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.