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.