; for the action
is carried on mostly in impossible asides.” And he said to me, in
discussing the use of the soliloquy, “I do not in the least object to
the soliloquy provided it does not exceed the time-limit a rational
man might be supposed to observe in talking aloud. But if there is
anything that drives me wild, it is to hear Brown come down to the
footlights, and begin: 'I wonder where Jones can be! He promised to
meet me here at half-past four. Can it be possible that he is still
suffering from remorse for the murder of his father-in-law? etc., etc.'
Deliver me from the soliloquy used solely as a first aid to ignorant
audiences.” In his _Saturday Review_ period, Shaw insisted that, “What
most of our critics mean by mastery of stage-craft is recklessness in
the substitution of dead machinery and lay figures for vital action
and real characters.” And in his notable essay on Ibsen, in 1906, he
clearly sets forth his dramatic ideal.
“What we might have learned from Ibsen was that our fashionable
dramatic material was worn out as far as cultivated modern
people are concerned, that what really interests such people on
the stage is not what we call action--meaning two well-known
and rather short-sighted actors pretending to fight a duel
without their glasses, or a handsome leading man chasing
a beauteous leading lady round the stage with threats,
obviously not feasible, of immediate rapine--but stories of
lives, discussion of conduct, unveiling of motives, conflict
of characters in talk, laying bare of souls, discovery of
pitfalls--in short, illumination of life....”[214]
“All this talk about the dramatist proceeding according to rule and
only making a coherent story which begins at the beginning of the
play,” Mr. Shaw remarked to me one day, “is the most mistaken and
harmful notion in the world. A dramatist finds himself in the grip of
a situation or a complex of character of which he must make the most
and the best that he can. Take Ibsen, for example. Not infrequently he
finds himself compelled, for the sake of giving coherence and validity
to his characters, to introduce a long recital by some character,
without which the play would lack a vital part of the dramatic
structure. Not that I defend such technique. I instance it merely to
show that even a craftsman like Ibsen is driven occasionally to such
expedients.”
“It seems to me,” I remarked, “that, whereas some of your plays are
notable for their first acts--_The Philanderer_ and _Arms and the Man_,
for instance--because you seem to be concerned chiefly with exposition
of the plot and not with brilliant Shavian divagations, in certain
others you wholly concern yourself in the first act with the careful
setting-up of a complex _milieu_, the elaboration of an environment
out of which the principal character emerges. In certain other plays,
the method is somewhat the same, but the purpose and the result quite
different. The first act of _The Devil's Disciple_, for instance, is
like a picture of Hogarth. By minutely delineated portrayal of Dick's
home, his training and environment--all the influences and surroundings
of his youth, you explain and thus justify his revolt. The first act
isn't a part of the plot--it is, however, an indispensable phase
of the situation. From the first act there emerges one remarkable
character, Dick Dudgeon; this act makes him comprehensible--that is
its fundamental purpose. But in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ the case is
quite different; the hour-long first act is vital only in the sense of
acquainting us with the single fact that, to turn a patient over to
Bloomfield-Bonington for treatment is to commit murder.”
“Yes, you are quite right about _The Devil's Disciple_,” replied Mr.
Shaw. “You have stated precisely the significance of that first act.
Unquestionably, the drama is the art of preparation and this method is
as legitimate a means of preparation as many others, and certainly much
more effective. There is no reason in the world why the drama should be
debarred as a medium for the painting of _genre_ pictures.”
[Illustration: =Shaw's Country House at Ayot St. Lawrence.=]
“As for the first act of _The Doctor's Dilemma_,” he continued, “it is
true, as you say, that the story really doesn't begin until nearly the
end of the long first act. But you must remember that the hero of my
play is no one single character, but modern medical science. You see,
I have been absolutely modern in my treatment of medicine, and I have
devoted this first act to a complete exposition of the present state of
modern medicine.”
“The real truth of the matter,” he went on to explain, greatly
interested in his subject, “is that in my first acts I have often
put many things I can't afford to waste my time with later on. When
an audience first enters a theatre, it comes absolutely fresh and is
prepared to stand a great deal from the dramatic author--a great deal
which is not, strictly speaking, germane to the carrying-on of the plot
of the 'story'--provided it is cast in a sufficiently entertaining
and diverting form. The average audience is so accustomed to the
conventional, wearisome piling up of one detail upon another--mere
mechanical exposition until the middle of the second act--that my
method, by which I furnish forth a complete social and psychological
_milieu_ in as entertaining a fashion as I can, is quite a relief.”
One may say in general that, not without reason does Shaw claim to have
cast his plays always in the ordinary practical comedy form in use at
all the theatres. There are, however, two marked features in which
his dramas, as tone pictures and as realistic transcripts of life,
are strikingly unique and distinctive. In the first place, Shaw runs
counter to the conventional standpoint of the emotion-racked critic
by refusing to preserve the medium in which plays are customarily
cast. Most of his plays deserve a twin appellation: tragi-comedy,
farce-comedy, burlesque-extravaganza, and the like. In some of them the
key is transposed so frequently as to defy brief classification. Shaw
is intent upon opening our eyes to points of view, not accidentally
variant, but purposely divergent from the conventional form. He scorns
the attitude of the romance-riddled melodramatist, and is utterly
impatient of the Fitch mood or the Belasco sentimentalism. If you
have tears, Mr. Fitch seems to say, prepare to shed them now. Holding
the blunderbuss of sentimentality and emotionalism to our heads, Mr.
Belasco bids us stand and deliver. In Shaw's hands, the play is now
comedy, now tragedy, now audacious satire--everything by turns and
nothing long. Once catch the distinction between the vital spirit of
Shaw and the demoralizing rant of the sentimentalists, and you have
gained an insight into Shaw's philosophy of will that clarifies and
illumines the motive and purpose of those creations of his that are
customarily classed as eccentrics, perverts, madmen, bounders, or
cads.[215]
We must, however, take account not only of the virtues, but also of
the defects of Shaw's qualities. His ability to play the _rôles_
of the acrobat, the trapeze-performer, the clown, even the stern
ringmaster, has occasionally seduced him from the strait and narrow
path of true drama. The statement that Shaw's serious plays are
exceedingly good _pastiches_ of Ibsen is perhaps an exaggeration of
Mr. Max Beerbohm in his _rôle_ of licensed jester. In reality there is
no doubt that the strict compression demanded by the Ibsenic form gave
Shaw no legitimate opportunity for the free play of his irresponsible
humour. His appearance as jester was often a manifest intrusion. _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_ just missed being a masterpiece because Shaw was
incapable of artistic self-sacrifice. The occasional lapse from tragic
seriousness to a tone of almost revolting levity robbed the play of its
dignity as a tragedy. Mr. Archer was severely shocked by _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ when he saw it on the stage; in the study he had called it
“a masterpiece--yes, with all reservations, a masterpiece.” Mr. Grein,
who wished to produce the play in the Independent Theatre series,
sternly renounced Shaw after seeing it played by the Stage Society. It
is clear, then, why such plays as _Arms and the Man_ and _You Never Can
Tell_ are genuine successes, theatric as well as dramatic. They are
least disturbed by rapid transitions, their large and loose comedic
form giving considerable room for Shaw's kaleidoscopic changes. Shaw's
farce-comedies are the natural and spontaneous expressions of Shaw's
peculiar comedic talent, the sports of his own humorous imagination.
Shaw's compositions are chameleons which are always most interesting
and attractive when they take the changing colours of his own
temperament.
In any classification according to form, Shaw's plays are very
difficult to catalogue. We have seen in the first place that Shaw
purposely runs counter to the conventional standpoint of the dramatic
critic. In _Widowers' Houses_ he jilts the ideal heroine; in _The
Philanderer_ he blasts the womanly woman; in _Arms and the Man_ he
knocks the romantic notion of war, and of the stage, so to speak, into
a cocked hat. In _You Never Can Tell_ he tilts against the Old Man and
the New Woman; in _The Devil's Disciple_ he reduces the melodramatic
formula to absurdity; in _John Bull's Other Island_ he explodes that
outworn fiction, the stage Irishman; in _Major Barbara_ he exposes
the evils of charity; in _The Doctor's Dilemma_ medical quackery is
the target for his ridicule. All this he does in the most fantastic
and variable forms--farce, melodrama, burlesque, extravaganza,
comedy, allegory--any one, but usually a diverting combination and
succession of these forms. In fact, he has almost succeeded in
inventing a new form of drama. This second characteristic of Shaw's
plays, as Professor Hale has remarked, is almost a note of Shaw's
dramaturgy.[216] His plays are frequently fantastic criticisms of
life, cast in the most photographically realistic form. In the guise
of severely natural transcripts of life, many of his plays, at bottom,
are critical judgments of humanity on a satiric plane of pure fantasy.
If neo-realism is “merely the presentation of the ultimate facts of
life in any way you like,” then Bernard Shaw is the high-priest of
neo-realism. In him we discern the marvellous versatility of the modern
critic, capable of making himself at home in any nationality and in any
age. But whether he is giving us an Offenbachian Egypt, a comic-opera
Bulgaria, a melodramatic America, or an imaginary Morocco, the result
is the same: a portrayal of human nature, a criticism of life,
penetrating, engaging, true. As Dr. Max Meyerfeld, the German champion
of Wilde, has tersely put it, Bernard Shaw possesses the supreme
faculty of the critic: “_in fremden Seelengehäuse hineinzuschlupfen_.”
Shaw spent nearly four years of his life continuously in saying to
British dramatists, “That's not the way to do it.” He has spent a
considerable part of his life in the last eighteen years in saying
to the world, by concrete and constructive achievement, “This is the
way to do it.” Bernard Shaw is to be reckoned as one of the most
suggestive and certainly the most brilliant of all the critics of the
modern British stage, understanding the word critic in its broadest
sense. His prime distinction consists not only in the cleverness of
his critical attacks upon the stage, past and present, but also in the
notable effort he has made, by actually writing plays, to elevate its
plane. Every phase of his activities as dramatic critic and dramatic
author has been vital with the force of powerful originality. His
_feuilletons_ in the _Saturday Review_ easily won him the title of
the most brilliant of contemporary British journalistic critics. If
he did not set a precedent, he almost rediscovered a lost art in
writing those masterpieces of egotistical, combative, polemical,
controversial criticism, the prefaces, appendices and epilogues to his
plays. A genuine contribution to dramaturgy is his innovation of ample
stage-directions so-called: penetrating character sketches of places
as well as people, revelative hints to the actor, brief clarifying
essays to elucidate each dramatic situation. His effort to make plays
readable, to write literature instead of specifications, is worthy
of emulation, and eventually his method, in certain modified forms,
will doubtless be generally adopted. His practice of casting fantastic
situations in rigidly realistic form strikes quite a novel note in
dramaturgy despite Shaw's oft-repeated assertion that, after all, he is
a very old-fashioned playwright.
FOOTNOTES:
[210] Almost all of Bernard Shaw's plays have been produced at the
most distinguished and artistic theatres of German Europe. In gaining
the German stage, he won a leading position in world-drama. Compare,
for example, the statement of Herr Carl Hagemann in his recent book
_Aufgaben des Modernen Theaters_: “Neben den anerkannten Vertretern
der Bühne der Lebenden (Ibsen, Hauptmann, Schnitzler und andere--im
Musikdrama: Wagner), müssen auch die Jüngeren und Jüngsten erschienen
(alle die Wedekind, Hoffmannsthal, Vollmoeller, Eulenberg, Wilde,
Shaw, Strindberg--im Musikdrama Strauss, Schillings, Humperdinck,
Weingartner, Pfitzner, Blech, Siegfried Wagner).” Hermann Bahr recently
said that a Shaw _première_ is as great an event in Berlin as a
Hauptmann _première_.
[211] The following characterization closely follows his own words in
_Mainly about Myself_, preface to _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_,
Vol. I.
[212] Cf. _Shaw on Stage Directions_, by William Archer, in the _Daily
News_, December 28th, 1901.
[213] In Herr Siegfried Trebitsch's translations of Shaw's plays into
German is found the explicit division into scenes.
[214] _Ibsen_, by G. Bernard Shaw, in the _Clarion_, June 1st, 1906.
Also published in _Die Neue Rundschau_, December, 1906.
[215] “About the plays of Shaw,” writes Hermann Bahr, “we are never
quite sure in what category they belong, whether they are farces,
comedies, or plays: for they summon death and the devil, threaten the
hero's life and happiness, and, in the midst of the greatest danger,
indulge in such audacious wit that we are not always sure whether
to shudder or to laugh. By degrees, however, it dawns upon us that
this has happened to us once before, namely, in life itself, which
so intermingles hope and despair, the previsions of destiny and the
absurdities of chance, necessity and free will, law and whim, favour
and spite, that it is peculiarly the experience of our time to question
whether our existence be tragic, against which view our daily life
warns us; or a senseless jest, to which our pride will never submit; or
a pleasant, disturbed dream, which, again, is too weighty, too terrible
a burden for our consciousness. This very uncertainty in the elements
of our primitive feelings, Shaw expresses with a mad, malicious joy.
Indeed, one might say, first and foremost, that Shaw is the poet of our
uncertainty.” _Rezensionen. Wiener Theater, 1901-3_, by Hermann Bahr:
article, _Bernard Shaw_.
[216] _Dramatists of To-Day_, by E. E. Hale, Jr.: article, _Bernard
Shaw_.
THE DRAMATIST
“The function of comedy is nothing less than the destruction of
old-established morals.”--_Meredith on Comedy_, by G. B. Shaw,
in the _Saturday Review_, March 27th, 1897.
CHAPTER XIV
There can be no new drama, as Mr. Stuart-Glennie has pointed out,
without a new philosophy. Drama can never be the same again since
Ibsen has lived. The drama of the future, in Shaw's view, can never be
anything more than the play of ideas.
Whether as yet accurately formulated in standard works of dramatic
criticism or not, the fact remains that a clear and demarcative line
of division runs across the drama of to-day. On one side of this line
falls that vast majority of plays--serious drama, comedy, melodrama,
farce--which accord more or less rigidly with the established canons
and authoritative traditions of dramatic art. On the other side falls
the persistently crescent minority of plays which break away from
the old conventions and set up new precedents for formulation by the
Freytag of the future. In the first class are found those works of art
which are founded upon emotion, live solely in and for the dramatic
moment, and treat of the universal themes of time and age, character
and destiny, life and death. They receive their impulse from eternal
and enduring, rather than from topical or transitory, aspects of
human life; and draw their inspiration as much--if not more--from the
literature of the past as from the human pageant of the present. In
the second class are found those works which start into life through
the quickening touch of the contemporary, which seek an interpretation
of society through the illuminative, transmutative intermediaries
of all that is newest, most vitally fecund, most prophetic in the
science, sociology, art and religion of to-day; and which endeavour,
through faithful portraiture of the present, to detect and reveal the
traits and qualities of human nature in its permanent and immutable
aspects. The authors of such works find their themes chiefly in the
crucial instances of to-day, the conflict of humanity with current
institutions, of human wills with existent circumstances, and they have
for their end a humanitarian ideal: the exposure of civic abuse, the
redress of social wrong, and the regeneration, redemption and reform
of society--not less than artistic fidelity to fact, satiric unmasking
of human folly, and veritistic embodiment of human passion. To the one
class belong Shakespeare, Calderon, Schiller, Rostand; to the other,
Charles Reade, Ibsen, Gorki, Brieux. It is a fundamental characteristic
of Bernard Shaw that he belongs to the second class--in this respect he
is sealed of the tribe of Rousseau, Dumas _fils_, Zola and Tolstoy.
Through the powerful social thrust of modern art there has forged to
the front a new and disquieting force. As an isolated phenomenon, this
has occasionally made its appearance in the past; but as a distinct
genus it may justly be regarded as a creation of the new social order.
To scoff at, rather than to study, to dismiss cavalierly rather than
to examine conscientiously, this new force, were as short-sighted
and senseless as to deny its existence. We are in duty bound to
consider and to weigh, carefully and critically, the claims of this
“dramatist of the future” as opposed to the classic virtues of the
dramatist working frankly in the manner of tradition. The dramatist
who conforms to popular and critical standards is an artist facile
in revealing either character in action or action in character,
invariable in interpreting life from the side of the emotions, and
resolute in imaging drama as a true conflict of wills--in a word,
the artist gifted with what the French so aptly term _la doigté du
dramaturge_. He recognizes the drama as the most impersonal of the
arts, and sedulously devotes himself to the realization of Victor
Hugo's dictum that dramatic art consists in being somebody else.
On the other hand, the new type of dramatist--the dramatist of the
future, if you will--is no less an artist than the other; his primal
distinction is his demand for that large independence of rules and
systems which Turgenev posited as the indispensable requisite of great
art. Just as Zola enlarged the conception of the function of the novel,
sublimating it into a powerful and far-reaching instrument for social
and moral propagandism, so this new dramaturgic iconoclast demands the
stage as an instrumentality for the exposition, diffusion, and wide
dissemination of his views and theories--upon standards of morality,
rules of conduct, codes of ethics, and philosophies of life. With him
there is no question of importing the methods of the Blue Book into the
drama; nor would he, in any broad sense, idly shirk what Walter Pater
terms the responsibility of the artist to his material. He accepts the
natural limitations, not the mechanical restrictions, of his art; he
does not seek to appropriate the privileges, while refusing to shoulder
the responsibilities, of his medium. His distinction arises from the
discovery of the hackneyed, but ever alarming and heretical truth, that
life is greater than art. For art's sake alone he refuses to exist,
with strange perversity insisting that he lives not for the sake of
art, but for the sake of humanity.
In reply to the question: “Should social problems be freely dealt
with in the drama?” Shaw characteristically said: “Suppose I say yes,
then, vaccination being a social question, and the Wagnerian music
drama being the one complete form of drama in the opinion of its
admirers, it will follow that I am in favour of the production of a
Jennerian tetralogy at Bayreuth. If I say no, then, marriage being a
social question, and also the theme of Ibsen's _A Doll's House_, I
shall be held to condemn that work as a violation of the canons of
art.” As a matter of fact, Shaw believes that every social question
furnishes material for drama--the conflict of human feeling with
circumstances--since institutions are themselves circumstances. On the
other hand, every drama by no means involves a social question, since
human feeling may be in conflict with circumstances which are not
institutions. The limitation of drama with a social question for motive
is that, ordinarily, it cannot outlive the solution of that question.
It is true that some of the best and most popular plays are dramatized
sermons, pamphlets, satires, or Blue Books: Gilbert's _Trial by Jury_,
a satire on breach of promise; Sheridan's _School for Scandal_, a
dramatic sermon; Reade's _Never Too Late to Mend_, a dramatic pamphlet;
and so on. The greatest dramatists, however, abjure political and
social themes, rooting their dramas in the firm soil of human nature
and elemental feeling. The reason for this is that, as a rule, social
questions are too temporal, too transient to move the great poet to
the mightiest efforts of his imagination. Shaw maintains that the
general preference of dramatists for subjects in which the conflict is
between man and his apparently inevitable and eternal, rather than his
political and temporal, circumstances, is due in the vast majority of
cases to the dramatist's political ignorance, and in a few--Goethe and
Wagner, for example--to the comprehensiveness of their philosophy.
The era of the drama of pure feeling, in Shaw's opinion, is now
past. Every great social question, owing to the huge size of modern
populations and the development of the Press, takes on the character
of a world-problem. _Les Misérables_ is the pure product of our epoch;
Zola is the colossal champion of social justice and social reform,
Ibsen the arch-enemy of social, as well as moral, abuse. William
Morris left house decoration for propagandism; Ruskin resigned _Modern
Painters_ for modern pamphleteering; Carlyle began by studying German
culture and ended with railing against English social crime. The poets
are following Shelley as political and social agitators, the drama is
becoming an arena for discussion, because the machinery of government
is becoming so criminally tardy in its settlement of the perpetually
increasing number of social questions: the poet must put his shoulder
to the wheel. “The hugeness and complexity of modern civilizations
and the development of our consciousness of them by means of the
Press,” Mr. Shaw maintains, “have the double effect of discrediting
comprehensive philosophies by revealing more facts than the ablest man
can generalize, and at the same time intensifying the urgency of social
reforms sufficiently to set even the poetic faculty in action on their
behalf. The resultant tendency to drive social questions on to the
stage, and into fiction and poetry, will eventually be counteracted
by improvements in social organization which will enable all prosaic
social questions to be dealt with satisfactorily long before they
become grave enough to absorb the energies which claim the devotion of
the dramatist, the story-teller, and the poet.”[217]
Shaw has placed on record his belief that subjects such as age,
love, death, accident, personality, abnormal greatness of character,
abnormal baseness of character give drama a permanent and universal
interest independent of period and place, and will keep a language
alive long after it has passed out of common use. It is not the drama
of profound and elemental human feeling against which Shaw rails, but
the drama designed solely for the obsession of the senses. His most
vehement attack is directed against plays pleasurably appealing to
animal passions and sensual appetites. To Bernard Shaw, as Benjamin de
Casseres has indelicately expressed it, romantic love is lust dressed
in Sunday clothes. The voluptuous appeal of the romantic drama is
utterly abhorrent to him. The flaccid sentimentalities, the diluted
sensualities of the modern plays which he dubs aphrodisiacs, totally
fail to impose on him. Sitting at such plays, he says, we do not
believe: we make believe. His own plays, he has spared no pains to tell
us, are built “to induce, not voluptuous reverie, but intellectual
interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane concern.... The drama of
pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright; it has been
conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts
seem cold and tame.... The attempt to produce a genus of opera without
music--and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been
driving at for a long time past without knowing it--is far less hopeful
than my own determination to accept problem as the normal material of
the drama.”[218]
Cervantes abolished chivalry; let us have done with it, is Shaw's
insistent clamour. Romance died with Schopenhauer; let sentiment expire
with Shaw. “The thing that Mr. Shaw calls romance,” says Mr. Gilbert
Chesterton, “is simply the fullness of life, the boiling over of the
pot of existence. Things are so good in general that men have, in
order to keep pace with the great cataract of beneficence, to call them
good in particular. This great and ancient tide of exultation, which
makes the tree green, the sunset splendid, the woman beautiful, the
flag a thing to be saved at any cost, is, of course, a fact as square
and solid as a beefsteak or St. Paul's Cathedral.... But Mr. Bernard
Shaw has, for all practical purposes, denied the existence of this
elemental tendency, and it is not, therefore, strange that he finds the
world a moon-struck and half-witted place.”[219] In his plays, indeed,
Shaw does not sound these deep and eternal notes of the human symphony.
He has fallen into the curious error of confounding contempt for
romance with denial of its existence. It is all very well to deplore
the eternal idealization of the sexual instinct; it is a totally
different matter to represent life as devoid of the ecstasies and
raptures of lovers, the pangs of despised love, the tyranny of romantic
passion.
Temperamentally and philosophically, Shaw is the very antithesis of
the romantic. He has consistently sought to reveal and exalt the
creative forces in life and art; to awaken the individual to alerter
consciousness and to sharpen his preference for actuality over
illusion, for reality over appearance. To that romance which seeks to
mask the facts of life with the roseate mists of sentiment, the golden
halo of illusion, Shaw has proved an inveterate foe. Upon Nordau in
his philistine and romantic struggle to uphold a hypothetical standard
of normality and to pollute those clear streams of creative energy in
art to which we owe the masterpieces of our epoch--upon Nordau Shaw
retorted with such splendid force and energy that no one who realizes
the issues involved can withhold his gratitude for that triumphant
service to the creative spirit of art and of humanity.
One of Bernard Shaw's fundamental claims to attention consists in his
effort toward the destruction, not only of romance, but of all the
false ideals and illusions which obsess the soul of man. He has assumed
the function of tearing the mask of idealism from the face of fact.
And yet it is a mark of his catholicity of view, that in his attack
upon illusions he is neither so blind nor so narrow as not to realize
their far-reaching and oftentimes beneficent effect. Thus he says:
[Illustration: =George Bernard Shaw.=]
_From a photo by Histed & Co._
_42, Baker Street, W._
“Suppress that phase of human activity which consists in the
pursuit of illusions, and you suppress the greatest force in
the world. Do not suppose that the pursuit of illusions is a
vain pursuit: on the contrary, an illusion can no more exist
without reality than a shadow without an object. Unfortunately
the majority of men are so constituted that reality repels,
while illusions attract them.”
With acute psychologic insight, Shaw draws the distinction between
two classes of illusions: those which flatter and those which are
indispensable. By flattering illusions he understands those which
encourage us to make efforts to attain things which we do not know
how to appreciate in their simple reality; either they reconcile us
to our lot, or else to actions we are obliged to take contrary to the
dictates of conscience. These are, indeed, deplorable consequences
in the eyes of the humanitarian meliorist who believes that to be
reconciled to one's lot is the worst fate that can befall mankind, and
who once said that the one real tragedy in life is the being used by
personally-minded men for purposes which you yourself recognize to be
base.
The _métier_ of Bernard Shaw is the destruction, not of the
indispensable illusions which support the social structure and
ultimately make for the uplift of humanity, but of those treacherously
flattering illusions which ensnare men in the toils of an existence for
which they have not the requisite passion, courage, faith, endurance
and self-restraint. “In my plays,” Shaw wrote in the Vienna _Zeit_,
“you will not be teased and plagued with happiness, goodness and
virtue, or with crime and romance, or, indeed, with any senseless
thing of that sort. My plays have only one subject: life; and only
one attribute: interest in life.”[220] It is a mistake of the German
dramatic critic, Heinrich Stümcke, to aver that the quintessence of
Shaw is _nil admirari_. It would be far nearer the truth to say that he
wonders at everything in this demented, moon-struck world. The law of
contrasts is the _motif_ of his art. He is never so brilliant as in the
portrayal of opposites.
With the transcendent egotism of the genius, he unhesitatingly claims
to see more clearly than humanity at large, to have ever fought
illusion, denied the ideal, and scorned to call things by other than
their real names.[221] Thus we see him always in search of what Walter
Pater was fond of calling _la vraie vérité_, challenging the old
formulas with the new ideas, transvaluing moral values with Nietzschean
fervour, and bidding humanity stand from behind its artificial
barriers of custom, law, religion and morality, and dare to speak and
live the truth. In his capacity of realistic critic of contemporary
civilization, he is neither surprised nor confounded to encounter
scepticism on all hands. Indeed, he is wise enough to expect it, since
he has observed that, when reality at last presents itself to men
nourished on dramatic illusions, they have lost the power to recognize
it.
