Bernard Shaw
_This chapter was read by G.B.S. His remarks are printed in
footnotes. [A facsimile of the] one page altered substantially by him
is [omitted in this plain-text electronic edition]_.
WHEN ANYONE IN the early years of the century made a list of the
English writers most in the public eye, such a list always included
the names of Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton. But a good many
people in writing down these names did so with unconcealed irritation
and I think it is important at this stage to see why.
These men were constantly arguing with each other; but the literary
public felt all the same that they represented something in common,
and the literary public was by no means sure that it liked that
something. It could not quite resist Bernard Shaw's plays; it loved
Chesterton whenever it could rebuke him affectionately for paradox
and levity. What that public succumbed to in these men was their art:
it was by no means so certain that it liked their meaning. And so the
literary public elected to say that Shaw and Chesterton were having a
cheap success by standing on their heads and declaring that black was
white. The audience watched a Shaw v. Chesterton debate as a sham
fight or a display of fireworks, as indeed it always partly was; for
each of them would have died rather than really hurt the other. But
Shaw and Chesterton were operating on their minds all the time. They
were allowed to sit in the stalls and applaud. But they were
themselves being challenged; and that spoilt their comfort.
Chesterton in his _Autobiography_ complains of the falsity of most of
the pictures of England during the Victorian era. The languishing,
fainting females, who were in fact far stronger-minded than their
grand-daughters today, the tyrannical pious fathers, the dull
conventional lives: it all rings false to anyone who grew up in an
average Victorian middle-class home and was happy enough there. There
was, however, one thing fundamentally wrong in such homes; and it was
on this fundamental sin that he agreed with Shaw in waging a
relentless war.
The middle classes of England were thoroughly and smugly satisfied
with social conditions that were intolerable for the great mass of
their fellow countrymen. They had erected between the classes
artificial barriers and now did not even look over the top of them. I
remember how when my mother started a settlement in South London the
head worker told us she often saw women groping in the dirt under the
fish barrows for the heads and tails of fishes to boil for their
children. The settlement began to give the children dinners of
dumplings or rice pudding and treacle, and many well-to-do friends
would give my mother a pound or so to help this work. But the
suggestion that government should intervene was Socialism: the idea
that here was a symptom of a widespread evil, was scouted utterly.
People might have learnt much from their own servants of how the rest
of humanity were living, but while, said Chesterton, they laughed at
the idea of the mediaeval baron whose vassals ate below the salt,
their own vassals ate and lived below the floor. At no time in the
Christian past had there been such a deep and wide cleavage in
humanity.
The first thing that G.K.C. and G.B.S., Wells too, and Belloc, were
all agreed upon was that the upper and middle classes of England must
be reminded, if need were by a series of earthquakes, that they were
living in an unreal world. They had forgotten the human race to which
they belonged. They, a tiny section, spoke of the mass of mankind as
"the poor" or "the lower orders" almost as they might speak of the
beasts of the forest, as beings of a different race. Chesterton had a
profound and noble respect for the poor: Shaw declared that they were
"useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished." But for both men,
the handful of quarrelsome cliques called the literary world was far
too small, because it was so tiny a section of the human race.
Shaw and Chesterton had, in fact, discovered the social problem.
Today, whether people intend to do anything about it or not, it is
impossible to avoid knowing something about it. But at that date the
idea was general that all was as well as could be expected in an
imperfect world. The trades unionists were telling a different story,
but they could not hope to reach intellectually the classes they were
attacking. Here were men who could not be ignored, and I cannot but
think that it was sometimes the mere utterance of unwelcome truth in
brilliant speech that aroused the cry of "paradox."
I hear many people [wrote Chesterton], complain that Bernard Shaw
deliberately mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; it
seems to me that he deliberately insults them. His language,
especially on moral questions, is generally as straight and solid as
that of a bargee and far less ornate and symbolic than that of a
hansom-cabman. The prosperous English Philistine complains that Mr.
Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr. Shaw is not in the least
making a fool of him; Mr. Shaw is, with laborious lucidity, calling
him a fool. G.B.S. calls a landlord a thief; and the landlord,
instead of denying or resenting it, says, "Ah, that fellow hides his
meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means, it is
all so fine-spun and fantastical." G.B.S. calls a statesman a liar to
his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of ecstasy, "Ah, what
quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought! Ah, what
elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!" I think it is
always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking, and
it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl
aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them
undoubtedly treats the Shavian meaning as tricky and complex, when it
is really direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his
leg, at the exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose.*
[* _George Bernard Shaw_, pp. 82-3.]
Chesterton was, however, in agreement with the ordinary citizen and
in disagreement with Shaw as to much of Shaw's essential teaching.
And here we touch a matter so involved that even today it is hard to
disentangle it completely. I suppose it will always be possible for
two observers to look at human beings acting, to hear them talking,
and to arrive at two entirely different interpretations of what they
mean. This is certainly the case with any very recent period, and
perhaps especially with our own recent history. We have within living
memory ended a period and begun an exceedingly different period, and
we tend to judge the former by the light--or the darkness--of the
latter. The Victorian age, even in its extreme old age, was still
tacitly assuming and legally enforcing as axioms the Christian moral
system, especially in regard to marriage and all sex questions, and
the sacred nature of property. To read many disquisitions on that
period today one would suppose that no one living really believed in
these things: that humbug explained the first and greed the second.
This is surely a false perspective. The age was an enormously
conventional one: these fundamental ideas had become fossilized and
meaningless for an increasing number of younger people. But when
Bernard Shaw called himself an atheist out of a kind of insane
generosity towards Bradlaugh (see his letter to G.K. later in this
chapter) or described all property as theft, it was a real moral
indignation that was roused in many minds. Real, but exceedingly
confused. It testified to the need of the ordinary man to live by a
creed that he need not question. Shaw and Chesterton were
philosophers, and philosophers love asking questions as well as
answering them. But the average man wants to live by his creed, not
question it, and the elder Victorians had still some kind of creed.
There were many who believed in God. There were others who believed
that the Christian moral system must remain, because it had commended
itself to man's nature as the highest and best and was the true fruit
of evolutionary progress. There were certainly some who were angry
because they thought chaos must follow any tampering with the
existing social order. But if you take the mass of those who tried to
laugh Bernard Shaw aside and grew angry when they could not do so,
you find at the root of the anger an intense dislike of having any
part of a system questioned which was to them unquestionable, which
they had erected into a creed. They thought Shaw's ideas dangerous
and wanted to keep them from the young. They did not want anyone to
ask how a civilisation had laid its principles open to this brilliant
and effective siege. They hated Shaw's questions before they began to
hate his answers. And that is probably why so many linked Chesterton
with Shaw--he gave different answers, but he was asking many of the
same questions. He questioned everything as Shaw did--only he pushed
his questions further: they were deeper and more searching. Shaw
would not accept the old Scriptural orthodoxy; G.K. refused to accept
the new Agnostic orthodoxy; neither man would accept the orthodoxy of
the scientists; both were prepared to attack what Butler had called
"the science ridden, art ridden, culture ridden, afternoon-tea ridden
cliffs of old England."
They attacked first by the mere process of asking questions; and the
world thus questioned grew uneasy and seemed to care curiously little
for the fact that the two questioners were answering their own
questions in an opposite fashion. Where Shaw said: "Give up
pretending you believe in God, for you don't," Chesterton said:
"Rediscover the reasons for believing or else our race is lost."
Where Shaw said: "Abolish private property which has produced this
ghastly poverty," Chesterton said: "Abolish ghastly poverty by
restoring property."
And the audience said: "these two men in strange paradoxes seem to us
to be saying the same thing, if indeed they are saying anything at
all." Chesterton wrote later of a young man whose aunt "had
disinherited him for Socialism because of a lecture he had delivered
against that economic theory"; and I well remember how often after my
own energetic attempts to explain why a Distributist was not a
Socialist, I was met with a weary, "Well, it's just the same." It was
just the same question; it was an entirely different answer, but the
audience, annoyed by the question, never seemed to listen to the
answer. One man was saying: "Sweep away the old beliefs of humanity
and start fresh"; the other was saying: "Rediscover your reasons for
these profound beliefs, make them once more effective, for they are
of the very nature of man."