Bernard Shaw, as Alfred Kerr has put it, is a distinct ethical gain
for our generation. His prime characteristic as a propagandist--and
his deficiency as a dramatist--is found in his assertion that the
quintessential function of comedy is the destruction of old-established
morals. Hence it is that his plays are conceived in a militant
spirit--in the Molièresque key of _Les Précieuses Ridicules_, or the
Ibsenic key of _An Enemy of the People_. His drama may roughly be
defined as the conflict of the Shavian _Ausschauung_ with conventional
dogma. Like Brieux, he has ingeniously employed the drama as a means
of giving lectures. He frankly confesses that his object is to make
people uncomfortable, to make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
“Molière and I are much alike,” he once remarked to me; “we both attack
pedantry.”[222] Shaw does not wish to drain the drama of all feeling;
he merely wishes to make feeling subsidiary to logic. He regards the
portrayal of emotion, not as an end in itself, but as an incentive to
thought. “You cannot witness _A Doll's House_ without _feeling_,” he
once said, “and, as an inevitable consequence, thinking.” He wishes
to set up, in the minds of his audience, a train of reflections and
meditations which may alter their own lives, which may influence the
whole world. For, as Emerson says, “To think is to act.” Shaw's object
is to create a true drama of ideas, having for its normal material
“problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact.” He
would have intellect predominate over sentiment; will engineered by
idea, and not unreasoning passion, the controlling factor. Bernard
Shaw is frequently charged with being devoid of feeling. Shaw is less
influenced by or concerned with mere personal feeling than anyone I
have ever known; but his whole being is vibrant with passion for the
welfare of society. If social pity is the underlying motive of the
later Russian novelists, social indignation seems to be the guiding
principle of Bernard Shaw. To him, social thought has become a genuine
passion.
The quintessence of the Shavian drama is the Shavian philosophy.
Shaw's theatre may be defined as an effort to depict naked instincts
upon the stage; this is the meaning of his “scientific natural
history.” He has sought to project instinctive temperaments, alive
and potent, before our very eyes. The inspiring words of Zola at the
funeral of Edmond de Goncourt might well have served as the motto for
his principal figures: “Ah! to have intellectual courage! To tell the
truth and the whole truth, even if it cost one peace and friends;
never to consider any convention, to go to the end of one's thought,
careless of consequence. Nothing is rarer, nothing is finer, nothing
is grander.” Unhampered by such scrupulousness as that of Mark Twain,
who declared that it was immodest to tell the naked truth in the
presence of ladies, Shaw's leading characters are ever in quest of
truth and freedom. They seek truth in unflinching recognition of facts,
freedom in emancipation from slavery to the false idealism of romantic
convention. They are libertines, in the original and not the perverted
sense of the word, with judgment unbiased by traditional influence or
contemporary prejudice. They are natural, not so much in the sense of
being perfect replicas of contemporary men and women--for they are
often little more than personified aspects of Shavianism--as in the
sense of being in a state of nature in regard to whim, eccentricity,
fancy, impulse, passion. There is a sort of complex and advanced
juvenility about Shaw's characters; they are the _enfants gâtés_ of
modern drama. In them are concretely delineated the outlines of the
Shavian philosophy: “Duty is the thing one should never do,” “Virtue
consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it,”
“Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given
or taken in moral conflicts.” The difference between moral and right,
for these Shavians, is the difference between doing what you ought to
do and what you want to do. Shakespeare's “To thine own self be true”
is insufficient; the modern sociologist knows that it is imperative to
realize, not only what you are, but where you are. After studying the
possibilities, not the restrictions, of their environment, the Shavian
characters go straight ahead and do what they choose. Shaw outranks
Ibsen himself in the individualistic injunction “Live your own life.”
In his own admirable way, Shaw has given us a succinct exposition of
his conception of the Shavian drama. Asked if he wrote plays to make
fun of people, Shaw replied, more in sorrow than in anger:
“People talk all this nonsense about my plays because they
have been to the theatre so much that they have lost their
sense of the unreality and insincerity of the romantic drama.
They take stage human nature for real human nature, whereas,
of course, real human nature is the bitterest satire on stage
human nature. The result is that when I try to put real human
nature on the stage they think that I am laughing at them. They
flatter themselves enormously, for I am not thinking of them
at all. I am simply writing natural history very carefully
and laboriously; and they are expecting something else. I
can imagine a Japanese who had ordered a family portrait of
himself, and expected it to be in the Japanese convention as
to design, being exceedingly annoyed if the artist handed him
a photograph, however artistic, because it was like him in a
natural way. He would accuse the photographer of making fun of
him and of having his tongue in his cheek.
“But there is a deeper reason for this attitude of mind.
People imagine that actions and feelings are dictated by
moral systems, by religious systems, by codes of honour and
conventions of conduct which lie outside the real human will.
Now it is a part of my gift as a dramatist that I know that
these conventions do not supply them with their motives. They
make very plausible _ex post facto_ excuses for their conduct;
but the real motives are deep down in the will itself.
“And so an infinite comedy arises in everyday life from the
contrast between the real motives and the alleged artificial
motives; and when the dramatist refuses to be imposed upon, and
forces his audience to laugh at the imposture, there is always
a desperate effort to cover up the scandal and save the face
of the conventional by the new convention that whoever refuses
to play the conventional game is a cynic and a satirist, a
_farceur_, a person whom no one takes seriously.”[223]
The supreme difficulty in any criticism of Bernard Shaw as dramatist is
to draw the many fine distinctions between his critical expositions of
his dramatic system and the actual qualities of the dramas themselves.
It is primarily incumbent upon the interpreter of Shaw to indicate
with sufficient clearness the discrepancy between theory and practice,
between purpose and performance. No objection need be raised to Shaw's
definitions. “Drama is no mere setting up of the camera to Nature,”
he says: “it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between
Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.” But what is
one to make of Sir Charles Wyndham's assertion that Shaw's dramatic
works are wonderful intellectual studies, but not plays? The dramas are
undoubtedly manufactured after the usual pattern, with divisions called
acts; figures like people walk back and forth and engage each other in
conversation; the mechanical illusion is complete. What is it, then,
that gives an air of unreality to all this mimic show?
Bernard Shaw possesses in rich measure the genius of the
stage-director, the pliability and suppleness of the critic of modern
civilization. The effects he produces, quite often, are tremendous. But
capitally and congenitally, Shaw is lacking in that quality ordinarily
recognized as natural dramatic genius. In his plays we look almost
in vain for those crucial emotional conjunctures, those climacteric
soul-crises, which dramatic critics announce to be the criteria of
authentic drama--the _scène à faire_ of a Sarcey. Just as Oscar Wilde
may be said to have invented the comedy of conversation, so Bernard
Shaw may be said to have invented the drama of discussion. The tendency
to prolixity and discursiveness has steadily grown upon him; at last
he has thrown off all disguise and deliberately set to work to create
a dramatic system based on dialectic. Two noteworthy features of
his career are his attacks upon conventional cant and Shakespearean
rhetoric. And all the time, he has been creating, for his own part,
both a Shavian cant and a Shavian rhetoric. “I find that the surest way
to startle the world with daring innovations and originalities,” he
recently said, “is to do exactly what playwrights have been doing for
thousands of years; to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical
speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift
characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.” The defining
characteristic of his plays is their argumentative and controversial
character. They are expository lectures, in dramatic form, on the
Shavian philosophy. Mr. Archer once said that Shaw's keen and subtle
intellect has built for itself a world of its own, in which it sits
apart, inaccessible; this world is not the real earth, but
“Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,
Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer.”
Instead of the indispensable conflict of wills, we often seem to
have merely a war of wits, in which the cleverest dialectician wins.
Aristophanes and Shaw have certainly one point in common: the plays
of both are dramatized debates. Instead of touching each other's
emotions, Shaw's characters often seem merely to arouse each other's
combative interest. Just as Victor Hugo gives a passion apiece to
each of his characters and lets them fight it out, so Shaw gives a
philosophy apiece to each of his characters and lets them argue it
out. His comedies exhibit with tremendous comic irony the exposure of
non-Shavians by Shavians. One day Huxley in jest described Herbert
Spencer's idea of a tragedy as “a deduction killed by a fact.” In a
moderate, a partial, sense, this might serve as a just criticism of the
theatre of Bernard Shaw.
There is a certain fanciful sort of resemblance between a play of
Shaw's and a meeting of his own Borough Council: the meeting is
called to order, there is argument and discussion _pro_ and _con_, a
resolution is moved, seconded, carried. Shaw is positively judicial in
his fairness, even to the extent of creating the impression that his
characters are vocalized points of view. With consummate shrewdness,
Shaw has fully realized that if the dramatist take sides in a dramatic
wrangle, he is lost. A sense of the most absolute fairness and
impartiality pervades and dominates his plays. Every character has
his say without let or hindrance; and the whole play is signalized by
the “honesty of its dialectic.” Shaw does not disclaim the fullest
responsibility for the opinions of all his characters, pleasant and
unpleasant. “They are all right from their several points of view;
and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also.
This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as
an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to
them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However
that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who argues with them can
possibly be a dramatist, or, indeed, anything else that turns upon a
knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespeare
had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.”[224]
This quality of anxious self-explanation in his characters, this
“Let me make clear to you my philosophy of life,” produces upon the
reader and spectator two distinct impressions: first an “overwhelming
impression of coldness and inhuman rationalism”; and, second, the
impression that the characters are replicas or mouthpieces of Shaw
himself. The resemblance is still further enhanced through the
instrumentality of one of Shaw's most diverting traits as a humorist:
his idiosyncrasy for self-mockery and self-puffery. There is nothing,
not even himself, about which Shaw will not jest; for, to use an
Oscarism, he respects life too deeply to discuss it seriously. He
is a master of that art of burlesque which, in Brunetière's harsh
characterization, consists “in the expansion of the ego in the joyous
satisfaction of its own vulgarity.” One of the truest words, spoken in
jest, is Shaw's confession that the main obstacle to the performance of
his plays has been--himself!
In contradistinction to the classic formula--that the drama should
be the most impersonal of the arts--Shaw's drama may be defined as a
revelation of the personality of Bernard Shaw. “We must agree with
him,” concludes M. Filon, “and accept--or reject--the dramatic work of
Mr. Shaw as it is, namely, as the expression of the ideas, sentiments
and fantasies of Mr. Shaw.”[225]
In fine, I should say that Bernard Shaw is a striking instance of the
unusual combination of critical and creative faculties. Sometimes the
dramatist, he is always the critic. While Shaw can make one laugh,
it is seldom that he can make one weep. He unites within himself the
power both to construct and to dissect. With Shaw--the _Richter und
Dichter_ of German characterization--rationality precedes creation.
His richly constructive fancy seldom imagines what his cooler reason
has not already perceived. In his plays, there is scarcely a hint of
what he himself somewhere described as “the stirring of the blood, the
bristling of the fibres, the transcendent, fearless fury which makes
romance so delightful.” Shaw is always perfectly aware of himself;
Coventry Patmore would have denied him the title of true genius. As
someone has cleverly said: “Shaw's eye has never yet in a fine frenzy
rolled.” If he had ever listened to the horns of elfland faintly
blowing, he would doubtless have said afterwards that Kosleck of Berlin
could have done it better. If he had ever heard the morning stars
sing together and the sons of God shout for joy, the experience would
probably have elicited the coolly critical remark that the _ensemble_
effect was not as good as at Bayreuth, and that the shouting was not as
ear-splitting as the “wilful bawling” of the De Reszkes.
This coolly critical attitude, which Shaw manages to transfer to
his characters, gives them the appearance of beings peculiarly
rationalistic and bloodless. In their veins, as Mr. Archer once said
of the leading characters in _Widowers' Houses_, there seems to flow
a sort of sour whey. Shaw has almost succeeded in eliminating the Red
Corpuscle from Art.
His characters seem to be devoid of animal passions; their pallid
ratiocinations can more aptly be described as vegetable passions.
[Illustration: =Shaw's Present Home in London,
10, Adelphi Terrace, W.C.=]
_Alvin Langdon Coburn._
In the case of Shaw, I often receive the impression that inspiration
is replaced by excogitation, imagination by what Rossetti called
fundamental brain-work. Lessing's phrase, “dramatic algebra,” is not a
wholly inappropriate term for his plays. A partial explanation of this
phenomenon may perhaps be found in the speech I heard him deliver at
the Vedrenne-Barker dinner. “One hears a lot of talk these days about
the New School of Shavian playwrights--Granville Barker, St. John
Hankin, and the rest. I sincerely hope they will not try to imitate
my style and method. There is only one Bernard Shaw, and that one is
quite sufficient. I find a striking analogy between the case of the old
Italian masters and myself. When they began to work, they found that
the human form had been neglected and ignored. Forthwith they began
to paint works which appeared to be anatomical studies, so emphasized
was the figure. I found myself in much the same situation when I first
began to write for the stage. I found that the one thing which had been
neglected and ignored by British dramatists was human nature. So I
began to put human nature barely and nakedly upon the stage, which so
startled the public that they declared that my characters were utterly
unnatural and untrue to life. But I have gone on and on exposing human
nature, more and more in each succeeding play. If my imitators continue
to reveal human nature so ruthlessly, I am afraid I shall have done
more harm than good.”[226] The greatest artist, according to Shaw's own
definition, is “he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying
works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been
perceived, succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in
adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.” It
is a mark of Shaw's high purpose, of the sociologic significance of the
man, that he employs art merely as one of a number of means by which
he can put his ideas into effect. Doubtless because of his belief that
philosophic content is the touchstone of real greatness in art--that
Bunyan is greater than Shakespeare, Blake than Lamb, Ibsen than
Swinburne, Shaw than Pinero--his plays have something of the rigidity
of theses. Shaw's plays not infrequently suffer from the malady of the
_à priori_. Sometimes they are even stricken down with what Wagner
called the incurable disease of thought.
Shakespeare created a drama of human nature in which the actions of the
characters are their own commentary. Maeterlinck created a drama of
shadow in which the characters are most articulate in their silence.
Shaw has created a drama of discussion in which his characters have
not the strength to hold their tongues. Shakespeare's characters are
self-unconscious characters; Maeterlinck's, subconscious; Shaw's,
self-conscious. Mr. Holbrook Jackson remarks that “Shaw's drama is
the only consistently religious drama of the day--it is as relentless
in its pursuit of an exalted idea as were the ancient Moralities and
Mysteries.” But Mr. Jackson fails to draw the conclusion that, for
this reason, Shaw's characters often take on the guise of intellectual
abstractions. The Frenchman calls them _hommes-idées_; the German,
_Gedankenpuppen_. Shaw's plays are pitched on a plane of transcendental
realism. His supreme gift as a dramatist, someone has wisely said,
is to produce an impression of life more real than reality itself.
His power of penetrative insight at times appears to be something
almost like divination. The soul of his wit is laconic brevity and
marvellous astuteness in character exposure. His dialogue is the most
entertaining, the most diverting, that has been written since the days
of Sheridan. He has succeeded in interpreting life with so precise
and so illuminating a medium that he frequently transcends the bounds
of plausibility, probability, or even possibility, without the lapse
being noted. Many, perhaps the majority, of his leading characters,
operate upon a plane of fantasy; the psychological impossibility of
their actions is concealed by the intellectual credibility of their
ideas. They appear as the mouthpieces of his theories, as replicas
of his personality, or as changing aspects of his own temperament.
Or else, in the later plays, they appear as embodied forces of
Nature, as allegorical personifications of modern Moralities. Shaw
is constitutionally opposed to “holding the kodak up to Nature”; he
believes in making the chaos of Nature intelligible by intelligent
choice of material. His _métier_, then, is interpretation, not
observation. As a consequence, he gives us life interpreted in strict
accordance with Shavian sophistication. In large part, he depicts human
beings not as they really are, but as they might be supposed to be if
animated by the Shavian philosophy modified to suit the needs of their
individual temperaments.
Quite a number of Shaw's leading characters, and the majority of the
subsidiary characters, are marvellously natural studies in contemporary
psychology. Unhampered by the _impedimenta_ of Shavianism, they move
freely and naturally along the beaten paths of humanity. Now and then,
we are whisked away to the realm of fantasy; or else we have only
to shut our eyes and open our ears to hear Shaw's ironical laughter
echo through their speeches. But, on the whole, we are not deceived
in believing that Bernard Shaw's plays are all stages in his search
for the essential reality of things. Along the pathway, he has left
many vivid, many brilliant, many comprehensible, some complex, and all
essentially modern figures. Sartorius, kind-hearted and inhumane; the
unwomanly “womanly woman,” Julia; Mrs. Warren, reptilianly fascinating
and repulsive, her mother-love slain by the relentless sword of her
profession; Crofts, upholding a hideously immoral standard of honour
before our sickened gaze; Bluntschli, genial, droll expositor of
the prose and common sense of life; Marchbanks, anæmic, asthenic--a
visionary penetrating to the truth beneath all disguises and learning
the lesson of life in the black hour of disillusionment; Morell, the
stupid, good-natured, self-centred parson; Candida, the maternal
_clairvoyante_; Dudgeon, the fascinating dare-devil, resolute in
fulfilment of the law of his own nature; Judith, the sentimental and
_larmoyante_; Lady Cicely, ingenuous, tactful, feline, irresistible;
Cleopatra, subtly evolving from a kittenish minx into a tigerish and
vengeful tyrant; the boyish, energetic, humane Cæsar, large in humour
and in comic perception; Broadbent, the typical, stolid Englishman,
blunderingly successful because he doesn't know where he is going;
Keegan, the gentle and the bitter, _vox clamantis in deserto_,
interpreting a new trinity for the worship of the coming age; Sir
Patrick Cullen, quintessence of gruff and kindly common sense; the
immortal William, deferential and urbane; and how many more!--a group
of finely imagined, subtly conceived, _essentially_ real, if not always
credibly human, beings.
Shaw is a marvellous portrait painter, a Sargent in his insight into
human nature and into contemporary life. He is a wit of the very
first rank, a satirist to be classed with Voltaire, Renan and Anatole
France. The static drama he has created enlarges our conception of the
function of the drama. The new dramatic system of Shaw's creation, in
the words of M. Filon, subordinates the development of the sentimental
action to the painting of characters and the discussion of ideas. Like
Molière, Shaw has stamped his characters in the idea, and made of them
the necessary exponents of contemporary philosophy, the inevitable
interpreters of contemporary life.
Capitally and fundamentally, Bernard Shaw's drama is socially
deterministic. His characters are what they are, become what they
become, far less on account of heredity or ancestral influence than
on account of the social structure of the environment through which
their fate is moulded. Economist as well as moralist, Shaw attributes
paramount importance to the economic and political conditions of the
_régime_ in which his characters live and move and have their being.
His drama has its true origin in the conflict between the wills of his
characters and the social determinism perpetually at work to destroy
the freedom of their wills. The germ idea of his philosophy is rooted
in the effort to supplant modern social organization by Socialism
through the intermediary of the free operation of the will of humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[217] _The Problem Play: A Symposium (V.)_, by G. Bernard Shaw, in the
_Humanitarian_, May, 1895.
[218] _The Author's Apology_, Preface to the Stage Society's edition of
_Mrs. Warren's Profession_, p. xxii.
[219] _The Meaning of Mr. Bernard Shaw_, by G. K. Chesterton, in the
_Daily News_, October 30th, 1901.
[220] Prospectus of the Schiller-Theater, Berlin. _Vornehmlich über
mich selbst_, von Bernard Shaw. This “Plauderei” appeared in the
Vienna _Zeit_ in February, 1903, shortly before the production of
_Teufelskerl_ (_The Devil's Disciple_) in Vienna.
[221] The celebrated account Shaw once gave of his visit to an
ophthalmic surgeon clearly sets before us his conception of the
nature and value of his critical faculty: “He tested my eyesight
one evening, and informed me that it was quite uninteresting to him
because it was 'normal.' I naturally took this to mean that it was like
everybody else's; but he rejected this construction as paradoxical,
and hastened to explain to me that I was an exceptional and highly
fortunate person optically, 'normal' sight conferring the power of
seeing things accurately, and being enjoyed by only about ten per cent.
of the population, the remaining ninety per cent. being abnormal. I
immediately perceived the explanation of my want of success in fiction.
My mind's eye, like my body's, was 'normal'; it saw things differently
from other people's eyes, and saw them better.”--_Mainly About Myself_,
Preface to _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, Vol. I., p. 11.
[222] At various times, in essays published in Europe and in America,
I have called attention to the resemblance between Shaw and Molière,
dubbing Shaw the Molière of our time. Recently, M. Auguste Hamon
has made a detailed comparison of the two comic dramatists in the
_Nineteenth Century and After: Un Nouveau Molière_, July, 1908.
[223] _Our Saturday Talk.--VI._, Mr. Bernard Shaw, in the _Saturday
Westminster Gazette_, November 26th, 1904.
[224] _Man and Superman: Epistle Dedicatory to Arthur Bingham Walkley_,
p. xxvi.
[225] _M. Bernard Shaw et son Théâtre_, by Augustin Filon; _Revue des
Deux Mondes_, November 15th, 1905.
[226] Response to the toast: _The Authors of the Court Theatre_, by
G. Bernard Shaw, at the Vedrenne-Barker Dinner, Criterion Restaurant,
London, July 7th, 1907.
ARTIST AND PHILOSOPHER
“It was easy for Ruskin to lay down the rule of dying rather
than doing unjustly; but death is a plain thing, justice a
very obscure thing. How is an ordinary man to draw the line
between right and wrong otherwise than by accepting public
opinion on the subject; and what more conclusive expression of
sincere public opinion can there be than market demand? Even
when we repudiate that and fall back on our own judgment, the
matter gathers doubt rather than clearness. The popular notion
of morality and piety is to simply beg all the more important
questions in life for other people; but when these questions
come home to ourselves, we suddenly discover that the devil's
advocate has a stronger case than we thought: we remember
that the way of righteousness or death was the way of the
Inquisition; that hell is paved, not with bad intentions but
with good ones.”--An Essay on Modern Glove Fighting appended to
_Cashel Byron's Profession_.
CHAPTER XV
It is worthy of record that Bernard Shaw does not _claim_ to be a great
novelist, or a great dramatist, or a great critic. As Mr. Chesterton
says, Shaw is very dogmatic, but very humble. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once
wrote me that he does not _claim_ to be great: either he is or he
is not great, and that is an end of the matter! But it is highly
significant that Shaw does specifically claim to be a philosopher.
Shaw's philosophical ideas have generally been regarded by English
and American critics either as of undoubted European derivation, or
else as fantastic paradoxes totally unrelated to the existing body
of thought. “I urge them to remember,” Shaw remonstrates, “that
this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the rarest of
blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the philosophic
plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can make more
than a minute contribution to it.” Whilst it is undoubtedly true that
Shaw's philosophy has been partially shared in by many forerunners,
nevertheless, he has made his own “minute contribution” to the existing
body of thought. Bernard Shaw is an independent thinker and natural
moralist, with a clearly co-ordinated system of philosophy. Let us
critically endeavour, then, in the language of political economy, to
award Shaw his merited “rent of ability.”
Shaw's fundamental postulate is that morality is not a stagnant
quality, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever, but transitory and
evolutional. Morality flows: “What people call vice is eternal; what
they call virtue is mere fashion.” A celebrated French critic once
declared: “_La morale est purement géographique._” Shaw goes far
beyond this in the assertion that morality is a creature of occasion,
conditioned by circumstance. And why is it that morality comes to be
regarded as not in itself a fixed quantity, a solid substratum of
human consciousness, but a concomitant fluxion of civilization? It
is because, historically considered, progress connotes repudiation
of custom: social advance takes effect through the replacement of
old institutions by new ones. “Since every institution involves the
duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an
established duty at every turn.” History shows us a world strewn with
the wrecks of institutions whose laws, upheld for a time as fixed,
were eventually broken by the triumphant assertion of the crescent
will of man. This phenomenon is not to be confused with that in which
an institution is burst simply by the natural growth of the social
organism. The phenomenon of which we are speaking involves a deliberate
assertion of self-constituted authority on the part of the individual
in defiance of established and generally accepted customs.[227]
“The ideal is dead; long live the ideal!” is the epitome of all human
progress. It is the note of nineteenth century literature. For the
first time in history the devil began to get his due. Men ceased to be
always on the side of the angels; a new day was dawning, the day of
the saintly anarch, the _advocatus diaboli_. Shaw has given us a brief
history of the movement:
“Formerly, when there was a question of canonizing a pious
person, the devil was allowed an advocate to support his
claims to the pious person's soul. But nobody ever dreamt of
openly defending him as a much misunderstood and fundamentally
right-minded regenerator of the race until the nineteenth
century, when William Blake boldly went over to the other
side and started a devil's party. Fortunately for himself, he
was a poet, and so passed as a paradoxical madman instead of
a blasphemer. For a long time the party made little direct
progress, the nation being occupied with the passing of its
religion through the purifying fire of a criticism which did
at last smelt some of the grosser African elements out of
it, but which also exalted duty, morality, law and altruism
above faith; reared ethical societies; and left my poor old
friend the devil (for I, too, was a Diabolonian born) worse
off than ever. Mr. Swinburne explained Blake, and even went
so far as to exclaim: 'Come down and redeem us from virtue';
but the pious influences of Putney reclaimed him, and he is
now a respectable, Shakespeare-fearing man. Mark Twain emitted
some Diabolonian sparks, only to see them extinguished by
the overwhelming American atmosphere of chivalry, duty and
gentility. A miserable spurious Satanism, founded on the
essentially pious dogma that the Prince of Darkness is no
gentleman, sprang up in Paris, to the heavy discredit of the
true cult of the Son of the Morning. All seemed lost, when
suddenly the cause found its dramatist in Ibsen, the first
leader who really dragged duty, unselfishness, idealism,
self-sacrifice, and the rest of the anti-diabolic scheme to the
bar at which it had indicted so many excellent Diabolonians.
The outrageous assumption that a good man may do anything he
thinks right (which in the case of a _naturally_ good man
means, by definition, anything he likes), without regard to the
interests of bad men or of the community at large, was put on
its defence, and the party became influential at last.
“After the dramatist came the philosopher. In England, G. B.
S.; in Germany, Nietzsche.”[228]
The whole anarchistic spirit of our time is summed up in the words
of a character in one of Ibsen's plays: “The old beauty is no longer
beautiful; the new truth is no longer true.”
Every age has its dominant accepted ideas and forms; but, as Georg
Brandes has said: “besides these, it owns another whole class of quite
different ideas, which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air,
and are apprehended by the greatest men of the age as the results
which must now be arrived at.” The ideas of the evolutionary trend
of human ideals, of the triumphant hypocrisy of current morality,
of the necessity for challenging and repudiating the code of the
human herd were in the air: they were slowly being arrived at. We
hear Chamfort's contemptuous assertion: “_Il y a à parier que toute
idée publique--toute convention reçue--est une sottise; car elle a
convenue au plus grand nombre._” We see William Blake performing the
ceremony of the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_; the Pirate King in W. S.
Gilbert's _Pirates of Penzance_ repudiates _bourgeois_ respectability
in his reply to Frederic's urgent request to accompany him back to
civilization: “No, Frederic, it cannot be. I don't think much of our
profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively
honest. No, Frederic; I shall live and die a pirate king.” In _The
Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg_, Mark Twain posits a new reading of
the Lord's Prayer: “Lead us (not) into temptation”; he arraigns the
morality of custom in _Was It Heaven or Hell?_ Nietzsche works his
way, through the “outer fortifications, the garb and masquerade; the
occasional incrustation, petrification, dogmatization” of the ideal, to
a position beyond good and evil, from which he transvalues all moral
values.[229]
With Ibsen, the disciple as well as the master of his age, the
newer ideas gained currency through the medium of the drama. The
individualist Stockmann, in _An Enemy of the People_, preaches the
salutary sermon of the “saving remnant” in his passionate declamation:
“The majority is never right! That's one of the social lies a free,
thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who make up the majority in any
given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think all must agree
that the fools are in a terribly overwhelming majority all the world
over.... What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths that
are decrepit with age. When a truth is as old as that, then it's in a
fair way to become a lie.” Ibsen is one with Saint Augustine in the
belief that it matters not so much what we are as what we are becoming.
“Neither our moral conceptions nor our artistic forms,” he once said,
“have an eternity before them. How much in duty are we really bound to
hold on to? Who can afford me a guarantee that up yonder on Jupiter
two and two do not make five?” And at a dinner at the Grand Hotel,
Stockholm, he concretized this tenet of modern faith in the words: “It
has been asserted on various occasions that I am a pessimist. So I am
to this extent--that I do not believe human ideals to be eternal. But I
am also an optimist, for I believe firmly in the power of those ideals
to propagate and develop.” In like manner Zola declared that there was
always a contest between men of unconquerable temperaments and the
herd: “I am on the side of the temperaments, and I attack the herd.”
How fiercely Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx, Ruskin
and Carlyle, Morris and Wagner railed at all the orthodoxies, the
respectabilities and the ideals! Heine tilted against the Philistine,
“the strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of
the children of light,” with an _élan_ equalled only by the detestation
of Carlyle for the snobbery which he denominated “respectability in its
thousand gigs.” The literature of the age resounded with the “rattle of
twentieth century tumbrils.”
Nietzsche has declared that the good taste, the “honesty,” of a
psychologist consists nowadays, if in anything, in his opposing the
shamefully permoralized language by which as by a phlegm all modern
judging on men and things is covered. His aim must be to “re-discover”
the incarnate innocence in moralistic mendaciousness, to stagger the
complacency of the illuded, ever “holding aloft the banner of the
ideal,” to divorce the imagined life from the real. Mr. W. S. Gilbert
was the first modern English dramatist to satirize the morality of
custom; but his philosophy was a mere farcical masquerade and sham. “He
would put forward a paradox,” Shaw has justly observed, “which at first
promised to be one of those humane truths which so many modern men of
fine spiritual insight, from William Blake onward, have worded so as to
flash out their contradictions of some weighty rule of our systematized
morality, and would then let it slip through his fingers, leaving
nothing but a mechanical topsy-turvitude.”[230]
Bernard Shaw has identified the function of comedy with the destruction
of old-established morals. In play after play, from _Mrs. Warren's
Profession_ and _Arms and the Man_ to _The Devil's Disciple_ and _Man
and Superman_, he has mordantly and fiercely attacked that “inmost
feminism which delights in calling itself idealism,” that Philistine
respectability which vaunts itself on its “morality of custom,” and the
genuine British narrowness, with its humdrum conservatism, its slavery
to routine, its stupid distrust of new ideas and fear of bold thinking.
Like Ibsen, he is always an outpost thinker, having no tolerance for
conservatism--the attitude of “the little narrow-chested, short-winded
crew that lie in our wake.” He has lived in passionate defiance of the
precept:
“Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
The step from the premiss that morality is a variable function of
civilization to the conclusion that salvation lies alone in revolt was
inevitable. Historically considered, the stages in the growth of man's
spirit may be classified under three heads: Faith, Reason, Will. First
came the age of Faith: man accepted the precepts of the Bible as the
revelation of God's voice. Faith in the Bible became the criterion of
righteous intention, and for a time the authority of the Church reigned
supreme. After a while came the age of free-thought, of Reason; the
free-thinker begins to “find reasons for not doing what he does not
want to do; and these reasons seem to him to be far more binding on the
conscience than the precepts of a book of which the divine inspiration
cannot be rationally proved.” Faith was dethroned by Reason, and
rationalist “free-thinking” soon came to mean “syllogism worship with
rites of human sacrifice.”
The great error of the Rationalists is latent in Voltaire's reply to
the plea of the poetaster that he must live: “_Je n'en vois pas la
nécessité._” “The evasion was worthy of the Father of Lies himself,”
Shaw has it; “for Voltaire was face to face with the very necessity
he was denying--must have known, consciously or not, that it was the
universal postulate--would have understood, if he had lived to-day,
that since all human institutions are constructed to fulfil man's will,
and that his will is to live even when his reason teaches him to die,
logical necessity, which was the sort Voltaire meant (the other sort
being visible enough) can never be a motor in human action, and is, in
short, not necessity at all.” In the course of time came Schopenhauer
to re-establish the old theological doctrine that reason is no motive
power; that the true motive power in the world--otherwise life--is
will, and that the setting up of reason above will is a damnable error.
Shaw has warned us that acceptance of the metaphysics of
Schopenhauerism by no means involves endorsement of its philosophy.
To Shaw, the cardinal Rationalist error into which Schopenhauer fell
consisted in making happiness the test of the value of life. Shaw is
the most vigorous possible combatant of the pessimist conclusion that
life is not worth living, and that “the will which urges us to live
in spite of this is necessarily a malign torturer, the desirable
end of all things being the Nirvana of the stilling of the will, and
the consequent setting of life's sun 'into the blind cave of eternal
night.'” The keynote of the Shavian philosophy is _the pursuit of life
for its own sake. Life is realized only as activity that satisfies the
will: that is, as self-assertion. Every extension or intensification
of activity is an increase in life._ Quantity and quality of activity
measure the value of existence. Shaw has refused to acknowledge the
validity of the will of the official theologians, because their
God stands outside man and in authority above him. He accepted
Schopenhauer's view of the will as a “purely secular force of nature,
attaining various degrees of organization, here as a jelly-fish, there
as a cabbage, more complexly as an ape or a tiger, and attaining its
highest form, so far, in the human being.” This was Shaw's key to the
works of two great artists, Wagner and Ibsen, notably, _The Ring_ and
_Emperor and Galilean_.
It is the idlest nonsense to say of Shaw, in Oscar Wilde's phrase,
that he has the courage of other people's convictions. Shaw's most
conspicuous trait is his courage in challenging and defying other
people's convictions. Instead of clinging to the pessimism of
Schopenhauer, he has been bold enough to “drop the Nirvana nonsense,
the pessimism, the rationalism, the theology, and all the other
subterfuges to which we cling because we are afraid to look life
straight in the face and see in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law
or the deductions of reason, but the satisfaction of a passion in us
of which we can give no account.” Claiming for himself the faculty
of unilluded vision, he conceives it his mission to tear away the
veils with which we persist in hiding realities and to call things
by their true names, instead of the false names with which we are
content to dupe ourselves. Mr. Walkley once said: “Mr. Shaw takes
up the empty bladders of life, the current commonplaces, the cant
phrases, the windbags of rodomontade, the hollow conventions and the
sham sentiments; quietly inserts his pin, and the thing collapses with
a pop.” But Shaw regards this as a cheap job which any man might do
and which Mr. Walkley himself excels in. “It is not the bubbles and
bladders that require some tackling,” Mr. Shaw once observed to me; “it
is the solid brass that has to be assayed and proved to be base metal.”
In many places, in varying ways, Shaw has given pungent expression to
the opinion so well advanced in Meredith's words: “Our world is all
but a sensational world at present, in maternal travail of a soberer,
a braver, a bright-eyed.” The clarity of Shaw's vision has saved him
from the cheap crudeness of pessimism: unlike Ibsen, plenty of “sound
potatoes” have come under his observation. His position is clearly
expressed in his own words:
“Now to me, as a realist playwright, the applause of the
conscious, hardy pessimist is more exasperating than the abuse
of the unconscious, fearful one. I am not a pessimist at all.
It does not concern me that, according to certain ethical
systems, all human beings fall into classes labelled liar,
coward, thief, and so on. I am myself, according to these
systems, a liar, a coward, a thief, and a sensualist; and it is
my deliberate, cheerful and entirely self-respecting intention
to continue to the end of my life deceiving people, avoiding
danger, making my bargains with publishers and managers on
principles of supply and demand instead of abstract justice,
and indulging all my appetites, whenever circumstances commend
such actions to my judgment. If any creed or system deduces
from this that I am a rascal incapable on occasion of telling
the truth, facing a risk, forgoing a commercial advantage, or
resisting an intemperate impulse of any sort, then so much the
worse for the creed or system, since I have done all these
things, and will probably do them again. The saying, 'All have
sinned' is, in the sense in which it was written, certainly
true of all the people I have ever known. But the sinfulness
of my friends is not unmixed with saintliness: some of their
actions are sinful, others saintly. And here, again, if the
ethical system to which the classifications of saint and sinner
belong, involves the conclusion that a line of cleavage drawn
between my friends' sinful actions and their saintly ones will
coincide exactly with one drawn between their mistakes and
their successes (I include the highest and the widest sense of
the two terms), then so much the worse for the system; for the
facts contradict it. Persons obsessed by systems may retort:
'No; so much the worse for your friends'--implying that I must
move in a circle of rare blackguards; but I am quite prepared
not only to publish a list of friends of mine whose names would
put such a retort to open shame, but to take any human being,
alive or dead, of whose actions a genuinely miscellaneous
unselected dozen can be brought to light, to show that none
of the ethical systems habitually applied by dramatic critics
(not to mention other people) can verify their inferences.
As a realist dramatist, therefore, it is my business to get
outside these systems.... The fact is, though I am willing and
anxious to see the human race improved, if possible, still I
find that, with reasonably sound specimens, the more intimately
I know people the better I like them; and when a man concludes
from this that I am a cynic, and that he who prefers stage
monsters--walking catalogues of the systematized virtues--to
his own species, is a person of wholesome philanthropic tastes,
why, how can I feel toward him except as an Englishwoman feels
toward the Arab, who, faithful to _his_ system, denounces her
indecency in appearing in public with her mouth uncovered.”[231]
The destruction of the principle of alien authority carries with it the
necessity for the creation of the individual standard. The dethronement
of rationalism, be it observed, involves no repudiation of logic and
intellect as guides to everyday life. “Ability to reason accurately is
as desirable as ever, since it is only by accurate reasoning that we
can calculate our actions so as to do what we intend to do--that is, to
fulfil our will.” Instead of accepting the nude, anarchistic formula
of Maurice Barrés, for example, “_Fais ce que tu veux_,” Shaw may be
understood to enjoin: “Form your moral conscience and act as it directs
you.”[232]
A development in our moral views must first appear insane and
blasphemous, Shaw has time and again warned us, to people who are
satisfied, or more than satisfied, with the current morality. Henri
Beyle was for long, and still is, much misunderstood for the simple
reason that the characters he created evolve their own standard,
pursue their cherished ideals with unfaltering determination, and
brook no interference, make no compromise, until they have won and
established their self-respect. All the while insisting on the prudence
necessary to discover the way for the will, Shaw has unhesitatingly
taken the supreme step, realizing always that “Every step in morals
is made by challenging the validity of the existing conception of
perfect propriety of conduct.... Heterodoxy in art is at worst rated
as eccentricity or folly: heterodoxy in morals is at once rated as
scoundrelism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoundrelism, which
must, we are told, if successful, undermine society and bring us back
to barbarism after a period of decadence like that which brought
Imperial Rome to its downfall.”
The time comes, however, when the voice of instinctive temperament
makes itself heard and heeded. In the past the younger generation
waited, but with a divine impatience, until “they were old enough to
find their aspirations toward the fullest attainable activity and
satisfaction working out in practice very much as they have worked out
in the life of the race; so that the revolutionist at twenty-five, who
saw nothing for it but a clean sweep of all our institutions, found
himself, at forty, accepting and even clinging to them on condition
of a few reforms to bring them up to date.” To-day the younger
generation is loud in its demands, imperious in its insistence. They
are outspoken in their scepticism concerning the infallibility of their
parents, they insist that their “spiritual pastors and masters” speak
humanly, and not dogmatically, of morality, and are determined to try
all pontifical wisdom by the touchstone of experience. They formulate
their heresy as a faith, and Shaw is the arch-heretic of them all.
Ibsen would abolish the State and inaugurate a bloodless revolution:
a revolution of the spirit of man; Hauptmann poetizes the Nietzschean
ideal in _Die Versunkene Glocke_; Sudermann challenges the equity of
parental authority in _Heimat_. With all the appearance of profound
wisdom and abstract justice, Maeterlinck teaches that the preservation
of virtue and adherence to conventional moral standards may be the
quintessence of selfishness and egotism. Tolstoy preaches an impossible
ideal of celibacy, and Shaw would abolish marriage because it is the
“most licentious of human institutions.” Modern literature from Ibsen
and Nietzsche to Bourget and Shaw is a “long litany in praise of the
man who wills.” Men to-day contemn the “slavery to duty and discipline
which has left so many soured old people with nothing but envious
regrets for a virtuous youth.” Moral heroism is the toast of the
epoch--“the heroism of the man who believes in himself and dares do the
thing he wills.” It finds complete expression in Henley's best known
poem, with its clamant finale:
“I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”
The philosophy whose pæan is glorification of the man whose standards
are within himself, whose actions are controlled by his will, carries
with it certain inevitable and shocking consequences. It is the
clearest proof of Shaw's consistency that he has never swerved one jot
from the course marked out by himself. He accepts the disagreeable
consequences along with the rest, neither blinking nor shirking them.
Georg Brandes epitomized his doctrine in the words: “To obey one's
senses is to have character. He who allows himself to be guided by his
own passions has individuality.” Shaw has avowed that he regards this
as excellent doctrine, both in Brandes' form and in the older form: “He
that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him
be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still;
and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” Shaw is fundamentally an
optimist; he identifies all life with the will itself. This will, this
Life Force, he refuses to regard as naturally malign and devilish.
His life-work may be said to consist in an attack upon the conception
that passions are necessarily base and unclean; his art works are
glorifications of the man of conviction who can find a motive, and not
an excuse, for his passions; whose conduct flows from his own ideas of
right and wrong; and who obeys the law of his own nature in defiance
of appearance, of criticism, and of authority. This abrogation of
authority, this repudiation of systematized morality is the step which
the strongest spirits in all history have taken; it is the inevitable
step for the naturally good man, who can breathe only in an atmosphere
of truth and freedom. Emancipation comes only when man fulfils his duty
to himself; but one's duty to oneself, as Shaw has reminded us, is no
duty at all, since a debt is cancelled when the debtor and creditor are
the same person. “Its payment is simply a fulfilment of the individual
will, upon which all duty is a restriction.”
The obverse of the medal is not so clear: What will happen in the case
of a person of ungovernable temper, of unbridled passions? The whole
philosophy of his position, with all its appalling consequences, Shaw
has expounded in that most remarkable of all his philosophical essays,
entitled, _A Degenerate's View of Nordau_.
“If 'the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked,' then truly, the man who allows himself
to be guided by his passions must needs be a scoundrel, and
his teacher might well be slain by his parents. But how if the
youth, thrown helpless on his passions, found that honesty,
that self-respect, that hatred of cruelty and injustice, that
the desire for soundness and health and efficiency, were master
passions--nay, that their excess is so dangerous to youth that
it is part of the wisdom of age to say to the young: 'Be not
righteous overmuch: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?'...
The people who profess to renounce and abjure their own
passions, and ostentatiously regulate their conduct by the most
convenient interpretation of what the Bible means, or, worse
still, by their ability to find reasons for it (as if there
were not excellent reasons to be found for every conceivable
course of conduct, from dynamite and vivisection to martyrdom),
seldom need a warning against being righteous overmuch, their
attention, indeed, often needing a rather pressing jog in the
opposite direction. The truth is that passion is the steam in
the engine of all religious and moral systems. In so far as it
is malevolent, the religions are malevolent too, and insist on
human sacrifices, on hell, wrath and vengeance. You cannot read
Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology on the
Island' without admitting that all our religions have been made
as Caliban made his, and that the difference between Caliban
and Prospero is that Prospero is mastered by holier passions.
And as Caliban imagined his theology, so did Mill reason out
his essay on 'Liberty' and Spencer his 'Data of Ethics.' In
them we find the authors still trying to formulate abstract
principles of conduct--still missing the fact that truth and
justice are not abstract principles external to man, but human
passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher
passions as well as with lower ones.”
It is one of Shaw's disconcerting theories--after Blake--that “the
road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; the law of the stern
asceticism of satiety is that “you never know what is enough unless you
know what is more than enough.” In amplifying this idea Shaw once said:
“When Blake told men that through excess they would learn moderation,
he knew that the way for the present lay through the Venusberg, and
that the race would assuredly not perish there as some individuals
have, and as the Puritan fears we all shall unless we find a way round.
Also, he no doubt foresaw the time when our children would be born on
the other side of it, and so be spared that fiery purgation.”
It is not _mal à propos_ that the arms of the Shaw family should have
borne the motto, in Latin: “Know thyself.” Shaw insists upon the
salutary virtue of experience, its reforming and educative effect. “If
a young woman, in a mood of strong reaction against the preaching of
duty and self-sacrifice and the rest of it,” Shaw once wrote, “were
to tell Mr. Herbert Spencer that she was determined not to murder her
own instincts and throw away her life in obedience to a mouthful of
empty phrases, I suspect he would recommend the 'Data of Ethics' to
her as a trustworthy and conclusive guide to conduct. Under similar
circumstances I should unhesitatingly say to the young woman: 'By all
means do as you propose. Try how wicked you can be; it is precisely
the same experiment as trying how good you can be. At worst, you will
only find out the sort of person you really are. At best, you will
find that your passions, if you really and honestly let them all loose
impartially, will discipline you with a severity your conventional
friends, abandoning themselves to the mechanical routine of fashion,
could not stand for a day.' As a matter of fact, I have seen over and
over again this comedy of the 'emancipated' young enthusiast flinging
duty and religion, convention and parental authority, to the winds,
only to find herself becoming, for the first time in her life, plunged
into duties, responsibilities and sacrifices from which she is often
glad to retreat, after a few years' wearing down of her enthusiasm,
into the comparatively loose life of an ordinary respectable woman
of fashion.” It is not a case of after satiety, moderation; after
Venus, Saint Elizabeth; after Bohemianism, the convent. This is not
what happens, except to ordinary loose livers. What happens, according
to Shaw, is, that when we cast off all moral restraint we find Saint
Elizabeth and the convent drawing us more passionately to them than
Venus and the Bohemians. The true trend of the movement, it scarcely
need be remarked, has been mistaken by many of its supporters as
well as by its opponents. “The ingrained habit of thinking of the
propensities of which we are ashamed as 'our passions,'” Shaw has
shrewdly remarked, “and our shame of them and of our propensities
to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory department called our
conscience, leads us to conclude that to accept the guidance of our
passions is to plunge recklessly into the insupportable tedium of
what is called a life of pleasure. Reactionists against the almost
equally insupportable slavery of what is called a life of duty are,
nevertheless, willing to venture on these terms. The 'revolted
daughter,' exasperated at being systematically lied to by her parents
on every subject of vital importance to an eager and intensely curious
young student of life, allies herself with really vicious people and
with humorists who like to shock the pious with gay paradoxes, in
claiming an impossible license in personal conduct. No great harm is
done beyond the inevitable and temporary excesses produced by all
reactions; for the would-be wicked ones find, when they come to the
point, that the indispensable qualification for a wicked life is not
freedom, but wickedness.”[233]
In the present state of the world's civilization, the universal
application of the Shavian philosophy is neither possible nor
desirable. Like Nietzsche, Shaw has evolved a philosophy for the
_naturally good man_, for the strong man who realizes that freedom
connotes, not license, but responsibility. His error inheres in the
statement that no great harm would be done by people claiming an
impossible license in personal conduct beyond the inevitable and
temporary excesses produced by all reactions. Far from being temporary
and negligible, the consequences that would result, were every person
permitted to give a personal unrestricted interpretation of his own
instincts, would be lasting and irremediable. The average sensual man,
“the mean sensual man,” as Granville Barker translates it--for
whom passion means merely sexual lust, would take every advantage of
the loopholes for self-indulgence offered by the Shavian programme.
Were every man a Martin Luther, a William Blake, a Bernard Shaw; were
every woman a Mary Wollstonecraft, a Candida Burgess, the world might,
indeed, be clear of cant, of hypocrisy, of moralistic mendaciousness,
of idealistic sophistication!
[Illustration: =_George Bernard Shaw_.=]
_From a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn made in 1906._
Mr. Shaw once went so far as to assure me that the universal
application of the Shavian philosophy does actually take place. As a
matter of fact, the vast majority of people do not do what they please,
but, aside from scruples of conscience, find it vastly more convenient
and satisfactory to conform to prevailing standards of right and wrong.
Indeed, the limits to the application of the Shavian philosophy are
given by Shaw himself when he tells us that “the men in the street have
no use for principles, because they can neither understand nor apply
them; and that what they can understand and apply are arbitrary rules
of conduct, often frightfully destructive and inhuman, but at least
definite rules enabling the common stupid man to know where he stands,
and what he may do and not do without getting into trouble.” That is,
most people can and actually do fulfil their desires only within the
limits prescribed by the prevailing code of morality. Most men are
neither philosophers nor moralists. Under present circumstances, as
Shaw himself admits, the number of people who can think out a line of
conduct for themselves is very small, and the number who can afford the
time for it still smaller.
“Nobody can afford the time to do it on all points. The
professional thinker may on occasion make his own morality
and philosophy as the cobbler may make his own boots; but the
ordinary man of business must buy at the shop, so to speak, and
put up with what he finds on sale there, whether it exactly
suits him or not, because he can neither make a morality
for himself nor do without one. This typewriter with which
I am writing is the best I can get; but it is by no means a
perfect instrument; and I have not the smallest doubt that
in fifty years' time the authors of that day will wonder how
men could have put up with so clumsy a contrivance. When a
better one is invented, I shall buy it: until then I must make
the best of it, just as my Protestant and Roman Catholic and
Agnostic friends make the best of their creeds and systems.
This would be better recognized if people took consciously and
deliberately to the use of the creeds as they do to the use
of typewriters. Just as the traffic of a great city would be
impossible without a code of rules of the road which not one
wagoner in a thousand could draw up for himself, much less
promulgate, and without, in London at least, an unquestioning
consent to treat the policeman's raised hand as if it were an
impassable bar stretched half across the road, so the average
man is still unable to get through the world without being
told what to do at every turn, and basing such calculations as
he is capable of on the assumptions that everyone else will
calculate on the same assumptions. Even your man of genius
accepts a thousand rules for every one he challenges; and you
may lodge in the same house with an Anarchist for ten years
without noticing anything exceptional about him. Martin Luther,
the priest, horrified the greater half of Christendom by
marrying a nun, yet was a submissive conformist in countless
ways, living orderly as a husband and father, wearing what his
bootmaker and tailor made for him, and dwelling in what the
builder built for him, although he would have died rather than
take his Church from the Pope. And when he got a Church made by
himself to his liking, generations of men calling themselves
Lutherans took that Church from him just as unquestionably as
he took the fashion of his clothes from his tailor. As the
race evolves, many a convention which recommends itself by its
obvious utility to everyone passes into an automatic habit,
like breathing; and meanwhile the improvement in our nerves and
judgment enlarges the list of emergencies which individuals
may be trusted to deal with on the spur of the moment without
reference to regulations, but there will for many centuries
to come be a huge demand for a ready-made code of conduct for
general use, which will be used more or less as a matter of
overwhelming convenience by all members of communities.”[234]
The final effect of the philosophy of Ibsen, of Nietzsche, of Shaw is
to substitute _conscience_ for _conformity_.[235] With the dramatists
of the Restoration, as Meredith has reminded us, morality was a duenna
to be circumvented; with Shaw, morality is a mere convenience, like
etiquette at a dinner-table or drill on a parade-ground. “For too long
a time man regarded his natural bents with an 'evil eye,'” writes
Nietzsche, “so that in the end they became related to 'bad conscience.'
A reverse experiment is _in itself_ possible--but who is strong enough
for it?” Readiness to override tradition, to act unconventionally, to
violate the current code of morality requires moral courage of the
very highest order. The sense of moral responsibility is infinitely
deepened. “Before conversion the individual anticipates nothing worse
in the way of examination at the judgment bar of his conscience,”
wrote Shaw before he had ever heard of Nietzsche, “than such questions
as: Have you kept the commandments? Have you obeyed the law? Have
you attended church regularly; paid your rates and taxes to Cæsar;
and contributed, in reason, to charitable institutions? It may be
hard to do all these things; but it is still harder not to do them,
as our ninety-nine moral cowards in the hundred know. And even a
scoundrel can do them all and yet live a worse life than the smuggler
or prostitute, who must answer 'No' all the way through the catechism.