Shaw and Chesterton were themselves deeply concerned about the
answers. Both sincere, both dealing with realities, they were
prepared to accept each other's sincerity and to fight the matter
out, if need were, endlessly. Being writers they conducted their
discussions in writing: being journalists they did so mainly in the
newspapers, to the delight or fury of other journalists. A jealous
few were enraged at what they called publicity hunting, but most
realised that it was not a private fight. Anyone might join in and a
good many did.
Belloc was in the fight as early as Chesterton, and of course, on the
same side. G.B.S. who had invented "The Chesterbelloc" declared that
Chesterton felt obliged to embrace the dogmas of Catholicism lest
Belloc's soul should be damned. H. G. Wells agreed in the main with
Shaw: both were Fabians and both were ready with a Fabian Utopia for
humanity, which Belloc and Chesterton felt would be little better
than a prison. Cecil Chesterton, coming in at an angle of his own,
wrote some effective articles. He was a Fabian--actually an official
Fabian--but his outlook already embraced many of the Chesterbelloc
human and genial ideals, although he still ridiculed their Utopia of
the peasant state, small ownership and all that came later to be
called Distributism. Like the _Clarion_, the _New Age_ (itself a
Socialist paper) saw the wisdom of giving a platform to both sides,
and in this paper appeared the best articles that the controversy
produced.
Meanwhile the private friendship between G.B.S. and G.K.C. was
growing apace. Very early on, Shaw had begun to urge G.K. to write a
play. G.K. was, perhaps, beginning to feel that newspaper controversy
did not give him space to say all he wanted about Shaw (or perhaps it
was merely that Messrs. Lane had persuaded him to promise them a book
on Shaw for a series they were producing!). Anyhow, in a letter of
1908, Shaw again urges the play and gives interesting information for
the book.
Ayot St. Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts.
1st March 1908.
MY DEAR G.K.C.
What about that play? It is no use trying to answer me in The New
Age: the real answer to my article is the play. I have tried fair
means: The New Age article was the inauguration of an assault below
the belt. I shall deliberately destroy your credit as an essayist, as
a journalist, as a critic, as a Liberal, as everything that offers
your laziness a refuge, until starvation and shame drive you to
serious dramatic parturition. I shall repeat my public challenge to
you; vaunt my superiority; insult your corpulence; torture Belloc; if
necessary, call on you and steal your wife's affections by
intellectual and athletic displays, until you contribute something to
the British drama. You are played out as an essayist: your ardor is
soddened, your intellectual substance crumbled, by the attempt to
keep up the work of your twenties in your thirties. Another five
years of this; and you will be the apologist of every infamy that
wears a Liberal or Catholic mask. You, too, will speak of the
portraits of Vecelli and the Assumption of Allegri, and declare that
Democracy refuses to lackey-label these honest citizens as Titian and
Correggio. Even that colossal fragment of your ruined honesty that
still stupendously dismisses Beethoven as "some rubbish about a
piano" will give way to remarks about "a graceful second subject in
the relative minor." Nothing can save you now except a rebirth as a
dramatist. I have done my turn; and I now call on you to take yours
and do a man's work.
It is my solemn belief that it was my Quintessence of Ibsenism that
rescued you and all your ungrateful generation from Materialism and
Rationalism.* You were all tired young atheists turning to Kipling
and Ruskinian Anglicanism whilst I, with the angel's wings beating in
my ears from Beethoven's 9th symphony (oh blasphemous Walker in
deafness), gave you in 1880 and 1881 two novels in which you had your
Rationalist-secularist hero immediately followed by my Beethovenian
hero. True, nobody read them; but was that my fault? They are read
now, it seems, mostly in pirated reprints, in spite of their
appalling puerility and classical perfection of style (you are right
as to my being a born pedant, like all great artists); and are at
least useful as documentary evidence that I was no more a materialist
when I wrote _Love Among the Artists_ at 24 than when I wrote
_Candida_ at 39.