Substitute for such a technical examination one in which the whole
point to be settled is, Guilty or Not Guilty?--one in which there is
no more and no less respect for chastity than for incontinence, for
subordination than for rebellion, for legality than for illegality,
for piety than for blasphemy, in short, for the standard virtues
than for the standard vices, and immediately, instead of lowering
the moral standard by relaxing the tests of worth, you raise it by
increasing their stringency to a point at which no mere pharisaism
or moral cowardice can pass them.” One of John Tanner's epigrams was
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” All the
stock excuses of the average man vanish before the inexorable fact of
this responsibility: “'The woman tempted me'; 'The serpent tempted
me'; 'I was not myself at the time'; 'I meant well'; 'My passion got
the better of my reason'; 'It was my duty to do it'; 'The Bible says
that we should do it'; 'Everybody does it,' and so on. Nothing is left
but the frank avowal: 'I did it because I am built that way.' Every
man hates to say that. He wants to believe that his generous actions
are characteristic of him, and that his meannesses are aberrations or
concessions to the force of circumstances.” Most men are lacking in the
“vigilant open-mindedness,” the splendid moral courage of an Ibsen; few
men are willing to face the fearful responsibility entailed by revolt
against the will of the majority. Only a master impulse, a ruling
passion will drive them to it. Shavianism means liberty with a string
to it; while knocking off the fetters of alien authority, it forges
upon one the iron band of liberty with responsibility.[236] Shavianism
is the philosophy for the reformer who is driven by the “passion of a
great faith”; in the words of Nietzsche, it is “the privilege of the
fewest.” The keynote of Shaw's philosophy he has sounded in the perfect
epigram, “The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” But, as Mr.
Chesterton rightly reminds us, the saying can be simply answered by
being turned around. “That there is no golden rule is itself a golden
rule, or, rather, it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron
rule, a fetter on the first movement of a man.”
The battle-cry of Shaw's life is the Nietzschean command: “Forward,
march! our old morality, _too_, is a _piece of comedy_.” Originality
in regard to moral notions he regards as the true diagnostic of the
first order in literature, the distinction that “sets Shakespeare's
_Hamlet_ above his other plays, and that sets Ibsen's work as a whole
above Shakespeare's work as a whole.” Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner
(these four apart and above all the English classics), Goethe, Shelley,
Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, he has
told us, are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world he
recognizes as more or less akin to his own. While granting to Dickens
and Shakespeare the “specific genius of the fictionist and the common
sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree,” he yet
insists that in spite of their combination of sound moral judgment with
light-hearted good-humour, they are concerned with the diversities of
the world instead of with its unities. His highest meed of praise goes
to the artist-philosopher who identifies himself with the purpose of
the world. He classes himself with writers of the “first order,” so
called, because he has recognized and proclaimed in all his works that
the rules of code-morality and the “need for them produced by the moral
and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary human animal, are no more
invariably beneficial and respectable than the sunlight which ripens
the wheat in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, making the
cheeks of the ploughman's child rosy in the morning and striking the
ploughman brainsick or dead in the afternoon; no more inspired (and no
less) than the religion of the Andaman Islanders: as much in need of
frequent throwing away and replacement as the community's boots.”
The prime reason for the accusation that in his plays Shaw ignores
all human feeling is not as simple as it seems. It is not enough to
say it is because he is judicially impartial or even that he ignores
stage logic. Humanity may possibly move by clockwork in Shaw's plays,
as Mr. Arthur Symons once said; but even if it did, there must be
some key which sets the machine in motion. That key is not intellect,
but will; against which systems, creeds, conventions, every sort of
formalism is ineffective and impotent. “Take care to get what you like
or you will be forced to like what you get”; that is the creed of all
his characters; or, in the words of Ann Whitefield: “The only really
simple thing to do is to go straight for what you want, and grab it.”
It is his view that “people imagine that their actions and feelings are
dictated by moral systems, by religious systems, by codes of honour
and conventions of conduct which lie outside the real human will.”
As a dramatist, he recognizes that these conventions do not supply
them with their motives, but merely serve as very plausible _ex post
facto_ excuses for their conduct. He has sought to reveal to us real
people with real motives which are deep down in the will itself. It was
Sainte Beuve's aim, as he himself phrased it, to set forth “the natural
history of the intellect.” One might say of Shaw, the dramatist, that
his aim is to set forth the natural history of the human will. “Far
from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors
in human action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the
elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of
manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses
from himself in this way, finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle's
suggested painting of Parliament sitting without its clothes.”
It is this unmasking of all the ideals, this shattering of all the
illusions, this demolition of the romantic cast of life which makes
Shaw appear as a cynic, representing human creatures as frauds,
impostors, poseurs, cads, bounders, hypocrites and humbugs. It is
difficult to convince some people, especially women, that Shaw
is not a cynic and pessimist. Like Schopenhauer, Shaw is a pure
metaphysiologist. It is the inevitable result of his disbelief in the
validity of custom-made morality that he should appear as a cynic,
and the characters of his plays as frauds and shams. But he has
deliberately averred: “It is not my object in the least to represent
people as hypocrites and humbugs. It is conceit, not hypocrisy, that
makes a man think he is guided by reasoned principles when he is
really obeying his instincts.” And in explaining his view of the
world-comedy, he has shown that, as a dramatist, he pretends to be, not
the historian, but the naturalist of his age.
“It is this premature search for a meaning that produces the
comedy. We are not within a million years, as yet, of being
concerned with the meaning of the world. Why do we recognize
that philosophy is not a baby's business, although its facial
expression so strongly suggests the professional philosopher?
Because we know that all its mental energy is absorbed by the
struggle to attain ordinary physical consciousness. It is
learning to interpret the sensations of its eyes and ears and
nose and tongue and finger-tips. It is ridiculously delighted
by a silly toy, absurdly terrified by a harmless bogey, because
it cannot as yet see things as they really are. Well, we are
all still as much babies in the world of thought as we were
in our second year in the world of sense. Men are not real
to us; they are heroes and villains, respectable persons and
criminals. Their qualities are virtues and vices; the natural
laws that govern them are gods and devils; their destinies are
rewards and expiations; their conditions are innocence and
guilt--there is no end to the amazing transubstantiations and
childish imaginings which delight and terrify us because we
have not yet grown up enough to be capable of genuine natural
history. And then people come to you with their heads full of
these figments, which they call, if you please, 'the world,'
and ask you what is the meaning of them. The answer is, that
they have not even an existence, much less a meaning. The blank
incredulity of men to that reply, and their absurd attempts to
act on their illusions, are as funny as the antics of a baby:
that is what you call the world-comedy. But when they try to
force others to act on them, when they ostracize, punish,
murder, make war, impose by force their grotesque religious
and hideous criminal codes, then the comedy becomes a tragedy.
And only the dramatist sees through it; all the rest, the
Army, the Navy, the Church, and the Bar are busy bolstering
up the imposture. The dramatic faculty is nothing more nor
less than a little more than common forwardness in natural
history, a little more than common freedom from illusion, or,
to put it as the average dupe sees it, and as Ruskin flatly
expressed it concerning Shakespeare, a little less than common
conscience.... If the playgoer could see the dramatist's mind,
all the dramatists would be hanged, just as all the men and
women of forty would be massacred by all the youths and maidens
of twenty, if these young ones only knew.”[237]
The world-comedy, in Shaw's eyes, consists in the imaginative
self-delusion, the moralistic sophistication of man; the world-tragedy
in the bankruptcy of what we delight in calling progress with a P.
Progress, from Shaw's point of view, means increased command over self;
this lamentable desideratum is the cause of his scepticism. But let us
observe the open-minded, clear-eyed consistency of Shaw. While heartily
subscribing to the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, he yet as heartily
refuses to accept his pessimistic philosophy. At one with Darwin and
Huxley in their scientific, realistic, yet anarchistic challenge of the
validity of Biblical theology, Shaw, by his deliberate rejection of
their materialistic views, occupies the opposite pole of conviction.
It is useless to pretend to a “generation which has ceased to believe
in heaven and has not yet learned that the degradation by poverty
of four out of every five of its number is artificial,” that the
“pessimism of Koheleth, Shakespeare, Dryden and Swift can be refuted
if the world progresses solely by the destruction of the unfit, and
yet can only maintain its civilization by manufacturing the unfit in
swarms of which that appalling proportion of four to one represents
but the comparatively fit survivors.” To Shaw, progress means, not an
effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction
of the unfit, but the growth of the spirit of man. He has refused to
accept the Darwinian theory of evolution, since it “only accounted
for progress at all on the hypothesis of a continuous increase in the
severity of the conditions of existence--that is, on an assumption
of just the reverse of what was actually taking place”--a fact which
escaped Huxley. He finds in the world no signs of progress in the
humanitarian and ethical sense; only a few more discoveries in physics.
And even the much-trumpeted “increased command over nature,” harnessing
continents, circling the globe, and so on, as an argument for progress
vanishes before the inevitable query as to whether a negro of to-day
using a telephone is superior to George Washington. Shaw rails at
the “theistic credulity” of Voltaire as he rails at the “tribal
soothsayings” of Huxley. As he recently wrote me: “I have not escaped
from a literal belief in the Book of Genesis only to fall back into
the gross blindness of seeing nothing in the world but the result of
natural selection operating on a chapter of accidents, which is popular
Darwinism.”
In that most whimsical and witty essay, entitled, _The Conflict
Between Science and Common Sense_, Shaw declares that he has “found
out” the man of science: “In future my attitude towards him will
be one of more or less polite incredulity. Impostor for impostor,
I prefer the mystic to the scientist--the man who at least has the
decency to call his nonsense a mystery, to him who pretends that
it is ascertained, weighed, measured, analyzed fact.” In a sense,
Shaw's part in the humanitarian campaign against vivisection, modern
science generally, vaccination, education, flogging, “cannibalism,”
and so on, are all part of his attitude as a “mystic.” He has no
faith in the scientist with his specious invitation: “My friend, by
a diabolically cruel process I have procured a revoltingly filthy
substance. Allow me to inject this under your skin, and you can never
get hydrophobia, or enteric fever, or diphtheria, etc. I have even a
very choice preparation, of unmentionable nastiness, which will enable
you, if not to live for ever (though I think that quite possible),
at least to renew in your old age the excesses of your youth.” While
the average man, with incomprehensible credulity, jumps at the bait,
Shaw refuses to be so easily duped. While science has taught him that
dirt is “only matter in the wrong place,” his own common sense has
taught him that “disease is only matter in the wrong condition, and
that to inject matter in the wrong condition into matter in the right
condition (healthy flesh, to wit) is to put matter in the wrong place
with a vengeance.” In the public prints, in his novels and plays,
notably, _Cashel Byron's Profession_ and _The Philanderer_, Shaw has
fulminated as vigorously against vivisection as against vaccination.
From the first he perceived that the vivisector was “just the same
phenomenon in science as the dynamiter in politics, and that to all
humane men both methods of research and reform, effective or not,
were eternally barred, precisely as highway robbery is barred as a
method of supporting one's family.” His persistent vegetarianism is
not based upon a scientific inquiry into the amount of hydrocarbons,
uric acid, or what not deleterious stuff there may be in meat, but in
his perfectly natural and humane distaste for the shedding of blood.
“I have not the slightest doubt myself,” he once said, “that a diet of
nice tender babies, carefully selected, cleanly killed and tenderly
cooked, would make us far healthier and handsomer than the haphazard
dinners of to-day, whether carnivorous or vegetarian.... There is no
objection whatever to a baby from a nitrogenous point of view. Eaten
with sugar, or with beer, it would leave nothing to be desired in the
way of carbon. My sole objection to such a diet is that it happens
to be repugnant to me. I prefer bread and butter.” Shaw's “three
centuries” of life have taught him, mainly, to regard “men's principles
as excuses for doing what they want to do.” And in the moral sphere, he
contends that “the world remains as dependent as ever on pure dogmatic,
instinctive recoil from suffering on the one hand, and pure dogmatic,
instinctive love of inflicting it on the other. Common to both these
temperaments, and to the compound temperament in which they struggle
for mastery, is the timid perception that society can only exist
through a compact to live and let live.... All sorts of virtuously
indignant persons, clamouring for all sorts of vulgar retaliations,
from the kicking of a cad to the humiliation of a minister by an
election defeat, are indulging the destructive instincts under cover
of solicitude for the common weal, as unmistakably as the scientist
who, with a thousand humane departments of research open to him,
deliberately prefers cruel experiments, and pleads that the man who
ascertains how long it takes to bake a dog to death confers as great a
boon on humanity as the man who discovers the Röntgen rays and their
application to surgery. The cruel (loving to read the description
of his experiments), the selfish (hoping for cures), the sportsman
(anxious to be kept in countenance), and the cowardly (seeking an
excuse for tolerating an evil they dare not attack) will accept his
excuse: the humane will not. The final conflict is not between the
excuses in their logical disguise of scientific arguments, but between
the cruel will and the humane will.”
A leading cause for Shaw's “divine discontent” with progress, with
moral systems, with institutions, with “regimentation,” with flogging
in the navy, vaccination, science, cannibalism, and a thousand other
things, is his loss of faith in education. He has lost his illusions
on the subject. Education and culture, he maintains, are for the most
part “nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of
literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary
real.” He sees Masters of Art as “patentees of highly questionable
methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and
for the majority but half valid, representations of life.” This is
the natural attitude for one who said only the other day that “great
communities are built by men who sign with a mark: they are wrecked
by men who write Latin verses.” The ruthless repression which we
practise on our fellow creatures whilst they are still too small to
defend themselves, he insists, ends in their “reaching their full
bodily growth in a hopelessly lamed and intimidated condition, unable
to conceive of any forces in the world except physically coercive
and socially conventional ones.” “Modern” education, he declares,
“differs from Dr. Johnson's education only in substituting Jenner and
Pasteur for Plato and Euripides as academic idols, and replacing the
recognition of a purpose in the world, and the investigation of that
purpose, by a conception of the universe as the accidental result of
a senseless raging of mechanical forces, and by a boundless credulity,
not outdone in dirt, cruelty, and stupidity, by any known savage
tribe, as to the possibility of circumventing these forces by nostrums
and conjurations.” The hope of the world lies in the development of
individuality and self-reliance. Real live learning would soon flourish
on the boundless basis of human curiosity and ambition.[238]
[Illustration: =A Plaster Bust of Shaw.=]
Made in forty minutes.
_Prince Paul Toubetzkoy._
_Courtesy of the Sculptor_
Bernard Shaw is not a materialist or natural selectionist, but in
direct line of descent, astounding as the contrast may appear, from
Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Samuel Butler. Shaw does not subscribe to
the belief that goodness implies that “man is vicious by nature, and
that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom.” A fundamental tenet of
his philosophic faith is the conviction that “progress can do nothing
but make the most of us all as we are.” This conviction has more or
less consciously animated him all through his career. Within his
secret soul, Shaw has always cherished a radiant and gorgeous hope for
humanity, always unconsciously trod the rainbow bridge from the real
to the ideal. In his heart, he has whispered Ibsen's thought, “The
expression of our own individuality is our first duty.” A dream of
human perfectibility has lured him on: the dearest foe of this arrant
realist has ever been--an ideal. As a youth he revelled in the Shelley
of _Prometheus Unbound_; young manhood found him working upon the
hypothesis of the Economic Man. In _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, Shaw
sang of the new man, the sovereign individual--in Nietzsche's phrase,
“the possessor of a long infrangible will, who has, in his possession,
his _standard of valuation_.” He had found out the impossibilities of
anarchism before he came to Wagner; his clearer vision and enlarged
horizon enabled him to realize that “the individual Siegfried has come
often enough, only to find himself confronted with the alternative
of government or destruction at the hands of his fellows who are not
Siegfrieds.” At last he began to realize that “it is necessary to breed
a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate before
the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable.” The matured
form of his ideal is the ethical man, convinced of the bankruptcy of
education and progress, inspired with the faith of the world-will, and
resolved, not to adopt a new philosophy, but to develop and perfect
the human species. “To rise above ourselves to ourselves”--that is the
creed of the new faith, of the humanitarian artificial selectionist
concerned even more for the future of the race than for the freedom
of his own instincts. Every phase in Shaw's career, it cannot be too
strongly insisted upon, is the legitimate and logical outcome of
his Socialism. His philosophy is the consistent integration of his
empirical criticisms of society and its present organization, founded
on authority and based upon Capitalism. And to the Socialist, nothing
is necessary for the realization of Utopia but that man should will
it. “Man will never be that which he can and should be,” wrote Wagner,
“until by a conscious following of that inner natural necessity, which
is the only true necessity, he makes his life a mirror of nature, and
frees himself from his thraldom to outer artificial counterfeits. Then
will he first become a living man, who now is a mere wheel in the
mechanism of this or that Religion, Nationality or State.” The fact
faced by the Shavian philosophy is that Man does not effectively will
perfection. The quintessence of Shavianism is that “he never will until
he becomes Superman.”[239]
The cardinal point in the New Theology as enunciated by Bernard Shaw
is the identification of God with the Life Force. “There are two
mutually contradictory ideas which cut across each other in regard to
the relative powers of God and Man,” Mr. Shaw once said to me in the
course of a long discussion of his religious views. “According to the
popular conception, God always creates beings inferior to Himself: the
creator must be greater than the creature. I find myself utterly unable
to accept this horrible old idea, involving as it does the belief that
all the cruelty in the world is the work of an omnipotent God, who, if
He liked, could have left cruelty out of creation. If God could have
created anything better, do you suppose He would have been content to
create such miserable failures as you and me?
“As a matter of fact,” he continued, “we know that in all art,
literature, politics, sociology--in every phase of genuine life and
vitality--man's highest aspiration is to create something higher than
himself. So God, the Life Force, has been struggling for countless ages
to become conscious of Himself--to express Himself in forms higher and
ever higher up in the scale of evolution. God does not take pride in
making a grub-worm because it is lower than Himself. On the contrary,
the grub is a mere symbol of His desire for self-expression.”
To Bernard Shaw, the universe is God in the act of making Himself.
At the back of the universe, according to his mystical conception,
there is a great purpose, a great will. This force behind the universe
is bodiless and impotent, without executive power of its own; after
innumerable tentatives--experiments and mistakes--the force has
succeeded in changing inert matter into the amœba, the amœba into some
more complex organism; this again into something still more complex,
and finally has evolved a man, with hands and a brain to accomplish the
work of the Will. Man is not the ultimate aim of the Life Force, but
only a stage in the scale of evolution. The Life Force will go still
further and produce something more complicated than Man, that is, the
Superman, then the Angel, the Archangel, and last of all an omnipotent
and omniscient God.[240]
Shaw has startled and shocked many people during his lifetime by
asserting vehemently that he was an atheist.[241] And so indeed he is,
if orthodoxy connotes belief in the early-Victorian God of cruelty and
barbarity--the Almighty Fiend of Shelley's characterization. The idea
of God as a cruel Designer, vindictive in punishment of the unbeliever,
then held full sway.
“Neither science on the one hand, nor the moral remonstrances of
Shelley and his school on the other, were able to shake the current
belief in that old theology that came back to the old tribal idol,
Jehovah.” Then came Darwin with his theory of natural selection,
involving the corollary that all the operations of the species can be
accounted for without consciousness, intelligence or design. After
rapturously embracing Darwinism for six weeks, Samuel Butler turned
upon Darwin and rent him--he had discovered that Darwin had actually
banished mind from the universe.[242] Butler saw clearly that natural
selection had no moral significance, that it did away not only with the
necessity for purpose and design in the universe, but actually with the
necessity for consciousness.
Philosophically and scientifically, Shaw derives directly from
Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Butler. He recognizes purpose and will in
the world because he is himself conscious of purpose and will. Woman
brings children into the world, not for herself or for her husband,
but to fulfil the end in view of which the Life Force has created her.
Man produces great works just as woman brings men into the world, with
travail and pain; man is continually engaged in doing things which
do not benefit him. He works just as hard when there is no chance of
profit as when there is. Shaw, then, is a confirmed Neo-Lamarckian in
the view that “where there's a will there's a way.” Just as Lamarck,
with his theory of functional adaptation, virtually maintained that
living organisms changed because they wanted to, so Shaw believes that
there is a purpose in the universe; identifies his own purpose with it,
and makes the achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice
for himself, but of self-realization. In Shaw's view, Schopenhauer's
treatise on the World as Will is the complement to Lamarck's natural
history; for Will is the driving force of Lamarckian evolution.[243]
Bernard Shaw's religion is the expression of his faith in Life and
in the Will. He regards man as divine because, actually, he is the
last effort of the Will to realize itself as God. And yet he does not
believe in the doctrine of personal immortality. “I have a strong
feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for--scrapped at
last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than
myself,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me. “This, I believe, is the clue to
my views on immortality. The idea of personal salvation is intensely
repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big
brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering
about as a celestial Rough Rider! Or imagine me in heaven, giving forth
all sorts of epigrams and paradoxes, startling Saint Peter with my
iconoclasm, being paragraphed in the _Eternal Herald_ and cartooned
in the _Æon Review_! No, I think the trouble has come about through
imagining that there are only two attributes--eternal life and utter
extinction at death. I believe neither of these theories to be correct.
Life continually tends to organize itself into higher and better forms.
There is no such thing as personal immortality; and death, as Weismann
says, is only a means of economizing life. The vital spark, the Life
principle within us, goes on in spite of personal annihilation.
“As I told Mrs. Besant the other night,” he added, “I am looking for a
race of men who are not afraid to die.”
A popular error into which many able critics fall is involved in the
oft-repeated assertion that Shaw derives his philosophy directly from
Ibsen, Strindberg, Stirner and Nietzsche. It is quite true that _The
Quintessence of Ibsenism_ might have been written by an ardent disciple
of Nietzsche; and yet the first time Shaw ever heard Nietzsche's name
was from a German mathematician, a Miss Borchardt, who had read Shaw's
brochure on Ibsen, and who told him she knew where he had got it all.
On being asked where, she replied “From Nietzsche's _Jenseits von Gut
und Böse_.” Shaw at once understood and appreciated the title, and
thereafter took an interest in Nietzsche; but he could not read much of
the few English translations that were attempted except Thomas Common's
book of selections; the German originals he never even attempted to
read. “If all this talk about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche continues,”
Shaw laughingly said to me one day, “I really will have to read their
works, to discover just what we have in common. This habit of referring
every idea of mine to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche comes about partly
because, to people without philosophy, all philosophies seem the same,
and partly because I have often referred to them to remind my readers
that what they called my eccentricities and paradoxes are part of
the common European stock.” As for Stirner, I have never heard Mr.
Shaw mention Stirner. I recall no mention of Stirner in all of Shaw's
works, and I have no reason to believe that Shaw is indebted to him
in the slightest degree. It is quite true that, like Stirner, Shaw
is an intellectual anarch; but he has no real sympathy for Stirner's
“Eigentum,” for the reason that though Shaw is an individualist, he
is likewise a constitutional collectivist. He sees no real conflict
between Individualism and Socialism, and has actually given the
striking definition: “Socialism is merely Individualism rationalized,
organized, clothed and in its right mind.” Shaw has been accused of
indebtedness to Strindberg also; the truth is, that he has all along
been perfectly familiar with the idea of hatred of woman-idolization
through the writings and conversation of Mr. Ernest Belfort Bax, whose
essays attacking _bourgeois_ morality were published before Strindberg,
or Nietzsche, for that matter, had been heard of in England. But
although Shaw has read very little of the marvellously prolific
Strindberg, he admires him greatly, and once told me that he thought
Strindberg would prove to be “the noblest Roman of us all.” Nietzsche's
view of Christianity as a slave-morality was advanced in England by
Mr. Stuart-Glennie, a Scotch historical philosopher, still living and
much neglected, in what appealed to Shaw as a far more sensible way,
Stuart-Glennie regarding it as the means by which the white races (the
Supermen) enslaved the dark races and mean whites, while Nietzsche
regarded it as an imposition by the slaves themselves.[244] Shaw,
Stuart-Glennie and Bax are all Socialists; if “the physiologist of the
mind” would seek to trace in Shaw's work early influences upon his
philosophy, he must look for them in the works of Stuart-Glennie and
Bax, rather than in the works of Nietzsche and Strindberg. And as for
Shaw's strange complex of Socialism and individualism, I personally
find it to be a mean between the extravagant individualism of Max
Stirner, the intellectual anarchy of Elisée Reclus, and the practical
collectivism of Jaurès and Vandervelde.
The English critics, however, continue to refer Shaw's philosophy to
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “knowing nothing about them,” as Shaw says,
“except that their opinions, like mine, are not those of the _Times_ or
the _Spectator_.” Indeed, Shaw is an unwilling impostor as a pundit in
the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. What, for example, could
be more foreign to the Shavian philosophy than Nietzsche's repudiation
of Socialism, his admiration of the Romans, or his notions about art?
Shaw's Superman is mere man to Nietzsche; whilst Nietzsche's Superman
is God to Shaw. “Nietzsche's erudition I believe to be all nonsense,”
Shaw recently remarked to me. “I think he was academic in the sense
of having a great deal of second-hand book-learning about him, and
don't care for him except when he is perfectly original--that is,
when he is dealing with matters which a peasant might have dealt with
if he had brains enough, and had had the run of a library. You feel
how clever and imaginative he is, and how much he has derived from
writers of genius and from his own humanity about men and nations; but
there is a want of actual contact knowledge about him; he is always
the speculative university professor or the solitary philosopher and
poet, never quite the worker and man of affairs or the executive artist
in solid materials. It annoys me to see English writers absolutely
ignoring the work of British thinkers, and swallowing foreign
celebrities--whether philosophers or opera-singers--without a grain
of salt. It shows an utter want of intellectual self-respect; and the
result of it is that Nietzsche's views, instead of being added solely
to the existing body of philosophy, are treated as if they were a sort
of music-hall performance.”
Bernard Shaw is endowed with that persistent strain of British
practicality which makes him employ philosophy as an instrumentality
for the achievement of the purposes of life. In a word, Shaw is
fundamentally an ethicist: philosophy to him means a guide for life.
His metaphysic is basically moralistic, consisting of a series of
postulates in respect to conduct.
In the manuscript of an unfinished work which Mr. Shaw once loaned to
me, I discovered a notable passage which throws a flood of light upon
Shaw's philosophy as an index to his entire life and career. Perhaps it
may distil the quintessence of the Shavian philosophy:
“The man who is looking after himself is useless for revolutionary
purposes. The man who believes he is only a fly on the wheel of Natural
Selection, of Evolution, or Progress, or Puritanism, or 'some power
not ourselves, that makes for righteousness' is not only useless,
but obstructive. But the man who believes that there is a purpose in
the universe, and identifies his own purpose with it, and makes the
achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice for himself,
but of self-realization: that is the effective man and the happy man,
whether he calls the purpose the will of God, or Socialism, or the
religion of humanity. He is the man who will combine with you in a
fellowship, which he may call the fellowship of the Holy Ghost or you
may call Democracy, or the Parliament of Man, or the Federation of the
World, but which is a real working, and if need be fighting, fellowship
for all that. He is the man who knows that nothing intelligent will be
done until somebody does it, and who will place the doing of it above
all his other interests.