[* Cecil avowed this as far as he was concerned. G.B.S.]
My appearances on the platform of the Hall of Science were three
in number. Once for a few minutes in a discussion, in opposition to
Bradlaugh, who was defending property against Socialism. Bradlaugh
died after that, though I do not claim to have killed him. The
Socialist League challenged him to debate with me at St. James's
Hall; but we could not or would not agree as to the proposition to be
debated, he insisting on my being bound by all the publications of
the Democratic Federation (to which I did not belong) and I refusing
to be bound by anything on earth or in heaven except the proposition
that Socialism would benefit the English people. And so the debate
never came off.
Now in those days they were throwing Bradlaugh out of the House of
Commons with bodily violence; and all one could do was to call
oneself an atheist all over the place, which I accordingly did. At
the first public meeting of the Shelley Society at University
College, addressed by Stopford Brooke, I made my then famous (among
100 people) declaration "I am a Socialist, an Atheist and a
Vegetarian" (ergo, a true Shelleyan) whereupon two ladies who had
been palpitating with enthusiasm for Shelley under the impression
that he was a devout Anglican, resigned on the spot.
My second Hall of Science appearance was after the last of the
Bradlaugh-Hyndman debates at St. James's Hall, where the two
champions never touched the ostensible subject of their
difference--the Eight Hours Day--at all, but simply talked Socialism
or Anti-Socialism with a hearty dislike and contempt for one another.
G. V. Foote was then in his prime as the successor of Bradlaugh; and
as neither the Secularists nor the Socialists were satisfied with the
result of the debate, it was renewed for two nights at the Hall of
Science between me and Foote. A verbatim report was published for
sixpence and is now a treasure of collectors. Having the last word on
the second night, I had to make a handsome wind-up; and the
Secularists were much pleased by my declaring that I was altogether
on Foote's side in his struggle with the established religion of the
country.
When Bradlaugh died, the Secularists wanted a new leader, because
B.'s enormous and magnetic personality left a void that nobody was
big enough to fill--it was really like the death of Napoleon in that
world. There was J. M. Robertson, Foote, and Charles Watts. But
Bradlaugh liked Foote as little as most autocrats like their
successors; and when he, before his death surrendered the gavel (the
hammer for thumping the table to secure order at a meeting) which was
the presidential sceptre of the National Secular Society, he did so
with an ill will which he did not attempt to conceal; and so though
Foote was the nearest size to Bradlaugh's shoes then available, he
succeeded him at the disadvantage of inheriting the distrust of the
old chief. J. M. Robertson you know: he was not a mob orator. Watts
was not sufficient: he had neither Foote's weight (being old) nor
Robertson's scholarship.
So whilst the survivors of Bradlaugh were trying to keep up the
Hall of Science and to establish a memorial library, etc. there, they
cast round for new blood. What more natural than that they should
think of me as a man not afraid to call himself an atheist and able
to hold his own on the platform? Accordingly, they invited me to
address them; and one memorable night I held forth on Progress in
Freethought. I was received with affectionate hope; and when the
chairman announced that I was giving my share of the gate to the
memorial library (I have never taken money for lecturing) the
enthusiasm was quite touching. The anti-climax was super-Shavian. I
proceeded to smash materialism, rationalism, and all the philosophy
of Tyndall, Helmholtz, Darwin and the rest of the 1860 people into
smithereens. I ridiculed and exposed every inference of science, and
justified every dogma of religion, especially showing that the
Trinity and the Immaculate Conception were the merest common sense.
That finished me up as a possible leader of the N.S.S. Robertson came
on the platform, white with honest Scotch Rationalist rage, and
denounced me with a fury of conviction that startled his own
followers. Never did I grace that platform again. I repeated the
address once to a branch of the N.S.S. on the south side of the
Thames--Kensington, I think--and was interrupted by yells of rage
from the veterans of the society. The Leicester Secularists, a pious
folk, rich and independent of the N.S.S., were kinder to me; but they
were no more real atheists than the congregation of St. Paul's is
made wholly of real Christians.
Foote is still bewildered about me, imagining that I am a pervert.