“In short, we must make a religion of Socialism. We must fall back
on our will to Socialism, and resort to our reason only to find out
the ways and means. And this we can do only if we conceive the will
as a creative energy, as Lamarck did; and totally renounce and abjure
Darwinism, Marxism, and all fatalistic, penny-in-the-slot theories of
evolution whatever.”
FOOTNOTES:
[227] Shaw's philosophy has many points of contact with the Pragmatism
of Schiller and James. Shaw sees in truth and justice, not abstract
principles external to man, but _human passions_, which have, in their
time, conflicted with higher passions as well as with lower ones. With
James he is at one in the belief that “Truth has its palæontology, and
its 'prescription' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service
and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity”; and with Schiller's
“humanistic” doctrine that “to an unascertainable extent our truths are
man-made products too.” To Shaw, as to James, “'the right' is only the
expedient in the way of our behaving.”
[228] _Giving the Devil His Due_: a review, by Bernard Shaw, of Vols.
I. and II. of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Supplement to the
_Saturday Review_, May 13th, 1899.
[229] “'Is here,' someone will ask, 'an ideal being erected, or an
ideal being broken down?' But have ye ever really asked yourselves
sufficiently as to how dearly the erection of _all_ ideals on earth
were paid for? How much reality had to be slandered and misconceived
for this purpose; how much falsehood sanctioned; how much conscience
confused; how much 'God' sacrificed each time? In order that a
sanctuary may be erected, _a sanctuary must be broken down_: this
is the law--name me an instance in which it is violated!” Friedrich
Nietzsche, _Genealogy of Morals_, translated by William A. Hausemann,
p. 122 (Macmillan).
[230] To take a single example, consult _My Dream_, from _The Bab
Ballads and Songs of a Savoyard_, the first two stanzas of which read:
The other night, from cares exempt, I slept--and what d'you think I
dreamt? I dreamt that somehow I had come To dwell in Topsy-Turvydom.
Where vice is virtue--virtue, vice; Where nice is nasty--nasty, nice;
Where right is wrong and wrong is right; Where white is black and black
is white.
[231] _A Dramatic Realist to His Critics_, in the _New Review_
(London), July, 1894.
[232] This morality is no new thing under the sun; Maurice Maeterlinck
has declared that our morality of to-day has nothing to add to this
injunction, found in the _Arabian Nights_: “Learn to know thyself! And
do thou not act till then. And do thou then only act in accordance with
all thy desires, but having great care always that thou do not injure
thy neighbour.”
[233] Compare also the notable passage, embodying a similar view, in
Max Stirner's _The Ego and His Own_ (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y., 1907),
p. 212, beginning: “'What am I?' each of you asks himself. An abyss of
lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos
without light or guiding star!...”
[234] _A Degenerate's View of Nordau_, in _Liberty_, July 27th, 1895.
[235] Mr. Shaw has recently pointed out that Professor A. K. Rogers, in
his _Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy_ (_Hibbert Journal_, July, 1910),
has failed to note the “trumpery (!) distinction between instinct and
conscience” which Shaw had drawn in _Man and Superman_.
[236] It is worthy of note that Nietzsche has defined freedom as the
will to be responsible for oneself. Compare also _The Ego and His Own_,
pp. 237-238 (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y.), the passage beginning: “To be
_a_ man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to realize _oneself_,
the individual....”
[237] _Who I Am, and What I Think_, Part II., in _The Candid Friend_,
May 18th, 1901.
[238] Compare _Does Modern Education Ennoble?_ by G. Bernard Shaw; in
_Great Thoughts_, October 7th, 1905.
[239] The substance of Shaw's philosophy--as, indeed, he once told
me--is embodied in Act III. of _Man and Superman_.
[240] For the sake of making himself easily understood, Shaw frequently
expresses his neo-theological conceptions in the familiar phraseology
of orthodox religion. Shaw's practice of personifying God, when in
reality he mentally identifies “God” with a mystical and impersonal
“Force,” is a practice which many people quite justly condemn.
[241] _Cf._ Shaw's open letter to G. W. Foote, in _The Freethinker_,
November 1st, 1908.
[242] In this connection it is interesting to read Shaw's review of
Samuel Butler's _Luck or Cunning?_ published under the heading “Darwin
Denounced,” in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, May 31st, 1887. At this time,
Shaw committed himself neither to Lamarck nor to Butler, but was
content to define the issues of the controversy. Certainly his interest
was aroused, and years later his support was won, by Butler's protest
against natural selection as--to use Butler's own words--“a purely
automatic conception of the universe as of something that will work if
a penny be dropped into the box.”
[243] Compare _The Philosophy of Bernard Shaw_, by Archibald Henderson,
in the _Atlantic Monthly_, February, 1909.
[244] Compare _A Genealogy of Morals_, translated by William A.
Hausemann; Alexander Tille's introduction, pp. xvi. and xviii. For
Shaw's general confession of indebtedness to others, compare the
preface to _Major Barbara_--_First Aid to Critics_.
THE MAN
“Like all men, I play many parts, and none of them is more or
less real than the other.... I am a soul of infinite worth. I
am, in short, not only what I can make out of myself, which
varies greatly from hour to hour, and emergency to emergency,
but what you can see in me.”--Bernard Shaw's review of G. K.
Chesterton's _Bernard Shaw_.
“Many people seem to imagine that I am an extraordinary sort of
person. The fact of the matter is that ninety-nine per cent. of
me is just like everybody else.”--Remark of Bernard Shaw to the
author.
“This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose
recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly
worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a
force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of
ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not
devote itself to making you happy.”--_Man and Superman. Epistle
Dedicatory to A. B. Walkley._
CHAPTER XVI
Bernard Shaw looks down upon contemporary life from many windows. The
world is caught in the dragnet of his infinite variety: few escape.
To each man, Shaw comes in a different capacity. The world at large
knows little, astoundingly little, of Shaw the man. That is why, after
detailing the various features of his literary and public career, I
have put last the study of his personality. From the preceding chapters
the reader may have constructed a more or less imaginary portrait. In
this chapter is portrayed Shaw, if not as in himself he really is,
certainly as one who knows him really sees him.
It may not be devoid of interest to think of Shaw at several stages of
his career. During the epidemic of 1881, he caught small-pox which, as
he expressed it, “left him unmarked, but an anti-vaccinationist for
ever.” The next few years Shaw passed “in desperate want and despair,”
as an acquaintance has expressed it. While this statement is somewhat
exaggerated, certainly the clothes he wore at this period gave it
colour: tawny trousers, extraordinarily, unbelievably baggy; a long,
_soi-disant_ black cut-away coat, and a tall silk hat, which had been
battered down so often that it had a thousand creases in it from top to
crown. “My clothes turned green,” Shaw has confessed, “and I trimmed my
cuffs to the quick with a scissors, and wore my tall hat with the back
part in front, so that the brim should not bend double when I took it
off to an acquaintance.”
Despite the loyal protest of the Secretary of the Fabian Society, who
once wrote me vehemently asserting that Shaw always wore perfectly
normal and conventional clothes, it must be admitted that Shaw has
been associated throughout his life with queer sartorial tastes.
The notorious velvet jacket which he wore during the days of his
activity as a critic of the drama, furnished the _casus belli_ in
Shaw's war with the theatre managers. Shaw refused point-blank to obey
the iron-clad regulation that occupants of stalls must wear evening
clothes. The irrepressible conflict was precipitated one night,
according to a story which Shaw vehemently denies, when Shaw was
stopped at the door of the theatre by an attendant.
“What do you object to?” asked Shaw; “the velvet jacket?”
The attendant nodded assent.
“Very well,” exclaimed Shaw, no whit abashed, “I will remove it.” And
the next instant he was striding up the aisle in his shirt sleeves.
“Here, that won't do!” shouted the attendant in great alarm, hurrying
after Shaw and stopping him with great difficulty.
“Won't do?” cried Shaw, with fine assumption of indignation. “Do you
think I am going to take off any more?”
And with that he promptly redonned his velvet jacket and turning on
his heel, left the house. Shaw finally won the battle and enjoyed his
triumph in face of the objection of managers and the indignation of the
fashionable and wealthy theatre-goers.
Shaw's snuff-coloured suit and flannel shirt made him a marked figure
in London during the 'nineties. He wore it so long that it finally
came to look, as one of his acquaintances said, as if it were made
of brown wrapping paper. So much a part of his individuality had it
become that, when he finally discarded it, some friends of Shaw's,
seeing it depending from a nail, exclaimed--so well had it retained its
shape--“Good heavens! he's done it at last!”
Of peculiar, almost unique, interest is the record of Shaw's physical
proportions and qualities, taken in the Anthropometric Laboratory
arranged by Francis Galton, F.R.S., at the International Health
Exhibition on August 16th, 1884. This was just twenty days before Shaw
joined the Fabian Society. According to this chart, numbered 3,655,
Shaw's anthropometric properties were as follows:
Colour of eyes, blue-grey.
EYESIGHT.
Greatest distance in inches of reading “Diamond” type--Right
eye, 23; left eye, 27.
Colour sense (goodness of)--Good.
JUDGMENT OF EYE.
Error per cent. in dividing a line of 15 inches--in three parts,
1-1/2; in two parts, 1/2.
Error in degrees of estimating squareness--1/4.
HEARING.
Keenness can hardly be tested here owing to the noises and
echoes.
Highest audible note--Between 30,000 and 40,000 vibrations
per second.
BREATHING POWER.
Greatest expiration in cubic inches--298.
STRENGTH.
Of squeeze in lbs. of--right hand, 83; left hand, 80.
Of pull in lbs.--57.
SPAN OF ARMS.
From finger tips of opposite hands--5 feet 11.7 inches.
HEIGHT.
Sitting, measured from seat of chair--3 feet 1.8 inches.
Standing in shoes 6 feet 0.8 inch
Less height of heel 0.7 inch
----------------
Height without shoes 6 feet 0.1 inch.
WEIGHT.
In ordinary indoor clothing in lbs.--142.
The social, physical, mental and moral measurements of the man, at
different periods of his life, have been taken by a thousand hands. Not
the least interesting of these is the record of a chirological expert
in the _Palmist and Chirological Review_, July, 1895.[245] Shaw is
inclined to believe in palmistry to the extent of regarding the hand
to be as good an index of character as the face. He once laughingly
remarked to me that the following chirological study possessed a
curious interest, because it was such a remarkable _mélange_ of acute
character-analysis and hopeless, utter nonsense.
Omitting technical details--the specific _indicia_ of specific
traits--the hands of Shaw yielded the following “results.” The author,
dramatist, musician and critic is betrayed by the long conical
hands--the smallness of which for so tall a man indicates that the
subject will be given to jumping to conclusions on insufficient
grounds in matters of opinion. The subject is very unconventional
and independent, especially in thought, and adaptable to people
and circumstances. His will is very strong, and he is obstinate in
opinion, very argumentative, dogmatic, and unconvincible. He is not
only fond of books and reading, but also has a great love of rule and
power over others. His temperament is a curious compound of caution
and liberality, very dependent upon moods for their expression.
The dramatic power he possesses is that of the dramatist, not of
the actor; he is gifted with great power in carrying out ideas and
turning circumstances to his advantage, due in no small measure to
his remarkable power of words, whether for speaking or writing. While
not entirely tactful, he is constantly scheming and planning; but
he is usually more successful in handling plots than persons. Great
energy, both physical and mental, and cultivated self-control are
distinguishing marks of the man; to these traits are superadded much
aggressiveness and high moral courage. He is endowed with a great
sense of fun, remarkable wit, immense wealth of imagination and
extreme eccentricity of ideas. The subject makes his own career in
the world, and tries to carry out to some extent his eccentric ideas;
but as a rule, his actions are directed by his accurate knowledge of
the world. In many respects, the subject is very genuine and sincere;
but along with this goes an incurable tendency to pose for effect.
His fame will steadily grow with the years; and it is predicted that
he will accomplish fine artistic work, if he will leave the practical
side of things to others, and stick to art as he should. He can make
or mar his own career as he chooses; he possesses the power to turn
circumstances to his own advantage. In a large sense, he is the master
of his fate.
Did the analysis stop here, Mr. Shaw might almost be justified in
believing it impossible to derive such accurate information solely
from a superficial knowledge of his public career. Unfortunately, the
palmist indulged in certain other characterizations which are doubtless
included in Mr. Shaw's category of “utter nonsense.” According to the
palmist, Mr. Shaw has a very good opinion of himself, due to vanity,
not to self-confidence, in which he is conspicuously lacking. He is
very susceptible to criticism, but harsh in his criticism of others;
very apprehensive of consequences, changeable and uncertain in his
moods. Quiet in temper, he is, nevertheless, very revengeful and
vindictive, imbued not only with a great power of hatred, but also
with utter mercilessness in carrying it out. His temperament is very
hard, and, in a refined manner, cruel. He has an extreme disregard for
truth, all notions and opinions being coloured by fancy until facts
are completely lost sight of, thus showing the subject to be utterly
wanting in practical common sense in his opinions and ideas. He is
neither passionate nor benevolent; but he has a laudable tendency to
idealize his friends. It is a very unlucky temperament in affairs of
the heart; his nature has little if any faculty for attachment. He
imagines himself in love, and the more obstacles and impossibilities in
the way of his suit, the more he will delight in it; he imagines the
object of his attachment perfect, and will endeavour, contrary to all
rules and observances, to live in his castles in the air, and when they
dissolve he will throw it all away, perfectly heedless of consequences
to himself or others, and start on a new ambition, or an entirely
different line. “That this has already happened once in his life,” adds
the chirologist, “is shown by the bar line, now fading, from the upper
Mars across to Head and Heart.” _Il ne manquait que ça!_
Let us now skip another eleven, or rather twelve, years, and take a
look at Bernard Shaw as he is to-day. Many people seem to regard Shaw
as too funny to be true--as fanciful as Pierrot, as imaginary as
Harlequin, as remote as the Man in the Moon. In reality, he is the
most unmistakable sort of person. The nervous, almost boyish swing
of his gait, the length and lankiness of his figure, the scraggly
reddish-brown beard, heavily tinged, or rather edged, with grey,
the high and noble brow, the quizzical geniality of his expression,
the sensitive mouth and the challenging directness of his grey-blue
eyes--all proclaim the original of a Coburn print, or a Max Beerbohm
cartoon. The balance between conventionality and _bizarrerie_, between
the serious thinker and the sardonic wit, is symbolized in eyebrows and
moustaches, one of each cocking humorously upward, the other gravely
preserving the level of dignity. This gives him, when he is in a gay
mood, the air of a genial Celtic Mephistopheles; and even when his
face is in repose this hirsute peculiarity imparts a sort of quaint
_diablerie_ to his expression. The delicate texture and excessive
pallor of his skin gives the note of distinction to his face; and his
eyes, whether turned full upon you with level gaze or dancing with
the light of irrepressible humour, are his most distinctive feature.
The frame for an artist's sketch of his profile would be a vertically
elongated rectangle--a curious cephalic conformation ready made to the
hand of the cartoonist.
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton's description, in his book, _The Ball and the
Cross_, of the sane professor of psychology whose ideas are wilder
than those of the lunatics under his charge, gives a rather startling
picture in semi-caricature--with slight variations--of the man Shaw:
“The advancing figure walked with a stoop, and yet, somehow, flung
his forked and narrow beard forward. That carefully cut and pointed
yellow beard was, indeed, the most emphatic thing about him. When he
clasped his hands behind him, under the tails of his coat, he would
wag his beard at a man like a big forefinger. It performed almost all
the gestures; it was more important than the glittering eye-glasses
through which he looked, or the beautiful, bleating voice in which he
spoke. His face and neck were of a lusty red, but lean and stringy;
he always wore his expensive gold-rim eye-glasses slightly askew upon
his aquiline nose, and he always showed two gleaming foreteeth under
his moustache, in a smile so perpetual as to earn the reputation of a
sneer.”
[Illustration: =G. B. S. (A Cartoon).=]
Reproduced from _Three Living Lions_.
_Joseph Simpson._
_Courtesy of the Artist._
The extravagant braggart and arrant _poseur_ of the Shavian myth
vanishes in the presence of the real Shaw. His playful pretence of
vanity is a source of great amusement to himself and his friends.
Socially, it is an admirable resource in the art of entertainment. “I
have never pretended that G. B. S. was real,” said Shaw the other day:
“I have over and over again taken him to pieces before the audience to
show the trick of him. And even those who, in spite of that, cannot
escape from the illusion, regard G. B. S. as a freak. The whole point
of the creature is that he is unique, fantastic, unrepresentative,
inimitable, impossible, undesirable on any large scale, utterly unlike
anybody that ever existed before, hopelessly unnatural, and void of
real passion. Clearly such a monster could do no harm, even were
his example evil (which it never is).” “The G. B. S. you know,” he
laughingly remarked to me one day, with a rapid shrug of the shoulders
and a deprecatory wave of the hand, “is merely a family joke with a
select circle. G. B. S. sometimes gets on my nerves; but he is a great
source of amusement to a small but highly enlightened audience. Of
course, there are lots of people in the world who regard me as a huge
joke; and perhaps I am as much responsible for the G. B. S. legend as
anybody else. But the vast majority of my readers,” he added, “are
serious persons who regard me as a serious person who has something
serious to impart.”
As an instance of the multiplicity of diverse impressions which Bernard
Shaw succeeds in evoking, consider his letter to P. F. Collier and Son.
Unknown to Shaw, his story, _Aërial Football_, was published during a
period within which the best story submitted was to receive a prize of
one thousand dollars. Shaw's letter in “acknowledgment” of Collier's
cheque evoked a thousand different expressions of opinion--ranging
between the opinion at one end of the scale that Shaw, as a great man
of letters, was entirely justified in his indignant protest at being
placed involuntarily in the position of competing for a money prize in
a fiction contest, and the opinion at the other end of the scale that
Shaw was playing a spectacular and sensational prank, and indulging
in a rather expensive form of advertisement. Shaw's letter speaks for
itself:
“SIR,--What do you mean by this unspeakable outrage? You send
me a cheque for a thousand dollars, and inform me that it is
a bonus offered by Messrs. P. F. Collier and Son for the best
story received during the quarter in which my contribution
appeared. May I ask what Messrs. P. F. Collier and Son expected
my story to be?
“If it were not the best they could get for the price they
were prepared to pay, they had no right to insert it at all.
If it was the best, what right have they to stamp their own
contributors publicly as inferior when they have taken steps
to secure the result beforehand by paying a special price to a
special writer?
“And what right have they to assume that I want to be paid
twice over for my work, or that I am in the habit of accepting
bonuses and competing for prizes?
“Waiving all these questions for a moment, I have another one
to put to you. How do Messrs. P. F. Collier and Son know that
my story was the best they received during the quarter? Are
they posterity? Are they the verdict of history? Have they even
the very doubtful qualification of being professional critics?
“I had better break this letter off lest I should be betrayed
into expressing myself as strongly as I feel. I return the
cheque. If you should see fit to use it for the purpose of
erecting a tombstone to Messrs. P. F. Collier and Son, I shall
be happy to contribute the epitaph, in which I shall do my best
to do justice to their monstrous presumption.
“G. BERNARD SHAW.”
In quite good humour the editor of _Collier's Weekly_ assured Mr.
Shaw that the award was a mistake. The “responsible” readers were out
of town, and the sporting editor, who was a devotee of football, a
vegetarian, a Socialist, a misanthrope, a misogynist--in short, a true
disciple of G. B. S.--made the award. Of course, on receipt of Mr.
Shaw's letter the sporting editor was summarily discharged!
[Illustration: =A Bust of Shaw.=]
By Auguste Rodin.
From the bronze original owned by Bernard Shaw. A marble replica is in
the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin.
_Alvin Langdon Coburn._ _Courtesy of the Sculptor._
The fantastic phenomenon “G. B. S.,” accredited by popular
superstition, after a long campaign on Shaw's part in the interest
of creating and fostering the legend, is a phenomenon that obviously
never could, never did, nor ever will, exist under the heavens. Indeed,
it is one of Mr. Shaw's foibles to insist that he is short of many
accomplishments which are fairly common, and in some ways an obviously
ignorant, stupid and unready man. Certainly it is not a little
strange that with all his remarkable knowledge of modern art, music,
literature, economics and politics, he speaks no language but his own,
and reads no foreign language, save French, with ease. I remember
hearing someone ask Rodin whether Shaw really spoke French. “Ah! no!”
replied Rodin, with his genial smile and a faint twinkle of the eyes;
“Monsieur Shaw does not speak French. But somehow or other, by the very
violence of his manner and gesticulation, he succeeds in _imposing_ his
meaning upon you!” Shaw is fond of relating the incident which laid
the foundation for his reputation as an Italian scholar. “Once I was
in Milan with a party of English folk. We were dining at the railway
restaurant, and our waiter spoke no language other than his own. When
the moment came to pay and rush for the train, we were unable to make
him understand that we wanted not one bill, but twenty-four separate
ones. My friends insisted that I must know Italian, so to act as
interpreter, I racked my memory for chips from the language of Dante,
but in vain. All of a sudden, a line from _The Huguenots_ flashed to my
brain: '_Ognuno per se: per tutti il ciel_' ('Every man for himself:
and heaven for all.') I declaimed it with triumphant success. The army
of waiters was doubled up with laughter, and my fame as an Italian
scholar has been on the increase ever since.”
As a rule, foreign critics rate Shaw higher as a thinker and
philosopher than as wit and dramatist. The painters and sculptors
likewise represent him as a personality of tremendous intellectual
force. The bust by Rodin--intermediate as a work of art between
his busts of Puvis de Chavannes and J. P. Laurens in the Musée de
Luxembourg--reveals the thoughtful student, of philosophic insight and
tremendous cerebration. Rodin, who finds Shaw “charming,” recently said
to Mrs. John van Vorst: “He is perhaps a 'fraud,' as you Americans put
it. But the first victim of Bernard Shaw's charlatanism is Bernard
Shaw himself. Susceptible to impressions as are all artists, and a
philosopher at the same time, he cannot do otherwise than deceive
himself. The cold reason which he could, were it unhampered, apply
to the problems of this life, is modified, reduced to vapour, by his
delicate temperamental sensitiveness and by his keen Irish sense of
humour. It is, in fact, to his Irish blood that Bernard Shaw, as
we know him, is due. With the cold Anglo-Saxon current only in his
veins, he would have proved the 'bore' _par excellence_ who tries
to divert us while reforming society, to win our applause by mere
idol-breaking.”[246] Also, in the Hon. Neville S. Lytton's portrait
of Shaw, after the Innocent X. of Velásquez, there is portrayed the
modern pope of wit and wisdom.[247] And the redoubtable logician, the
philosophic satirist, is admirably bodied forth in that remarkable
photograph of Shaw--the masterpiece in portraiture of Alvin Langdon
Coburn.[248]
The real Bernard Shaw is one of the most genial and delightfully
entertaining of men. In his London quarters, at Adelphi Terrace, or
in the quiet retreat of Ayot St. Lawrence, in Hertfordshire, he is
easy, hospitable and unaffectedly natural.[249] In his manner, the
combination of light spontaneity with a sort of effusive shyness
is peculiarly engaging. There is something strikingly transitory
about his presence: one always feels that he has just managed to
catch Shaw “on the fly.” While he not infrequently plays up to his
reputation for gay self-puffery, in such innocent diversions, for
example, as ecstatically admiring the Rodin bust or rhapsodizing over
Coburn's prints of him, it is always quite obviously with the humorous
consciousness that his listener is sharing in the imposture. The genius
of proverbial classification writes like an angel and talks like
Poor Poll; Shaw possesses the unique distinction of talking, whether
in his own home or upon the public platform, as trenchantly and as
brilliantly as he writes. Unlike many celebrated _raconteurs_, whose
ability consists almost solely in pouring forth a flood of polished
anecdote and personal reminiscence, Shaw talks with apparent ease
and equal wit upon any and every subject that comes to hand, from
Richard Wagner to Anthony Comstock, from spiritualism to bicycling,
from German philosophy to women's clothes. One is amused to discover
that his extreme acuteness in analyzing subjects upon which he is an
authority is equalled only by his marvellous glibness in talking of
things of which he can really know little or nothing. Far from taking
his cue from Coleridge or Wilde and monopolizing the conversation for
hours at a time, he makes an attentive and appreciative listener,
instantaneously responsive to clever characterization or thoughtful
analysis. A great tease and joker, he is perpetually telling upon his
friends devastatingly comic stories which they vehemently deny _in
toto_. When he is not poking fun at your views or drawing your fire by
carefully directed sarcasm, he is entertaining you with some humorous
episode in his own life--a tilt with Anatole France, perhaps, a bit of
repartee with which he turned the tables on Gilbert Chesterton, or an
illiterate person's joke on Shaw which for the time being completely
floored him.
I remember hearing him say that Anatole France and he, among others,
were once dining together in Paris, and with great brilliance France
spoke uninterruptedly for a long time about the strange type of men
called geniuses. At the conclusion, Shaw said: “Yes, I know all about
them, for I myself am a genius.” France, who knew virtually nothing of
Shaw, was taken aback for only a moment. “_Mais oui, monsieur_,” he
replied, “_et une courtisane se nomme une marchande de plaisir!_”
Simplicity and unostentation are the keynotes of Shaw's home life.
The ornate, the gaudy, the useless are banished from his scheme of
things. In his wife, a gracious person of great sweetness, he has
both a charming companion and an enthusiastic supporter in all his
multifarious activities. Mr. Shaw's retirement from the journalistic
lists was signalized by his marriage to Miss Charlotte Frances
Payne-Townshend, who nursed him back to health and strength--and
matrimony--after a serious accident. “I was very ill when I was
married,” Mr. Shaw once wrote, “altogether a wreck on crutches and
in an old jacket which the crutches had worn to rags. I had asked my
friends, Mr. Graham Wallas, of the London School Board, and Mr. Henry
Salt, the biographer of Shelley and De Quincey, to act as witnesses,
and, of course, in honour of the occasion they were dressed in their
best clothes. The registrar never imagined I could possibly be the
bridegroom; he took me for the inevitable beggar who completes all
wedding processions. Wallas, who is considerably over six feet high,
seemed to him to be the hero of the occasion, and he was proceeding to
marry him calmly to my betrothed, when Wallas, thinking the formula
rather strong for a mere witness, hesitated at the last moment and left
the prize to me.”
Shaw is the quintessence of vital energy. He rushes hither and thither,
from one task to another, with a feverish, almost frenzied activity.
“Bernard Shaw reminds me of a locomotive of the most modern type,”
said one of his intimate friends, “perfectly adjusted and running with
lightning speed--an engine of tremendous power and efficiency.” One is
liable to receive a first impression that Shaw is a delicate and anæmic
sort of person--an impression fostered by the mackintosh and gloves
he habitually wears and the umbrella he is fond of carrying. Once you
have seen the man in action, and realized his abundant vitality and
apparently inexhaustible store of nervous energy, you are not surprised
to note, in Coburn's nude portrait of Shaw, in the casually affected
pose of Rodin's _Le Penseur_, very massive shoulders and strong
muscular development in arms and back. “Mr. Bernard Shaw is New York
incarnate,” once wrote Miss Florence Farr. “Both of them are feverish
devotees at the altar of work. Empty Mr. Shaw and New York of work and
hurry, the man has a headache and closes his eyes in pain; he feels
no reason for existence; and the city is a desolation. To Mr. Shaw,
as to New York,” she pointedly added: “'doing nothing' is hell and
damnation.”[250]
As a conversationist, Mr. Shaw is the most witty and delightful person
imaginable. “Shaw is just a great big boy,” one of his intimate friends
said to me, “who enjoys life and the world and himself to the fullest
extent.” His enjoyment of his own anecdotes, witticisms, and strokes
of repartee is irresistibly contagious; you howl with merriment,
even when the joke is on you--and untrue to boot, as it often is.
Brevity is the soul of his wit; and yet his stories pour forth in a
perfect flood, and the coming of the “point” is duly heralded. The
bubbling, chuckling note in his voice, the hands rubbed together with
lightning-like rapidity, his body convulsively rocking back and forth
in his chair--then the “point” with a rush, followed by his mirthfully
expressive: “Well, you know----!”; he fairly doubles up, his head is
thrown back, his body shakes from head to foot, and his eyes dance
and glitter like the sea when struck full by the rays of the sun. His
habit is to turn his light batteries of genial sarcasm, satire and
irony upon those things which he perceives to be the especial objects
of your respect, admiration, or veneration; he invariably depreciates
and even ridicules those works of his own which you express an especial
liking for. In private conversation, as well as on the platform, he
is frequently engaged in drawing your fire and “putting you to your
trumps”; and he once laughingly remarked to me that nothing delighted
him more than to create around him a miniature reign of terror.[251]
Less strongly opinionated persons than himself, when challenged in
this way, are occasionally frightened into concealing or belying their
real views. I once heard one of Shaw's acquaintances say with much
harshness: “The astuteness and acumen of Bernard Shaw is little short
of miraculous. His power of making people say precisely what he wants
to hear, and at the same time what they don't necessarily believe, is
truly phenomenal, almost diabolic.” He always keeps his temper and
seldom goes beyond sharp, but good-humoured banter; but when attacked
upon some fundamental point in which his convictions are profoundly
engaged or the meaning of his life fundamentally misinterpreted, he
becomes a dangerous dialectic antagonist who unmasks upon his opponent
all the batteries of his keen satire, cutting logic and mordant
wit.[252]
[Illustration: =“A Prophet, the Press, and Some People.”=]
Reproduced from the original water-colour.
_Jessie Holliday._
_Courtesy of the Artist._
As a platform speaker and mob orator, Bernard Shaw is unique alike in
his incisive, metallic utterance and in the mystifying directness of
his paradoxes. It is genuinely amusing to watch him--the head and front
of Fabianism--at a meeting of the Fabian Society. Here he is truly
Sir Oracle: his opinion controls the policy of the society, as it has
done for many years. While the speaker is addressing the society, Mr.
Shaw is usually seated to the front and at the right of the platform,
his eye-glasses depending from the hook upon the breast of his coat,
his head bowed slightly forward, the fingers of his right hand lightly
resting across his lips. This striking figure, with face of deadly
pallor, eyes of steel blue, and general appearance of patient, amused
tolerance, is here the chief justice of the court, the critic of
highest authority. When he does not agree with the speaker, he shakes
his head with all the naïve assumption of infallibility; and when some
point is made which supports or clinches some well-known argument of
his own, he gravely nods with equal _sang-froid_--the air of the sage
encouraging promising youth. When he rises to speak, he dabbles with
no graceful preliminaries, but plunges at once in _medias res_, and,
with long forefinger upraised, sharply and mercilessly drives home
his paradoxical point with all the deadly accuracy of the practised
duellist. Whilst Shaw uses the rapier of cold logic in debate, and is
merciless in penetrating the joints in his opponents' armour, he is
scrupulously fair and just. His audiences, even at the Fabian meetings,
seldom fully endorse, or even seem to understand thoroughly, the full
significance and implication of his position; the applause at the
close of one of his speeches is, not infrequently, less vigorous and
unanimous than at the beginning. And after the meeting is over, one may
observe groups of excited Fabians, scattered here and there, vehemently
debating as to what Bernard Shaw really meant, and as to whether, after
all, what he said was to be taken _au grand sérieux_!
It is a strange and inexplicable mystery that, whenever a man makes a
genuine effort to disencumber himself of all traditional sentiment and
contemporary prejudice, and to express himself with perfect _naïveté_
and impartiality, the British public immediately concludes that
he is a frivolous jester. Mr. William Archer, however, is of opinion
that Shaw is far less free from sentiment than he appears. “I suspect
Bernard Shaw of being constitutionally an arrant sentimentalist,
whose abhorrence of sentiment is as the shrinking of the dipsomaniac
from the single drop of alcohol which he knows will make his craving
ungovernable!” If this humorous conjecture be correct, the mania is
assuredly a furtive one. On occasion Bernard Shaw enjoys to the full
playing with his public and flaunting a red rag at the British Bull,
named John; when he chooses he airily plays to perfection the parts of
_jongleur_ and _matador_ rolled into one. “It is an astounding thing
that people so thoroughly fail to understand me,” Mr. Shaw remarked to
me one day. “All that is necessary is discrimination, a strong sense of
humour, and ability to occupy my point of view for the time being. Of
course, I get no end of fun out of fluttering the dove-cotes. I love
to leave fire and desolation in my path--to create the impression that
I am a terrible fellow to deal with. The great difficulty with most
people is to distinguish between my moods--when I am joking, and when I
am serious; they can't see how anyone can joke about serious things. I
am continually being asked all sorts of silly questions, and I am human
enough”--this with a twinkle in the grey-blue eyes and an expressive
wave of the hand--“to enjoy mystifying people who labour under the
misfortune of being born without a sense of humour. Why, only the other
day some innocent had the temerity to ask me if I were really serious
in all that I said, wrote and did.
“'My dear sir,' I replied, with the air of all earnestness and
conviction, 'if you really believe me to be serious, it is unnecessary
for me to assure you of the fact. If you do not believe me to be
serious, it is equally unnecessary to assure you of something you would
not believe.'”
It is related that on one occasion a student just beginning his studies
as a naturalist, walked into a bookstore and ignorantly asked: “Have
you any books by the great Buffoon (meaning Buffon, of course)?”
Whereupon the clerk, without the slightest hesitation, presented the
applicant with the latest work of Bernard Shaw!
I have been interested to discover, through acquaintance with Bernard
Shaw and the late Mark Twain, that their views as to the fundamental
nature of man are in many respects identical. Their thoroughly
human, wise views of man, his failings and limitations, might easily
be regarded as cynical by thoughtless persons; in reality, their
“cynicism” is nothing more nor less than a profound knowledge of human
nature. Shaw, who has the very highest admiration for Mark Twain, both
as sociologist and humorist, once said: “Of course, he is in very much
the same position as myself. He has to put matters in such a way as
to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking.”
Shaw was once asked why he was always so cynical; to which he replied,
without hesitation or embarrassment, that he could not account for his
cynicism--that it must be accepted as the primary and original product
of his own genius. “I am not a cynic at all,” Mr. Shaw once told me,
leaning forward in his chair and speaking with convincing earnestness,
“if by cynic is meant one who disbelieves in the inherent goodness of
man. Nor am I a pessimist, if by pessimist is meant one who despairs
of human virtue or the worth of living. But all this babble about the
search for happiness does not impose on me in the slightest degree.
Remember the incident of Napoleon:
“'Could I be what I am, little one, cared I only for happiness?'
“Life is worth living for its own sake, and for the sake of the general
welfare of humanity. It is a common error to mistake a penetrating
critic for a confirmed cynic. I owe my success as a critic, not to any
quality of cynicism, but to a searching power of analysis.”
Strangely enough, this advocate of life for its own sake is charged
in many quarters, and notably by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, with being
feelingless, rationalistic and a Puritan of the Puritans. It is quite
true that in matters of food, drink, dress and sanitation, Shaw is
scientifically hygienic and Puritanical--if Puritanical be the just
word for this attitude of mind. In his views concerning the relations
of the sexes, there is no evidence to show that he is one whit more
Puritanical than George Meredith, who advocated marriages limited
to a specified time. Mr. Shaw one day told me a good story about an
argument he had with Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. “Chesterton _would_
insist upon calling _me_, the author of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_
and _Man and Superman_, a Puritan,” explained Shaw. “'Of course,
Shaw, I admire your hard and frigid Puritanism,' said Chesterton,
'but, for Heaven's sake, indulge in a little frivolity now and then.
Fling away, if only for the moment, your terrible burden of duty.'
'My dear Chesterton,' I replied, 'you cannot deceive me by declaring
me to be a Puritan. You pretend to be attacking Puritanism when you
say that, despite my splendid love of truth, my deficiency in fully
comprehending truth springs from a neglect of the great gaieties out
of which Romance is born. What you call an attack on Puritanism is
nothing but a veiled defence of excess.'” “And do you know,” added
Shaw--clearly exhibiting the irreconcilability of the two philosophies
of life--“Chesterton--Chesterton, our English Rabelais--actually
admitted it!”
Most persistent of all these accusations made against Shaw is that
he is a case of intellect almost pure, without feelings and without
heart. Were it fitting, I could cite many instances of Mr. Shaw's
generosity, benevolence and philanthropy--true stories which have come
to me without my seeking and without Mr. Shaw's knowledge. I happen to
know that Shaw has the utmost abhorrence for “those abominable bastard
Utopias of genteel charity, in which the poor are first robbed and
then pauperized by way of compensation, in order that the rich man
may combine the idle luxury of the protected thief with the unctuous
self-satisfaction of the pious philanthropist.” Shaw is continually
engaged in assisting people in various ways--frequently without their
knowledge and always in such a way as to avoid the radical error of
permitting them to suffer in self-respect. Shaw believes in helping
other people to help themselves. He will take any amount of trouble
for a friend, and he has materially assisted innumerable people who
had not one iota of claim upon his time or his services. His courtesy
is of the truest sort, without affectation or pretence; and one of his
acquaintances recently said: “My memory of the cheerful and easy grace
of Bernard Shaw's instant considerateness and simple courtesy, when he
believed himself to be unobserved and unrecognized, remains with me as
among the most delightful impressions I have ever collected of a large
mind taking pleasant and friendly cognizance of the importance of the
little everyday acts of good-fellowship which make this world a less
irksome place to sojourn in than it would otherwise be.” If Shaw has
deeply angered many people by his unrestrained outspokenness, he has
also given many people both pleasure and happiness, by his generosity,
his brilliant wit, and his sanity of spirit. Recall one of the finest
of his maxims: “We have no more right to consume happiness without
producing it than we have to consume wealth without producing it.”
I once asked Mr. Shaw what answer he had to make to the statement that
he was a bloodless, passionless, intellectual machine. His answer made
upon me a more profound impression than anything that has ever occurred
in my association with him.
“Look here,” he replied, the utmost earnestness moulding his
expression, “real feeling is the most difficult thing in the world to
recognize. A parable will serve. Two men are walking down the crowded
Strand, gazing at the vast throng of people as they hurry along with
a thousand different aims. To one, the spectacle signifies nothing
more than the ordinary metropolitan aspect of the greatest city in the
world. The other sees in the spectacle a company of men and angels
ascending and descending an endless ladder which reaches from earth to
heaven. The one passes a starving child whose face is pinched with the
cold; he shudders with discomfort, draws his greatcoat tighter around
him, and, after giving the child a penny, passes on, thanking God that
he is not as other men are. The other man regards the little waif with
infinite compassion, his heart goes out in profoundest sympathy, and
his whole being protests against the social system which makes such
things possible. And he devotes his life, not to giving pennies to
individual sufferers, but to exposing the conditions which produce
such horrors and to agitating for such reforms as will mitigate these
horrors, and eventually render them impossible.”
The close and searching student of Bernard Shaw's work and personality
cannot fail to detect, beneath the surface, the profound and passionate
sentiment which runs through his entire life. In his fierce reaction
against the puerile sentimentalities, the fraudulent romance, the
loathsome eroticism of modern art and life, one can detect the spur
of real sentiment and passion. The pure love of man and woman,
physically congruent and temperamentally compatible, he regards as
the ideal condition for the progressive evolution of the race. And he
once assured me of his conviction that such marriages, eventuating
in children sound in mind and body, were best from every possible
standpoint; but that in actual experience, marriages of this sort are
in a hopeless minority. Shaw's fundamental Socialism prompts him to
batter down the social barriers which set off the aristocrats from the
common people--those barriers which result in the aristocracy feeding
upon its own vitality, breeding and in-breeding, until the sexual
product is hopelessly anæmic and degenerate. Stronger, better, saner
men and women, Shaw believes, would be bred through the intermarriage
of the duchess and the navvy; he strongly advocates the experiment, not
simply for the sake of breaking down the social barriers, but primarily
for the cause of the ultimate betterment of the race.
It is Shaw's chief distinction that, for the sake of sentiment, he
would deny sentiment. “I verily believe,” a distinguished author once
remarked to me, “that Mr. Shaw lives in mortal terror of the public
for fear it will discover his great secret: the possession of a warm
heart.” His reaction is not against the sentiment which civic virtue
and personal integrity bespeak, but against the popular clap-trap,
romanticized notion of sentiment which to the unilluded goes by
the name of sentimentality. Bernard Shaw is a man of tremendous
sentiment--social and humanitarian sentiment. Sociologic thought and
social service are the ruling moral passions of his life.
“The final ideal for civic life,” he said in a public address not long
ago, “is that every man and every woman should set before themselves
this goal--that by the labour of their lifetime they shall pay
the debt of their rearing and their education, and also contribute
sufficient for a handsome maintenance during their old age. And more
than that: why should not a man say: 'When I die my country shall be in
my debt.' Any man who has any religious belief will have the dream that
it is not only possible to die with his country in his debt but with
God in his debt also.”
The germ of Shaw's philosophy of life may be found in these words:
“I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and
as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can.
“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work,
the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief
candle' for me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold
of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
before handing it on to future generations.”
FOOTNOTES:
[245] The journal of the Chirological Society, edited by Mrs. K. St.
Hill and Mr. Charles F. Rideal.
[246] _Rodin and Bernard Shaw_, by Mrs. John van Vorst; in _Putnam's
Monthly and the Critic_, February, 1908.
[247] Unfortunately this portrait has a somewhat flouting and cynical
expression, produced chiefly by the protruding under-lip. In answer
to a question of mine on the subject, in which I pointed out that
the feature was untrue to life, Mr. Lytton replied: “The unfortunate
expression to which you refer does not represent my interpretation of
Bernard Shaw's character or attitude towards the world, but is the
result of my effort to accentuate the likeness of Shaw to the original
of Velásquez. Personally, I am a great admirer of Bernard Shaw.”
[248] The photogravure facing page 468.
[249] One night about eleven o'clock, just after finishing the
discussion of certain portions of the present work, I remember asking
Mr. Shaw how he happened to take the place in Hertfordshire. “Come with
me and I will show you,” he said; and we wandered across the common
in the moonlight over to the old English church, redolent of mystery
and sanctity. Shaw pointed to the inscription on a tomb near by: “Jane
Eversley. Born, 1815. Died, 1895. Her time was short.” “I thought,”
said Shaw, “that if it could be truthfully said of a woman who lived to
be eighty years old that her time was short, then this was just exactly
the climate for me.”
[250] Shaw suffers from periodical headaches, which come about once
a month, and last a day. “Don't you ever suffer any ill effects from
the terrible hardships you have to undergo in the bleak northern
latitudes?” Shaw inquired one day of Fridtjof Nansen, the great
Arctic explorer. “Yes,” replied Nansen, “I suffer with the most
frightful headaches.” “Have you never tried to discover a cure for the
headache?” asked Shaw. “Why, no!” replied Nansen. “I never thought of
such a thing!” “Well, my dear fellow,” said Shaw, “that is the most
astonishing thing I have ever heard. Here you have spent a lifetime
trying to discover the North Pole, that nobody in the world cares
tuppence about, and you have never even tried to discover a cure for
the headache, which the whole world is crying for.”
[251] The delightful way in which Lady Randolph Churchill “squelched”
him on the occasion of one of his terrorizing utterances is eminently
worthy of quotation. In answer to her invitation to a luncheon party,
Shaw wrote: “Certainly not! What have I done to provoke such an attack
on my well-known habit?” To which she replied: “Know nothing of your
habits; hope they are not as bad as your manners.” Shaw then wrote
her a long letter of “explanation”--leaving the victory with the
lady.--_Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill_, in the _Century
Magazine_, September, 1908.
[252] Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Adelphi Terrace
quarters is the inscription cut in the enamel headboard of the
mantelpiece--an inscription vitally characteristic of Shaw, the
free-thinker and _intransigéant_--taken from the walls of Holyrood
Palace:
“_Thay say. Quhat say thay? Lat thame say!_”
APPENDIX
[Illustration: =Genealogical Chart of the Shaw Family
OF COUNTIES TIPPERARY, KILKENNY AND DUBLIN,
TOGETHER WITH OTHER LINEAL ANCESTORS OF
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW.=]
INDEX
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 400-1.
_Academy_, 246, 287.
Achurch, Janet, 299, 304, 353-4.
_Actors' Society Monthly Bulletin, The_, 369.
Adams, Maurice, 104.
Addison, Joseph, 199.
Ade, George, 136.
Adelphi Terrace, 20.
_Admirable Bashville, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Aldwych Theatre, 401.
Alexander, George, 183, 282.
Allen, Grant, 279.
Allen, Rev. G. W., 102.
Alma-Tadema, Sir L., 287.
_Amateur Photographer_, 226.
Anderton's Hotel, 115, 131.
Angelo, Michael, 31, 46, 90, 153, 218-9, 225, 243, 291, 393.
Archer, William, 20, 75, 84, 90, 91, 142, 251, 297, 306,
315, 327, 333, 369, 413, 417, 443;
and _Cashel Byron's Profession_, 61, 76;
first sees Shaw, 97;
and Shaw's career as a critic, 195;
and Shaw's musical criticisms, 232-3;
and Shaw's dramatic criticisms, 279 _et sqq._, 286;
collaborates with Shaw, 293, 295;
and Shaw as a dramatist, 299;
and _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, 307-8, 363, 425;
and _Arms and the Man_, 316-17;
and _You Never Can Tell_, 325;
and Shaw's greatest work, 378;
and _Major Barbara_, 387;
and _The Doctor's Dilemma_, 390 _et sqq._;
and stage directions, 419;
and _Widowers' Houses_, 445;
and Shaw's sentiment, 507.
_Arms and the Man._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Arnold, Matthew, 96.
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 299.
_Art Moderne, L'_, 348.
_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 484.
Augier, E., 294.
_Author, The_, 91.
Aveling, Dr., 114, 160, 164, 261.
Avenue Theatre, 312 _et sqq._, 316.
Bab, Julius, 85, 249, 402.
Bach, 236, 240, 252.
Bahr, Hermann, 198, 353, 358, 410, 414, 424.
Bakunin, Michel, 98, 189, 247.
Balfour, Right Hon. A. J., 372, 404.
Ball Publishing Co., 111.
Barker, Granville, 286, 368, 371-2, 388, 398, 446.
Barnby, Sir Joseph, 237.
Barrie, J. M., 404.
Barry, James, 200.
Bashkirtseff, Marie, 5, 273.
Bax, Belfort, 51, 98, 164, 485-6;
his article, _Socialism and Bourgeois Culture_, 159.
Beaumarchais, 23.
Beaumont and Fletcher, 264, 366.
Bebel, F. A., 152, 180, 186.
Beerbohm, Max, 231, 288, 339, 363, 394, 425, 496.
Beethoven, 18, 23-4, 73, 153, 240, 243, 250, 257, 393.
Beeton, 158.
Bell, Chichester, 34-5, 44.
Bellamy, Edward, 152.
Bellini, 18.
Bennett, Sterndale, 237.
Berlioz, 234, 257.
Bernstein, Eduard, 165.
Besant, Mrs. Annie, 52, 92, 109, 113 _et sqq._, 125, 133,
144, 160, 165, 178, 283, 484.
Beyle, Henri, 20, 412, 463.
Birmingham, George A., 401.
Bispham, David, 238.
Bizet, 24, 61.
Blake, William, 447, 454 _et sqq._, 466, 469, 473.
Bland, Hubert, 67, 99, 102, 114 _et sqq._, 128-9, 169, 175, 178.
Bland, Mrs. Hubert, 128-9.
Blavatsky, Madame, 127.
Blum, M. Jean, 337.
Booth, General, 387.
Borchardt, Miss, 484.
Borsa, Mario, 270.
_Boston Transcript_, 287.
Bouguereau, W. A., 222.
Bourget, Paul, 416, 464.
Bradlaugh, Charles, 137-8, 144, 160, 176.
Braekstad, Hans L., 272.
Brahms, 241, 243.
Brandes, Dr. Georg, 306, 307, 311, 313, 347, 359-60, 418, 464.
Brentanos, 54-5.
Brieux, Eugène, 432, 439.
Brooke, Stopford, 15, 93, 208.
Brown, Ford Madox, 212, 219-20.
Browning, Robert, 31-2, 40, 219, 412, 415, 466.
Browning Society, 135.
Bruneau, 245.
Brunetière, Ferdinand, 307, 309.
Bryant, D. Sophia, 37-8.
Bülow, Hans Von, 241.
Bunyan, John, 268, 447, 473.
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 206, 212, 221, 225.
Burne-Jones, Lady, 206.
Burns, Right Hon. John, 112 _et sqq._, 127, 142, 166, 174.
Burrows, 113.
Butler, Samuel, 480, 483.
Byron, Lord, 143, 215, 364.
_Cæsar and Cleopatra._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Cairnes, J. E., 155.
Calderon, 432.
Calvé, Mme., 245.
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 372.
Campbell, Lady Colin, 212.
Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 228, 392.
_Candida._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
_Candid Friend, The_, 42, 60, 98, 147, 202, 476.
_Captain Brassbound's Conversion._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Carlyle, Thomas, 253, 271, 336, 434, 457, 474.
Carnegie, Andrew, 383, 385.
Carpaccio, 227.
Carpenter, Captain Alfred, 99.
Carpenter, Edward, 50, 99, 114.
Carroll, Rev. William George, 15.
_Cashel Byron's Profession._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
_Caxton Magazine_, 211.
Cellier, Alfred, 233.
_Century Magazine_, 505.
Chamberlain, Right Hon. Joseph, 404.
Chamfort, Nicholas, 456.
Champion, Henry Hyde, 48, 51, 52-3, 102, 112 _et sqq._, 125, 155.
_Chap-Book, The_, 29, 57, 149.
Chapman and Hall, 47.
Chapman, George, 264.
Charrington, Charles, 354.
Charrington, Mrs. _See_ ACHURCH.
Chaucer, 221.
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 9, 190, 202, 354, 413, 415, 435, 436,
453, 472, 489, 496, 503, 508-9.
Chopin, 23, 25.
_Christian Socialist, The_, 47.
Chubb, Percival, 102.
Civic and Dramatic Guild, 402.
_Clarion, The_, 385, 390, 422.
Clarke, M.A., William, 100 _et sqq._;
his _The Fabian Society_, 111, 129, 136.
_Clerk, The_, 22.
Cobden, Richard, 168.
Coburn, Alvin L., 224 _et sqq._, 496, 501 _et sqq._
Collier and Son, P. F., 498-9.
Colvin, Sidney, 53.
Comedy Theatre, 295.
_Common Sense of Municipal Trading, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Common, Thomas, 485.
Comte, Auguste, 102, 168.
Constable and Co., Archibald, 55, 183, 399.
_Contemporary Review_, 183, 385.
Corbett, James J., 72.
Corbin, John, 319, 321, 344, 373.
Correggio, 221.
Courtney, W. L., 63, 80, 81, 177, 286.
Court Theatre, 277, 285, 286, 324, 345, 368-9, 371-2, 388, 402.
Cowen, Sir Fred, 237.
Crane, Walter, his _An Artist's Reminiscences_, 112.
Crawford, Rev. William, 16.
Criterion Theatre, 295.
Cunningham, Edward, 158.
Cunningham, W., 159.
_Daily Chronicle, The_, 100, 164, 212, 248, 305, 312, 331.
_Daily News, The_, 75, 91, 419.
Daly, Arnold, 315, 326, 346.
D'Annunzio, Gabriel, 416, 419.
_Dark Lady of the Sonnets, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Darwin, Charles, 92, 94, 96, 102, 123, 153, 261, 476, 483;
his _Descent of Man_, 97.
Davidson, Thomas, 102-4, 173.
Davis, 114.
Day, Holland, 228.
Delaroche, Paul, 200, 224.
Delia Robbia, 221.
Demachy, 228.
De Quincey, Thomas, 51, 153, 161, 359, 503.
De Reszke, Édouard, 238, 445.
De Reszke, Jean, 238, 245, 445.
_Devil's Disciple, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Dialectical Society, 92-3, 271.
Dickens, Charles, 41, 253, 361, 416, 443, 473.
_Die Zeit_, 165.
Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield, 98, 124, 144, 205, 262.
_Doctor's Dilemma, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Dolmetsch, Arnold, 237.
Donald, 114.
Donatello, 221.
_Don Giovanni_, 18, 23.
Donisthorpe, Wordsworth, 114, 125.
Donizetti, 18, 23.
_Don Juan in Hell._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
_Dramatic Opinions and Essays._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Dryden, John, 476.
Drysdale, Dr., 93.
Dublin, Shaw born at, 3;
Shaw's early life in, 3 _et sqq._
Dumas, Alexandre, 61, 67.
Dumas, Alexandre _fils_, 413.
Düsel, Friedrich, 337.
Dvorak, 241.
_Echo, The_, 231.
Economic Club, The, 158.
_Economic Journal, The_, 158.
Edgeworth, F. Y., 158-9.
Edison, Thomas A., 44.
Edward VII., 311, 372.
Edwards, Clement, 142.
Edwards, Osmon, 270.
Eliot, George, 92, 94, 96, 305.
Ellis, Alexander, 91.
Ellis, Ashton, 393.
Ellis, Havelock, 102.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 439.
Engel, Louis, 235.
Engels, Friedrich, 106, 163, 167, 181.
_English Illustrated Magazine_, 244.
English Land Restoration League, The, 47, 99.
Fabian Essays in Socialism. _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Fabian Society, The, 39, 47, 52, 56, 89 _et sqq._,
173 _et sqq._, 231, 280.
Faguet, Émile, 84, 250.
Farr, Florence, 329, 504.
_Faust_, 18.
_Fellowship of the New Life, The._ _See_ THE FABIAN SOCIETY.
_Figaro, Le_, 348.
Filon, Augustin, 300, 336, 344-5, 367, 445, 449.
Fitzgerald, C. L., 111.
Fontenelle, 416.
Foote, G. W., 114, 131, 138 _et sqq._, 482.
Ford, Rev. F. W., 125.
_Fortnightly Review, The_, 24, 60, 187.
Foxwell, 158-9.
France, Anatole, 144, 449, 502-3.
_Freethinker, The_, 482.
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 51.
Frost, Percy, 155-6.
Funk and Wagnalls Co., 268.
Furniss, Harry, 327.
Furnival, Dr. F. J., 135.
Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, 402.
Galsworthy, John, 372.
Galton, Sir Francis, F.R.S., 492.
Garcke, Emil, 91.
Garland, Hamlin, 152.
Garrick, David, 196.
Garrick Theatre, 295.
George, Henry, 47-8, 50, 56, 90, 117, 153 _et sqq._, 176, 178;
his _Progress and Poverty_, 94, 96, 102, 152, 154-5, 178.
George, Henry, Jr., 95, 152.
George, Right Hon. Lloyd, 175.
Gerster, 239.
_Gestalten und Gedanken_, 313.
_Getting Married._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Gibson, Dr. Burns, 102, 104.
Gilbert, Sir W. S., 237, 303, 316 _et sqq._, 433, 456 _et sqq._;
his _Palace of Truth_, 318 _et sqq._
Gissing, George, 415.
Godard, J. G., 91.
Goethe, 23, 306, 364, 412, 434.
Goncourt, Edmond de, 440.
Gonner, E. C. K., 135.
Gordon, General, 312.
Gorki, Maxim, 432.
Gounod, 18, 24.
Graham, Cunninghame, 113, 306, 314, 328.
Grant, Corrie, 125.
_Great Thoughts_, 480.
Greene, Robert, 264.
Greenwood, Frederick, 200.
Gregory, Lady, 400.
Grein, J. T., 293, 295, 309, 321, 358.
Greuze, 228.
Greville, Eden, 293.
Grove, Sir George, 236.
_Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre_, 161.
Grundy, Sydney, 282, 284.
Guèsde, 152, 166, 180.
Guilbert, Yvette, 345.
Gurly, Lucinda Elizabeth. _See_ MRS. G. C. SHAW.
Gurly, Walter Bagenal, 7.
Hadden, Caroline, 104.
Hagemann, Herr Carl, 410.
Haldane, Right Hon. R. B., 132 _et sqq._
Hale, Professor, 426.
Hall, Andrew, 113.
Hals, Franz, 227.
Hamon, Auguste, 165, 309-10, 353, 439.
Hampstead Historic Club, 128 _et sqq._, 157.
Handel, 18, 23, 233, 257.
Hankin, St. John, 372.
Hapgood, Norman, 325, 411.
Hardie, Keir, 187.
Hardy, Thomas, 55, 368.
Hare, Sir John, 282.
Harper and Brothers, 54-5.
_Harper's Bazaar_, 85.
Harris, Frank, 261, 266.
Harris, Sir Augustus, 216, 245, 278, 287.
Hart, Sir Robert, 16.
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 413, 464.
Hausemann, William A., 340, 456, 486.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 25.
Hay, John, 189.
Haydn, 36.
Haymarket Theatre, 321.
Headlam, Rev. Stewart, 48, 114.
Hebbel Theater, 301.
Heine, Heinrich, 3, 47, 201, 413, 457.
Helmholtz, Hermann Von, 44.
Henderson, Archibald, 484.
Henley, W. E., 53, 212, 214 _et sqq._, 282.
Henry and Co., 205, 298.
Hensley, Lewis, his _The Scholar's Algebra_, 158.
Herwegh, Georg, 51.
_Hibbert Journal_, 471.
Hichens, Robert, 261.
Hinton, Horsley, 228.
Hinton, Mrs., 104.
Hodgskin, 155.
Hodgson, R., 127.
Hogarth, William, 227-8, 422, 473.
Holbein, 227.
Hollman, 239.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, his _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, 89.
Hooghe, Peter de, 224.
Hope, Laurence, 392.
Hoppner, John, 228.
Horniman, Miss, 401.
_How He Lied to Her Husband._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Hudson Theatre, 365.
Hughes, 114.
Hugo, Victor, 23, 59, 250, 432, 434, 443.
Humanitarian League, The, 49.
_Humanitarian, The_, 435.
Huneker, James G., 84-5, 246, 275, 350, 366, 375, 418.
Huxley, Thomas, 92, 94, 96-7, 443, 476-7.
Hyndman, H. M., 98, 110, 112-3, 127, 138, 152, 156-7, 159, 160, 164-5,
167 _et sqq._, 173-4, 200, 206, 302, 368;
his _Economics of Socialism_, 162;
his _Marx's Theory of Value_, 164-5.
Ibsen, Henrik, 14, 25, 39, 59, 90, 143, 198, 237, 247, 299 _et sqq._,
415, 432, 447, 455, 460, 471, 480;
Shaw compared to, 61-2, 304, 316, 420 _et sqq._, 458;
his _Love's Comedy_, 78, 347;
his _Little Eyolf_, 81;
his _The Master Builder_, 81;
the controversy on, 248-9;
Shaw's championship of, 263, 272 _et sqq._, 305,
389-90;
his mission, 269;
Shaw's admiration for, 270;
his _A Doll's House_, 271, 274, 299, 314, 338, 433, 439;
his _Peer Gynt_, 273;
his _Emperor and Galilean_, 273, 460;
his _The Pillars of Society_, 271, 274;
his _An Enemy of the People_, 274, 297, 439, 456-7;
his _Ghosts_, 274, 296, 305, 307;
his _The Wild Duck_, 274;
his _Rosmersholm_, 274;
his _The Lady from the Sea_, 274, 347;
his _Hedda Gabler_, 274;
criticized by Shaw, 303;
his death, 389;
and stage directions, 417-18.
_Immaturity._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Independent Theatre Society, 293, 295, 309, 321.
Ingersoll, Robert G., 92.
Ingres, Jean, 219.
_Interlude at the Playhouse, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Ireland, its irreligion, 8-9;
National Gallery of, 19, 31;
land agency in, 21;
described in _John Bull's Other Island_, 372 _et sqq._
Irish National Theatre Society, 401.
_Irish Times, The_, 400.
_Irrational Knot, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Irving, Sir Henry, 216, 287 _et sqq._
Irwin, Will, 270.
Jackson, Holbrook, 11, 175, 447.
James, Henry, 64, 284, 394, 416, 454.
James, S. T., 259.
Jaurès, Jean, 144, 152, 166, 180, 186, 486.
Jefferies, Richard, 51.
Jevons, Stanley, 155-6, 159 _et sqq._;
his _Letters and Journal_, 160;
his _Theory of Political Economy_, 161.
Joachim, Joseph, 240-1.
_John Bull's Other Island._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Johnson, Dr., 479.
Jones, Benjamin, 132.
Jones, Henry Arthur, 210, 257, 263, 282 _et sqq._
Jonson, Ben, 264, 266.
_Journal des Débats_, 350.
Jowett, Benjamin, 262.
Joynes, James Leigh, 48, 50-1, 90, 94, 155.
Jupp, W. I., 104.
_Justice_, 164-5.
Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 200, 224.
Keats, John, 40, 215.
Kerr, Alfred, 340, 438.
Kingsway Theatre, The, 402, 403.
Knight, William, his _Memorials of Thomas Davidson_, 104.
Knowles, Sheridan, 415.
Kropotkin, Prince, 98, 108, 152, 170, 173.
Lamarck, Jean, 480, 483-4, 488.
Lamb, Charles, 6, 266, 447.
_Land Nationalization Society_, 95.
Land Reform Union. _See_ ENGLISH LAND RESTORATION LEAGUE.
Lane, John, 270.
Lane, Joseph, 114.
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 98, 127, 152, 165, 168, 173, 176, 178, 271, 457.
“Law and Liberty League,” 113.
Lecky, James, 90 _et sqq._, 122, 235.
Leeds Art Club, 175.
Lee, George J. V., 17-8, 22, 37.
Le Gallienne, Richard, 232.
Leighton, Sir Frederick, 219.
Leschetizky, 239.
_Le Temps_, 277.
Levy, 131.
Lewes, George H., 201, 233.
_Liberty_, 189, 246.
Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 98, 152, 166, 172-3, 180-1.
Lind, Letty, 254.
Linnell, John, 228.
Lippi, Fra Filippo, 221.
Liszt, Abbé, 23, 257.
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 385.
_Lohengrin_, 35.
London Stage Society, 380.
Longfellow, Henry W., 24.
Loraine, Robert, 43, 302, 315, 368.
_Love Among the Artists._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
_Lucrezia Borgia_, 18.
Luther, Martin, 469-70.
Lyceum Theatre, 282, 343.
Lytton, Hon. Neville S., 501.
Lytton, Lord, 297.
Macaulay, Thomas B., 199.
MacCarthy, Desmond, 324, 339.
_McClure's Magazine_, 329.
Macdonald, J., 111.
McEvoy, Charles, 380.
McKail, J. W., 212.
McKee, Rev. T. A., 16.
Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, 236.
Macmillan Co., The, 340, 456.
McNulty, Edward, 34;
his _Misther O'Ryan_, _The Son of a Peasant_ and _Maureen_, 33.
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 134, 224, 368, 415, 463-4.
_Mainly About People_, 1.
Mallock, W. H., 59, 60, 186-7.
Malthus, Thomas R., 92-3, 168.
_Man and Superman._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Mann, Tom, 113.
_Man of Destiny, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Mansfield, Richard, 54, 315, 342-3, 355, 358.
Mantegna, 46, 225, 227.
Marbot, his _Memoirs_, 312.
Maris, James, 222.
Marlowe, Christopher, 264.
Marshall, Alfred, 158.
Marston, John, 264.
Marx, Eleanor, 261, 272.
Marx, Karl, 50, 79, 90, 128, 151-2, 159, 173, 176, 178, 181,
261, 271, 457;
his _Das Kapital_, 96 _et sqq._, 106, 155 _et sqq._,
160 _et sqq._, 293.
Masefield, John, 372.
Massenet, Jules, 245.
Massingham, H. W., 231.
Mathews, Charles, 317.
Matthews, Brander, 416.
Maude, Aylmer, his _Life of Tolstoy_, 399.
Maude, Cyril, 321, 328.
Maupassant, Guy de, 304-5, 316.
Melba, Mme., 24.
Mendelssohn, Felix, 18, 24, 233, 243.
Menger, Anton, 161.
Meredith, George, 46-47, 77, 201, 278, 461, 471, 509;
his _Essay on Comedy_, 278.
Merimée, Prosper, 24.
Methuen and Co., 112.
_Metropolitan Magazine_, 227, 351.
Meyerbeer, 24, 243.
Meyerfeld, Dr. Max, 43, 426.
Millerand, 166.
Mill, John Stuart, 91-2, 94, 96, 102, 123, 153, 157, 466.
Milton, John, 139.
Mirabeau, 339.
_Misalliance._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Modern Press, The, 155.
Moffat, Yard and Co., 343.
Molière, 23, 130, 270, 278, 306, 320, 361, 364, 370, 378, 394,
439, 443, 449.
Mommsen, Theodor, 335.
Monet, Claude, 222.
Moody and Sankey, 10-11, 27, 33.
Moore, George, 202.
Moore, Samuel, 160.
Moore, Thomas, 243.
_Morning Leader_, 91.
Morris, May, 261.
Morris, William, 90, 98, 152, 173, 261, 271, 434, 457, 473;
makes Shaw's acquaintance, 52;
and _Cashel Byron's Profession_, 74;
on parents and children, 92;
his influence on Shaw, 99, 205;
and the Fabian Society, 114-5;
and the Socialist League, 137;
and the value theory, 164;
Shaw's ignorance of, 206;
his Socialist views, 207;
Shaw's obituary notice of, 209, 212;
his artistic integrity, 210-11;
his mastery of English, 221;
and Shaw's article on Nordau, 246.
Mozart, 18, 24, 32, 36, 90, 214, 218, 240, 243-4, 248-9, 257, 364, 393.
_Munsey's Magazine_, 293.
Muret, M. Maurice, 349-50.
Nansen, Fridtjof, 504.
Napier, Dr. T. B., 125.
Napoleon, 342 _et sqq._, 508.
Napoleon III., 93.
_Nation_, 250, 287, 401.
_National Observer_, 214.
_National Reformer_, 160, 164.
National Secular Society, 114, 160.
National Service League, 405.
Nesbit, E. _See_ MRS. H. BLAND.
_Neue Freie Presse_, 287, 343.
_New Age, The_, 175, 246, 396.
Newman, Ernest, 249.
Newman, Professor F. W., 95.
_New Review, The_, 313, 462.
New Shakespeare Society, 135, 263.
_New York Herald_, 54.
_New York Sun_, 373.
_New York Times_, 342, 361, 393.
_New York Tribune_, 317.
Nicol, Commissioner, 387.
Nietzsche, 20, 39, 81, 90, 151, 247, 261, 273, 339, 413, 455 _et sqq._,
464, 468, 471 _et sqq._, 480, 484 _et sqq._;
his _Genealogy of Morals_, 340, 364, 456, 486.
_Nineteenth Century_, 246, 439.
Nordau, Max, 35, 346, 436.
_North American Review_, 286-7.
O'Connor, Fergus, 173.
O'Connor, T. P., 231, 232, 235-6.
Offenbach, 233, 243, 340.
Olivier, Sir Sydney, 48, 99, 107, 128-9, 174;
his play, _Mrs. Maxwell's Marriage_, 100;
his career, 100.
_One and All_, 43.
Orage, A. R., 175.
Ouida, 392.
_Our Corner_, 52, 109, 195.
Owen, Miss Dale, 104.
Owen, Robert, 178, 209.
Paderewski, I. J., 237-8, 254.
_Pall Mall Budget_, 244.
_Pall Mall Gazette_, 48, 50-1, 98, 127, 135, 160, 164-5, 195-6,
200, 215, 483.
_Palmist and Chirological Review_, 493.
Pankhurst, Dr., 114.
Pardon, Sidney, 261.
Parker, Dr. H. R., 16.
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 101.
Parry, Sir Charles H. H., 236-7.
_Passion, Poison and Petrifaction._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Pater, Walter, 433, 438.
Patmore, Coventry, 445.
Patti, Adelina, 237, 239, 254.
Pease, Edward R., 102, 104, 127, 139.
Pepys, Samuel, 45.
Phelps, William L., 366.
_Philanderer, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
_Photography_, 222.
Pinero, Arthur Wing, 3, 279 _et sqq._, 364, 447.
Plançon, P., 24.
_Play, The_, 335, 338.
_Playhouse, The_, 327.
_Plays for Puritans._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
_Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Podmore, Frank, 102, 104, 114, 127, 177.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 5, 24, 130.
Pope, Alexander, 59, 243.
Porter, General Horace, 312.
Praxiteles, 32.
Proudhon, P. J., 128, 186.
Psychical Research Society, The, 127.
_Public Opinion_, 11, 33.
_Putnam's Monthly_, 501.
Queensberry, Marquess of, 387.
_Quintessence of Ibsenism._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Rabelais, 201, 509.
_Radical, The_, 132.
Raphael, 208, 221, 224.
Reade, Charles, 432-3.
Reclus, Elisée, 486.
Reinhardt, Max, 345.
Rembrandt, 227, 393.
Renan, Ernest, 449.
Repertory Theatre, 285.
_Review of Reviews_ (London), 386.
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, 300, 445.
Rhodes, Cecil, 385.
Ricardo, David, 155, 159, 161.
Richards, Grant, 55, 309, 319, 321.
Robertson, Forbes, 282, 335, 338, 402, 417.
Robertson, John Mackinnon, 45, 114.
Robins, Elizabeth, 372.
Rockefeller, John D., 384.
Rodin, Auguste, 226, 500-1, 504.
Roeckel, August, 247.
Rogers, Professor A. K., 471.
Rook, Clarence, 141, 198, 335.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 384, 484.
Rossetti, D. G., 219, 446.
Rossini, 18.
Rossiter, 115.
Rostand, Edmond, 432.
Rousseau, J. J., 5.
Runciman, James, 214.
Runciman, J. F., 214.
Ruskin, John, 7, 168, 210-11, 253, 271, 434, 451, 457.
Sainte Beuve, Charles A., 251, 297, 474.
Saint Saëns, Camille, 241, 243.
St. Simon, Claude H., Comte de, 178.
Salt, Henry, 48 _et sqq._, 90, 503.
Sanders, W., 184.
Sargent, J. S., 227, 449.
_Saturday Review, The_, 53, 181, 199, 208-9, 212, 220-1, 231, 245,
261 _et sqq._, 266, 269, 272, 275, 279, 288, 364, 421, 427-9, 455.
_Savoy Magazine, The_, 14.
Savoy Theatre, 285, 337, 388.
Scheffer, Ary, 24.
Schiller, Friedrich, 23, 432, 454.
Schiller Theater, 355.
Schopenhauer, 81, 271, 364, 366, 435, 457, 459, 473-4, 476,
480, 483 _et sqq._
Schumann, 23, 240, 243, 252.
Scott and Co., Walter, 53, 179.
Scott, Clement, 279, 299, 302.
Scott, Sir Walter, 61, 67.
Scribner's Sons, Charles, 343.
Sedgwick, Anne D., her _Confounding of Camellia_, 367.
Shakespeare, William, 26, 55, 74, 81, 135, 196, 341, 391,
417, 447, 473, 476;
his plays criticized by Shaw, 262 _et sqq._, 288, 321;
Shaw's preface on, 336.
Shaw, Agnes, 22, 25.
Shaw, Frederick, 10.
Shaw, George Bernard, his birth, 3;
his complex characteristics, 4;
on autobiographies, 5-6;
his parentage and ancestry, 6 _et sqq._;
his early life, 8 _et sqq._, 39;
on church going, 8-9, 11-12 _et sqq._;
enters his uncle's office, 10;
on Moody and Sankey, 10-11, 27, 33;
his dislike of snobbery, 14-5, 21, 35, 41;
his education, 15 _et sqq._;
his great love of music, 18-9, 22 _et sqq._, 36-7, 216;
his early love of art, 19;
enters Mr. Townshend's office, 20;
his original musical technique, 23, 218;
goes to London, 25;
his religious training, 26;
his asceticism, 26-7;
choosing a profession, 31 _et sqq._;
his friendship with Edward McNulty, 33-4;
and Chichester Bell, 34-35, 44;
first introduction to Wagner's music, 35, 234;
his resemblance to his mother, 38-9;
his struggles in London, 39 _et sqq._;
his dress, 40-1, 491-2;
on poverty, 41-2, 46;
on the artistic temperament, 43;
first literary earnings, 43, 47;
his egotism, 44-5;
his _Immaturity_, 46-7;
and land nationalization, 47-8;
makes new friends, 47 _et sqq._;
his vegetarianism, 49, 471;
and the Salts, 48 _et sqq._;
on Shelley and Wagner's principles, 49-50;
and the death of J. L. Joynes, 50-51;
publication
of his novels, 51 _et sqq._;
becomes acquainted with William Morris, 52;
on _Cashel Byron's Profession_, 52;
his _Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, published, 54;
his plays, _Arms and the Man_ and _The Devil's Disciple_,
produced, 54;
on American publishing, 54 _et sqq._;
on novel-writing, 59, 60;
Stevenson on, 61;
and Ibsen, 61-2, 297 _et sqq._, 316, 420 _et sqq._;
his _The Irrational Knot_, 62 _et sqq._;
his _Love Among the Artists_, 65 _et sqq._;
his _Cashel Byron's Profession_, 69, 71 _et sqq._;
on the education of children, 70-1;
his _The Admirable Bashville_, 74 _et sqq._;
his _An Unsocial Socialist_, 77 _et sqq._;
his attitude towards women, 80 _et sqq._;
as a novelist, 83 _et sqq._;
his versatility, 89, 409, 424;
various influences on, 90, 99, 100;
his friendship with Lecky, 90 _et sqq._;
studies phonetics, 91;
joins the Zetetical Society, 92-3;
joins the Dialectical Society, 93;
on Sidney Webb, 93;
practices public speaking, 94;
his admiration for Henry George, 96;
studies Marx, 97-8;
and the Darwinian School, 97;
an enthusiastic Socialist, 98 _et sqq._, 385;
and William Clarke, 100-1;
and the Fabian Society, 102 _et sqq._, 173 _et sqq._, 279-80, 385;
Sidney Webb's great influence on, 106-7, 125-7;
his powers of oratory, 121 _et sqq._, 412, 505-6;
his early training for public speaking, 121 _et sqq._;
and the Hampstead Historic Club, 128 _et sqq._;
his love of debating, 130-1, 135;
and Mr. Haldane, 133-4;
and literary societies, 135;
his strenuous work, 136-7;
and Bradlaugh, 138;
debates with G. W. Foote, 138 _et sqq._;
his independent attitude, 140-1;
his appearance, 145, 338;
his Socialistic philosophy, 151 _et sqq._, 188 _et sqq._;
his letter to Hamlin Garland, 152;
influence of Henry George on, 153 _et sqq._;
studies economics, 155 _et sqq._;
and Wicksteed, Jevons and Marx, 155 _et sqq._;
attends International Socialist Congress at Zurich, 171;
as a Vestryman and Borough
Councillor, 181 _et sqq._;
on municipal trading, 182-3;
invited to stand for Battersea, 184-5;
his career as an art critic, 193 _et sqq._;
his criticism of the _Taming of the Shrew_, 196-7;
and the New Journalism, 199;
compared to Heine and Meredith, 201;
his affected levity, 201 _et sqq._;
compared with Whistler, 204;
his opinion of criticism, 205;
William Morris's influence on, 205, 208, 211;
Morris's appreciation of, 208;
his obituary of Morris, 209 _et sqq._;
his integrity as an art critic, 212-13;
becomes a musical critic, 212;
and Henley, 214 _et sqq._;
his admiration for Michelangelo, 218-9;
and Madox Brown, 219-20;
and the Impressionists, 221;
and the Dutch school, 222;
and photography, 222 _et sqq._;
photographed by A. L. Coburn, 225 _et sqq._;
as a music critic, 231 _et sqq._;
on the staff of the _Star_, 231 _et sqq._;
his _nom-de-plume_ of Corno di Bassetto, 232 _et sqq._;
on Offenbach, 233, 243;
his admiration for Wagner, 235;
on some modern composers, 236 _et sqq._;
on Paderewski, 238;
on Patti and Bispham, 238-9;
on Hollman, Essipoff, Joachim and Ysaye, 239, 240;
on Mozart, 240;
on Saint Saëns and Meyerbeer, 243;
on Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, 243;
his championship of Wagner, 243 _et sqq._;
his Bayreuth criticisms, 244;
on Covent Garden Opera, 244-5;
on Strauss' _Elektra_, 249-50;
his attitude as a critic, 251 _et sqq._;
dramatic critic on the _Saturday Review_, 261 _et sqq._;
his aim as dramatic critic, 262, 427;
on Shakespeare, 263 _et sqq._;
on modern problems, 271;
champions Ibsen, 272 _et sqq._;
on Church and Stage, 276-7;
on comedy, 278 _et sqq._;
leading critics on, 279 _et sqq._;
on Pinero, 282 _et sqq._;
on some modern playwrights, 283;
on Irving and Ellen Terry, 287-8;
his income from journalism, 288;
as a playwright, 293 _et sqq._;
his first play produced, 293 _et sqq._;
Archer's article on, 293 _et sqq._;
and the writing of _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, 305-6;
his new phase as a dramatist, 309 _et sqq._;
and W. S. Gilbert, 316 _et sqq._;
and Cyril Maude, 321-2, 327-8;
and Arnold Daly, 326-7;
and Ellen Terry, 328 _et sqq._, 343;
and Richard Mansfield, 342-3;
Sir Charles Wyndham on, 346;
Dr. Brandes on, 347;
and William Terriss, 354;
William Archer's admiration for, 363, 378;
and the modern drama, 363 _et sqq._, 413 _et sqq._;
his _magnum opus_, 370 _et sqq._;
Walkley's criticism on, 374, 460-1;
and politics at the theatre, 388;
and the plot of the _Doctor's Dilemma_, 391 _et sqq._;
his letter to Tolstoy, 399;
as a technician, 409 _et sqq._;
his world-wide reputation, 409-10;
his prefaces, 413;
his descriptive powers, 414;
and stage directions, 417 _et sqq._;
his defects, 424-5;
a _résumé_ of his plays, 425-6, 448-9;
as a dramatist, 431 _et sqq._;
and the problem play, 433 _et sqq._;
G. K. Chesterton on, 436;
on illusions, 436 _et sqq._;
philosophy of his plays, 439 _et sqq._, 481;
as artist and philosopher, 453 _et sqq._;
on Schopenhauer, 459;
his optimism, 459 _et sqq._;
on self-knowledge, 467 _et sqq._;
and science, 477;
on vivisection, 478-9;
on progress, 480;
his atheism, 482;
his religion, 484;
alleged influences on, 484 _et sqq._;
Sir Francis Galton's anthropometric chart, 492-3;
his characteristics, 494-5, 501 _et sqq._;
as he is to-day, 495;
his prize story, 498-9;
foreign critics on, 500-1;
his marriage, 503;
his energy, 503;
as a conversationist, 504;
his Puritanism, 508-9;
his kindness of heart, 509-10;
on marriage, 511-12.
Shaw, G. B., his works:--
_Cashel Byron's Profession_, 32, 51 _et sqq._, 61, 71 _et sqq._,
205, 304, 381, 451, 478.
_Common Sense of Municipal Trading, The_, 183.
_Dramatic Opinions and Essays_, 208, 276, 285.
_Fabian Essays in Socialism_, 178.
_Immaturity_ (Unpublished), 46-7.
_Irrational Knot, The_, 45, 52, 55, 62 _et sqq._
_Love Among the Artists_, 52, 54, 67 _et sqq._, 85, 235.
_Perfect Wagnerite, The_, 247.
_Quintessence of Ibsenism_, 138, 272-3, 299, 413, 480, 484.
_Unsocial Socialist, An_, 51, 54, 77, 81-2, 206, 222.
Shaw, G. B., Pamphlets, Articles, etc.:--
_Aërial Football_ (_Collier's Weekly_), 498.
_Author to the Dramatic Critics_ (_Widowers' Houses_), 205.
_Author's View, The_ (_Caxton Magazine_), 211.
_Authors of the Court Theatre, The_, 446.
_Blaming the Bard_ (_Saturday Review_), 269.
_Bluffing the Value Theory_, 164-5.
_Censorship of Plays_ (_The Nation_), 287.
_Censorship of the Stage in England_ (_North American Review_), 286-7.
_Class War, The_ (_Clarion_), 167-8.
_Coburn the Camerist_ (_Metropolitan Magazine_), 227.
_Conflict Between Science and Common Sense_, 51, 477.
_Darwin Denounced_ (_Pall Mall Gazette_), 483.
_Das Kapital_ (_National Reformer_), 160.
_Degenerate's View of Nordau, A_, 465, 471.
_De Mortuis_ (_Saturday Review_), 245.
_Diabolonian Ethics, On_ (_Three Plays for Puritans_), 119, 355.
_Does Modern Education Ennoble?_ (_Great Thoughts_), 481.
_Dramatic Realist to His Critics_ (_New Review_), 313, 462.
_Elektra of Strauss and Hoffmansthal_ (_Nation_), 250.
_Ellen Terry_ (_Neue Freie Presse_), 343.
_Exhibitions, The_ (_Amateur Photographer_), 226, 228.
_Fabian Essays_, 109, 116, 136.
_Fabian Society Tracts, The_, 87, 105 _et sqq._,
110, 111, 115, 131, 171, 174, 177, 183, 207-8, 385.
_Failures of Inept Vegetarians_ (_Pall Mall Gazette_), 50.
_Fitzthunder, My Friend_ (_To-Day_), 169.
_Fitzthunder on Himself_ (_To-Day_), 169.
_Giving the Devil His Due_ (_Saturday Review_), 455.
_Haymarket Theatre, The_ (Chap. XIV.), 321.
_Ibsen_ (_The Clarion_), 390, 422.
_Illusions of Socialism, The_, 165, 188.
_Impossibilities of Anarchism, The_, 171.
_In the Days of Our Youth_ (_Star_), 234.
_King Arthur_ (_Saturday Review_), 221.
_Life of Madame Blavatsky, A_ (_Pall Mall Gazette_), 127, 195.
_Madox Brown, Watts and Ibsen_ (_Saturday Review_), 220.
_Marx and Modern Socialism_ (_Pall Mall Gazette_), 165.
_Meredith on Comedy_ (_Saturday Review_), 278-9, 429.
_Morris as Actor and Dramatist_ (_Saturday Review_), 208.
_Music_ (_The World_), 239, 257.
_Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers_
(_The Author_), 91.
_On Going to Church_ (_Savoy Magazine_), 14.
_On Mr. Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance_
(_Fortnightly Review_), 60, 187.
_Our Saturday Talk_ (_Westminster Gazette_), 442.
_Phonetic Spelling; a Reply to Some Criticisms_
(_Morning Leader_), 91.
_Plea for Speech Nationalization, A_ (_Morning Leader_), 91.
Prefaces:--
_Author's Apology_ (_Dramatic Opinions and Essays_), 276.
_Author's Apology_ (_Mrs. Warren's Profession_), 286, 309, 435.
_Better than Shakespeare?_ (_Three Plays for Puritans_), 336, 364.
_First Aid to Critics_ (_Major Barbara_), 486.
_Mainly About Myself_ (_Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_), 309,
411, 438.
_Problem Play_ (_Humanitarian_), 435.
_Religion of the Pianoforte, The_ (_Fortnightly Review_), 24, 50.
_Sanity of Art, The, An Exposure of the Current Nonsense About Artists
Being Degenerate_, 246, 396.
_Scotland Yard for Spectres, A_ (_Pall Mall Gazette_), 127.
_Shakespeare's Merry Gentlemen_ (_Saturday Review_), 266.
_Shaw, Bernard_, 489.
_Shaw Abashed, Bernard_ (_Daily News_), 75.
_Shaw, George Bernard: A Conversation_ (_The Tatler_), 374.
_Shaw and the Heroic Actor, Bernard_ (_The Play_), 335, 338.
_Shaw as a Clerk, Bernard_ (_The Clerk_), 22.
_Shaw, Letter from Mr. G. Bernard_ (_Tolstoy on Shakespeare_), 268.
_Shaw's Method and Secret, Mr._ (_Daily Chronicle_), 305.
_Shaw's Works of Fiction, Mr. Bernard_ (_Novel Review_), 80.
_Socialism and Republicanism_ (_Saturday Review_), 181.
_Socialism at the International Congress_, 190.
_Socialism for Millionaires_ (_Contemporary Review_), 183, 385.
_Socialists at Home_ (_Pall Mall Gazette_), 165.
_Solution of the Censorship Problem_ (_Academy_), 287.
_Spelling Reform v. Phonetic Spelling_ (_Daily News_), 91.
_Stanley Jevons: His Letters and Journal_ (_Pall Mall Gazette_),
160, 195.
_Sunday on the Surrey Hills_ (_Pall Mall Gazette_), 48.
_Theatrical World_ (_Archer's_), 315.
_Transition to Social Democracy_, 208.
_Valedictory_ (_Saturday Review_), 288.
_Who I Am, and What I Think_ (_Candid Friend_), 42, 60, 98, 147, 202.
_A Word About Stepniak_ (_To-Morrow_), 313.
_A Word More About Verdi_ (_Anglo-Saxon Review_), 241.
Shaw, G. B., his plays:--
_Admirable Bashville, The, or Constancy Unrewarded_, 74 _et sqq._
_Arms and the Man_, 54, 142, 311, 313 _et sqq._, 320, 359, 404,
422, 425, 458.
_Cæsar and Cleopatra_, 335 _et sqq._, 340.
_Candida_, 54, 85, 326, 341, 346 _et sqq._, 409-10, 418.
_Captain Brassbound's Conversion_, 91, 288, 320, 328 _et sqq._
_Dark Lady of the Sonnets_, 398.
_Devil's Disciple, The_, 54, 288, 328, 341, 354 et seq., 401, 419,
422-3, 425, 438, 458.
_Doctor's Dilemma, The_, 389 _et sqq._, 422-3, 425.
_Don Juan in Hell_ (_Man and Superman_), 369 _et sqq._
_Getting Married_, 398.
_How He Lied to Her Husband_, 320, 326.
_Interlude at the Playhouse, The_, 327.
_John Bull's Other Island_, 15-16, 34, 370 _et sqq._, 388, 425.
_Major Barbara_, 297, 337, 380, 381, 382, 384 _et sqq._, 401,
425, 486.
_Man and Superman_, 27, 81-2, 152, 363 _et sqq._, 368, 378, 388,
414, 444, 458, 471, 481, 489, 509.
_Man of Destiny, The_, 341 _et sqq._, 374.
_Misalliance_, 398.
_Passion, Poison and Petrifaction; or the Fatal Gazogene_, 327.
_Philanderer, The_, 51, 299 _et sqq._, 422, 425, 478.
_Plays for Puritans_, 27, 119, 193, 328, 333, 336, 364, 407.
_Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant_, 49, 54, 288, 291, 309, 411.
_Press Cuttings_, 402, 404.
_Showing-up of Blanco Posnet_, 27, 398 _et sqq._
_Warren's Profession, Mrs._, 220, 286, 304 _et sqq._, 341, 363,
380 _et sqq._, 398, 425, 458, 509.
_Widowers' Houses_, 22, 205, 220, 270, 293 _et sqq._, 420, 425, 445.
_You Never Can Tell_, 320, 321 _et sqq._, 404, 414, 425.
Shaw, G. B., Books and Articles on:--
Archer, William, _Shaw's Phonetic World-English_, 91;
_About the Theatre_, 390;
_Shaw on Stage Directions_, 419;
Article in _The World_, 295.
Bab, Julius, _Bernard Shaw_, 249.
Bahr, Hermann, _Bernard Shaw_, 424.
Brandes, Georg, _Der Dramatiker Bernard Shaw_, 313.
Chesterton, G. K., _The Meaning of Mr. Bernard Shaw_, 436.
Corbin, John, _Bernard Shaw and His Mannikins_, 373.
Filon, Augustin, _M. Bernard Shaw et son Théâtre_, 300, 445.
Greville, Eden, _Bernard Shaw and His Plays_, 293.
Hale, E. E., Jr., _Dramatists of To-Day_ (_Bernard Shaw_), 426.
Hamon, Auguste, _Un Nouveau Molière_, 439.
Henderson, Archibald, _The Philosophy of Bernard Shaw_, 484.
Huneker, James, _Bernard Shaw and Woman_, 84-5;
_The Truth About Candida_, 351.
Irwin, Will, _Crankidoxology, Being a Mental Attitude from
Bernard Pshaw_, 270.
Jackson, Holbrook, _Bernard Shaw_, 183.
Play, The, _Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor_, 335, 338.
Rogers, Professor A. K., _Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy_, 471.
Rook, Clarence, _Mr. Shaw's Future_, 335.
Stead, W. T., _Impressions of the Theatre_ (_Major Barbara_), 386.
Terry, Ellen, _From Lewis Carroll to Bernard Shaw_, 329.
Walkley, A. B., _Mr. Bernard Shaw's Plays_, 319.
Shaw, Mrs. G. B., 388-9, 401, 495.
Shaw, George Carr (G. B. Shaw's father), 6 _et sqq._, 20, 22.
Shaw, Mrs. George Carr (G. B. Shaw's mother), 7, 8, 17;
her musical talent, 17 _et sqq._, 22, 36 _et sqq._
Shaw, Lucy Carr, 22, 26.
Shaw, Sir Robert, 33.
Shelley, P. B., 32, 40, 48 _et sqq._, 90, 92, 152-3, 215, 234,
271, 273, 346, 412, 434, 457, 473, 480, 482, 503.
_Shelley Society_, 135.
Sheridan, Richard B., 3, 40, 433.
Shields, Frederick, 220.
Shorter, Clement K., 232.
_Showing-up of Blanco Posnet._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Sims, George R., 43.
Smith, Adam, 155.
Smith, Armitage, 158.
Social Democratic Federation, 96, 102, 108, 110 _et sqq._,
138, 173, 206.
Socialist League, 137-8, 207, 261.
Socialist Society, Hammersmith, 207.
_Sozialistische Monatshefte_, 165.
_Speaker, The_, 107.
_Spectator, The_, 401, 486.
Spencer, Herbert, 92, 94, 96-7, 102, 168, 443, 467;
his _The Coming Slavery_, 189.
_Standard Elocutionist, The_, 34.
_Standard, The_, 393.
Standring, G., 132, 139.
Stanford, Sir Charles V., 237.
Stange, Stanislaus, 72, 315.
Stapleton, 114.
_Star, The_, 113, 171, 231 _et sqq._, 237, 295, 387.
Stead, W. T., 112-3, 215, 386-7.
Steichen, Éduard J., 225.
Stephens, Yorke, 312.
Stevenson, R. L., 85, 241;
letters of, 53, 61, 73, 215-16, 282, 297.
Stirner, Max, his _The Ego and His Own_, 468, 472, 484 _et sqq._
Stone and Co., H. S., 54, 309.
Straus, Oscar, 314, 315.
Strauss, Richard, his _Elektra_, 250.
Strindberg, August, 316, 366, 484 _et sqq._
Stuart-Glennie, J. S., 114, 431, 485-6.
Stümcke, Herr Heinrich, 340, 438.
Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 237.
Sweet, Henry, 91, 331.
Swift, Jonathan, 3, 60, 476.
Swinburne, Algernon C., 266, 447, 455.
Symes, Rev. --, 48.
Symons, Arthur, 237, 240, 473.
Taine, Hippolyte, 266.
_Taming of the Shrew, The_, 196-7.
Tarpey, W. K., 346.
_Tatler, The_, 377.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 8, 24;
his _Charge of the Light Brigade_, 312.
Terriss, William, 354.
Terry, Ellen, 287-8, 328 _et sqq._, 342-3.
Théâtre des Arts, 348-9.
Théâtre Royal du Parc, 353.
Thomas, Agnes, 405.
Thomas, Goring, his _Golden Web_, 237.
Thomson, James, 51.
Thoreau, 50.
Thorpe, Courtenay, 354.
Thorwaldsen, Bertel, 221.
_Times, The_, 94, 187, 232, 287, 400, 486.
Titian, 200.
Tochatti, 114.
_To-Day_, 51 _et sqq._, 114, 155-6, 158, 165, 206.
Tolstoy, Leo, 145, 168, 173, 268, 398-9, 401, 413, 464, 473.
Tourneur, Cyril, 264.
Townshend, Uniacke, 10, 20, 33-4.
Traill, H. D., 199.
Trebitsch, Herr Siegfried, 420.
Tree, Sir H. Beerbohm, 282, 288, 398.
Treherne and Co., A., 327.
_Tribune, The_, 390, 391.
Trollope, Anthony, 39, 41.
_Trovatore, Il_, 18, 24.
_Truth_, 195.
Tucker, Benjamin R., 189, 245-6, 396, 468.
Turner, J. M. W., 210-11, 473.
Twain, Mark, 10, 38, 413, 440, 456, 508.
Tyndall, Professor, 35, 44, 94, 96, 153.
_Unsocial Socialist, The._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Unwin, T. Fisher, 104.
Vandervelde, Émile, 186, 486.
Van Uhde, 222.
Vasa-Theater, 326.
_Vaudeville Magazine_, 11.
Vedrenne, J. E., 371-2, 398, 446.
Velásquez, 200, 224, 227, 393.
Verdi, 18, 23, 241, 245.
Victoria, Queen, 312.
Vieuxtemps, Henri, 254.
Vizetelly, Henry, 202.
Voltaire, 144, 183-4, 449, 459, 477.
Vorst, Mrs. John van, 501.
Wagner, Richard, 24, 69, 73, 81, 90, 198, 214, 241, 257, 271, 447,
457, 473, 481, 502;
his _Tannhäuser_, 23, 234, 245;
Shaw's first acquaintance with music of, 35, 234;
his ascetic temperament, 49;
his _Tristan und Isolde_, 97, 244, 293;
Shaw's admiration for, 218, 243;
Shaw studies music of, 235;
Shaw's defence of, 237;
Shaw's criticisms on, 244 _et sqq._, 252-3;
his _Die Meistersinger_, 244;
his _Die Walküre_, 245;
his _Das Rheingold_, 245, 250;
his _Ring of the Niblungs_, 247, 460;
his _Lohengrin_, 248;
his _Parsifal_, 250;
his _Götterdämmerung_, 377;
his story, _An End in Paris_, 393;
his philosophy, 434.
Walkley, Arthur Bingham, 20, 121, 203, 232, 279, 324, 333, 363, 364,
374, 387, 412, 444, 460, 489;
his _Frames of Mind_, 319.
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 94;
his work on _Land Nationalization_, 95.
Wallace, Vincent, 24.
Wallas, Graham, 99, 100, 113, 128-9, 158, 174, 178, 503;
his _Life of Francis Place_, 100;
his _An Economic Eirenicon_, 164-5.
_Warren's Profession, Mrs._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Washington, George, 477.
Webb, Sidney, 90-1, 93, 99, 102, 105 _et sqq._, 114, 116-7,
125 _et sqq._, 133, 152, 157, 174-5, 178, 225, 314.
Weber, his _Der Freischütz_, 234.
Webster, John, 264.
Wedmore, Frederick, 299.
Wesley College, Dublin, 15-6, 34.
_Wesley College Quarterly_, 16.
_Westermann's Monatshefte_, 337.
Whibley, Charles, 215.
Whistler, J. McNeill, 204, 222-3, 413-4.
Whitcroft, Ellen, 7.
Whitman, Walt, 50, 243, 268.
Whitney, F. C., 315.
Wicksteed, Philip H., 155 _et sqq._, 160 _et sqq._;
his _Alphabet of Economics_, 158.
_Widowers' Houses._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Wilde, Oscar, 3, 227, 282, 284, 366, 394, 412, 426, 442, 460, 502.
Williams, 112.
Willis's Rooms, 131.
Wilshire, Gaylord, 186.
_Wilshire's Magazine_, 159.
Wilson, Mrs., 108, 114-5.
Winter, William, 343.
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 419, 469.
Wolseley, Lord, 312.
_World, The_, 98, 135-6, 195, 231, 237, 239, 244-5, 255, 257, 261, 295.
Wright, Charles, 158.
Wyndham, Sir Charles, 342, 345-6, 442.
Yates, Edmund, 195, 212, 261.
Yeats, W. B., 371, 378, 400.
_You Never Can Tell._ _See_ G. B. SHAW.
Ysaye, Eugen, 240.
_Zeit, Die_, 431.
Zetetical Society, The, 91 _et sqq._, 122, 144, 271.
Zola, Émile, 40, 59, 84, 146, 202, 297, 432, 440, 457;
his _La Débâcle_, 312.
REVIEWS,
from Foreign Journals of Opinion, of
“George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works”
By
ARCHIBALD HENDERSON, M.A., Ph.D.,
of The University of North Carolina
“The book is a most remarkable achievement.”--George Bernard
Shaw, in the _Morning Post_ (London), May 3, 1911.
“Mr. Shaw is explored from every point of view.... Newspaper
files have been ransacked, forgotten controversies between
dramatic critics or different kinds of Socialists have
been unearthed, profound researches made into contemporary
literature suggesting parallels and illustrations, stray
thoughts gathered up and traced in their development from
childhood to middle age....
“We cannot praise Mr. Henderson too highly. We know of nothing
in the literature of biography that is so exhaustively
complete.”--_Westminster Gazette_ (London), April 22, 1911.
“Its comprehensiveness gives it the importance of an historical
document.... It is something more than a chronicle of the life
of Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is a remarkable chronicle of English
revolutionary movements during the last twenty-five years....
In the sixteen chapters of his book, Dr. Henderson tells the
history of the idea movements of the last quarter of a century
_apropos_ of Bernard Shaw.... The reader who cannot find
instruction and entertainment within its covers lacks the art
of reading.”--Holbrook Jackson, in the _Bookman_ (London), May,
1911.
“Dr. Henderson's authorized and critical biography ... is
indispensable.... The fullest, the best informed, and the most
carefully studied account of Bernard Shaw that has yet been
published.... The book will rank immediately after Mr. Shaw's
own works as material for students of the advanced tendencies
of which in this country the author of John Bull's Other Island
is the most conspicuous representative....”--_The Scotsman_
(Edinburgh), April 13, 1911.
“A biography that could scarcely be bettered.... It is
full, minute, and exact. Biographer and autobiographer have
joined forces, and the result is a masterly study of the
most complicated personality of our time.... The author has
spared no pains in verifying his references and arranging
his materials. Here you have Shaw in his quiddity.... Dr.
Henderson out-Boswells Boswell in his enormous pertinacity,
his prodigious fidelity. He has not left a crumb for other
biographers.”--James Douglas, in the _Star_ (London), April 15,
1911.
“It would be hard to find anyone perfectly equipped for the
task (of writing Shaw's biography). Mr. Granville Barker ...
would have shown a more intelligent sympathy in Mr. Shaw's
ideals. But we should have had as much Barker as Shaw. Our
lily would have been painted. Mr. Archer might have seized the
opportunity to set up that guillotine for which he once sighed.
Mr. Webb would have been unreliable once inside the theatre. We
might have had a score of articles from various writers, each
qualified to speak on one aspect of Mr. Shaw, but we should
then have been like children with the pieces of a puzzle,
unable to fit them together. No, Professor Henderson is not
easily dethroned....
“The book is almost a history of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, and ... it has not a dull
moment.”--_Evening Standard and St. James's Gazette_ (London),
April 11, 1911.
“At length comes the really big thing, ... and following
precedent, it comes from the home of big things, America. Dr.
Henderson ... is not only elaborate in his interpretation of
our leading dramatist and controversialist, but comprehensive
as well. His book is ... a mine in which all future students
of George Bernard Shaw will be forced to dig and delve....
Nothing is impossible to this amazingly energetic American
professor.... Professor Henderson is an interpreter of modern
ideas. He feels that we are in the midst of a remarkable
intellectual awakening, and he is impelled ... to give his
complex and multiplex period a coherent voice....
“Professor Archibald Henderson is the modern counterpart of
the old chronicler; they saw the romance and significance of
events, he sees the romance and significance of ideas; he is
a Hakluyt of ideas, of personalities.... His interests and
his enthusiasms embrace the hemispheres.”--_Black and White_
(London), April 22, 1911.
“Ce livre n'est pas seulement une étude magistrale sur la
personnalité la plus compliquée de notre temps, il est aussi
un exposé fort complet des divers mouvements d'idées qui ont
agité l'Angleterre en ces derniers vingt-cinq ans.... Mr.
Henderson mérite qu'on lui sache gré des six ans de labeur
qu'il a consacrés à ce livre, qui restera un document des
plus précieux.”--Henry D. Davray, in the _Mercure de France_
(Paris), June 16, 1911.
“The reader's astonishment when the book is laid down is not
at its length but at its brevity.... Here things regain their
true proportions, and much of our astonishment and admiration
for the book, its author, and its hero are due to this....
Nowhere does Dr. Henderson's critical faculty show to greater
advantage than in his deductions as to the general aim of the
plays.... Dr. Henderson is a critic before he is a biographer.
There is nothing of the attitude of a Boswell in his work....
There remains the possibility that others may gauge the results
of Shaw's secret with more acumen than he himself. There is
no probability, however, that this will ever be done with
more discretion, discernment, and distinction than by Mr.
Henderson.”--_Manchester Courier_ (England), April 11, 1911.
“An elaborate and detailed history of Bernard Shaw and
his effects as a dramatist, Socialist, and general
revolutionary.... George Bernard Shaw is looked at, sounded,
discussed, examined, and appraised from every point of view....
It is a well into which all future students of Bernard Shaw
will have to dip their buckets.... The biographical chapters
are brimming over with lively anecdote.... In the three
chapters devoted to Shaw as a dramatist, Mr. Henderson gives
a critical analysis of the plays of G. B. S. which is as
penetrating as it is painstaking, and will easily give him a
front seat among Bernard Shaw's commentators.... Shaw's ...
biographer has succeeded, and it is no small praise to say
that throughout the whole of his book you feel that you are in
the presence of a living personality....”--_T. P.'s Weekly_
(London), April 21, 1911.
“This notable book ... is a long one, but we have noticed very
few faults either in fact or of taste in reading it.... Nothing
in it is so salutary as the final impression it leaves of the
power to which a man can attain through the old-fashioned
virtues of energy, industry, and determination.... As critic,
political thinker, and dramatist, Mr. Shaw has managed to do
a great deal of splendid work ...; and Dr. Henderson gives us
a capital picture of it all.”--_Pall Mall Gazette_ (London),
April 11, 1911.
“A record which, in completeness, is unique among the _Men of
Our Time_. What would we not give to know as much of some of
the mighty intellects of the past!”--_Daily Graphic_ (London),
April 11, 1911.
“Acknowledgment should be made of Dr. Henderson's critical
sanity.... A most interesting and weighty book. It is the
nearest thing to that ideal autobiography which Mr. Shaw will
never write, and is a worthy tribute to a man of whom this
country ought to be proud.”--George Sampson, in the _Daily
Chronicle_ (London), April 11, 1911.
“The large and exceedingly handsome volume ... deals with
its distinguished subject in every variety of aspect,
while managing to remain itself both interesting and
entertaining.”--_Punch_ (London), May 10, 1911.
“Mr. Henderson's book is full of good things.... He analyses
and explains, watches and reports, exploits the whys and
retails the wherefores.... He is a searchlight....”--_Sketch_
(London), May 3, 1911.
“Mr. Henderson's criticism of the plays of George Bernard
Shaw is, indeed, acute and painstaking to an extraordinary
degree.”--_Lloyd's Weekly_ (Liverpool), April 30, 1911.
“Mr. Henderson's illuminating Life.... His task has been
carried out with remarkable thoroughness.”--_Globe_ (London),
April 12, 1911.
“Dr. Henderson has done his work with the Boswellian
thoroughness and assiduity. He has tracked Mr. Shaw down
through the files of remote and forgotten newspapers; he has
ransacked libraries; he has unearthed and pumped Mr. Shaw's
friends and critics in all countries; he has zealously studied
the social movements in which his hero was involved, and got
the atmosphere of the London intellectual cliques as if he had
lived his life among them instead of being a Professor in an
American University. Finally, he has compelled Mr. Shaw himself
to take an interest in the work, to contribute to it, criticise
it, and thoroughly overhaul it, so much so indeed as to lead
to the suggestion that it should be called a biography and
autobiography.... If he (Dr. Henderson) has not given us the
verdict which history will pronounce on his subject ..., he has
pronounced the verdict of the clever people of to-day.”--R. A.
Scott-James, in the _Daily News_ (London), April 11, 1911.
“A document of value. Immense pains have been taken by the
author and by Mr. Shaw to bring together within its covers
as many of the facts about Mr. Shaw's life and character and
opinion as Mr. Shaw wishes to be generally known.... Best
of all the chapters is that called 'The Cart and Trumpet,'
the record of the days when his personal force was in full
flood.”--_Outlook_ (London), April 22, 1911.
“The chapters which tell of the rise of the Socialistic spirit
in London, dating as it does from about 1880, of the genesis of
the Fabian Society, and of various controversies upon economic
matters, are capital reading and form valuable contributions to
the history of the period.... Another excellent feature is the
portion of the book dealing with the brilliant Vedrenne-Barker
seasons at the Court Theatre--seasons which made theatrical
history rapidly and forced both the critics and the public
to sit up and look around.”--_Wilfred L. Randall_, in the
_Academy_ (London), April 29, 1911.
“We are agreeably surprised to find a critic who can consider
the Shavian drama without going to extremes of laudation or
disapproval. Mr. Henderson has found the golden mean.”--_Irish
Times_ (Dublin), May 12, 1911.
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