But anybody who reads my stuff from the beginning (a Shelleyan
beginning, as far as it could be labelled at all) will find implicit,
and sometimes explicit, the views which, in their more matured form,
will appear in that remarkable forthcoming masterpiece, "Shavianism:
a Religion."
By the way, I have omitted one more appearance at the Hall of
Science. At a four nights' debate on Socialism between Foote and Mrs.
Besant, I took the chair on one of the nights.
I take advantage of a snowy Sunday afternoon to scribble all this
down for you because you are in the same difficulty that beset me
formerly: namely, the absolute blank in the history of the immediate
past that confronts every man when he first takes to public life.
Written history stops several decades back; and the bridge of
personal recollection on which older men stand does not exist for the
recruit. Nothing is more natural than that you should reconstruct me
as the last of the Rationalists (his real name is Blatchford); and
nothing could be more erroneous. It would be much nearer the truth to
call me, in that world, the first of the mystics.
If you can imagine the result of trying to write your spiritual
history in complete ignorance of painting, you will get a notion of
trying to write mine in ignorance of music. Bradlaugh was a
tremendous platform heavyweight; but he had never in his life, as far
as I could make out, seen anything, heard anything or read anything
in the artistic sense. He was almost beyond belief incapable of
intercourse in private conversation. He could tell you his adventures
provided you didn't interrupt him (which you were mostly afraid to
do, as the man was a mesmeric terror); but as to exchanging ideas, or
expressing the universal part of his soul, you might as well have
been reading the letters of Charles Dickens to his family--those
tragic monuments of dumbness of soul and noisiness of pen. Lord help
you if you ever lose your gift of speech, G.K.C.! Don't forget that
the race is only struggling out of its dumbness, and that it is only
in moments of inspiration that we get out a sentence. All the rest is
padding.
Yours ever
G. BERNARD SHAW.
In the book on Shaw which appeared in August 1909, G.K. did as he had
done with his other literary studies: gave (inaccurately) only as
much biography as seemed absolutely necessary, and mainly discussed
ideas. He saw Shaw as an Irishman, yet lacking the roots of
nationality since he belonged to a mainly alien governing class. He
saw him as a Puritan yet without the religious basis of Puritanism.
And thirdly, he saw him as so swift a progressive as to be ahead of
his own thought and ready to slay it in the name of progress.
All these elements in Shaw made for strength but also created
limitations, "Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of
him is admirable." Where he fails is in being unable to see and
embrace the full complexity of life. "His only paradox is to pull out
one thread or cord of truth longer and longer into waste and
fantastic places. He does not allow for that deeper sort of paradox
by which two opposite cords of truth become entangled in an
inextricable knot. Still less can he be made to realise that it is
often this knot which ties safely together the whole bundle of human
life . . . here lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling
mind; he cannot quite understand life, because he will not accept its
contradictions." Humanity is built of these contradictions, therefore
Shaw pities humanity more than he loves it. "It was his glory that he
pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he pitied men almost
too much like animals. Foulon said of the democracy, 'Let them eat
grass.' Shaw said, 'Let them eat greens.' He had more benevolence but
almost as much disdain."
As a vegetarian and a water drinker Shaw himself lacked, in
Chesterton's eyes, something of complete humanity. And in discussing
social problems he was more economist than man. "Shaw (one might
almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life
of the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer." This
lack of the full human touch is felt, even in the plays, because Shaw
cannot be irrational where humanity always is irrational. In
_Candida_ "It is completely and disastrously false to the whole
nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the
cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic
duties. No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel
disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like
her to be domestic. He would simply feel that the potatoes had become
poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. This may be irrational;
but we are not talking of rationality, but of the psychology of first
love.* It may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of
potato-peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance; but the
glamour is quite as certain a fact as the potatoes. It may be a bad
thing in sociology that men should deify domesticity in girls as
something dainty and magical; but all men do. Personally I do not
think it a bad thing at all; but that is another argument."**
[* No two love affairs are the same. This sentence assumed that they
are all the same. To Eugene, the poet living in a world of
imagination and abhorring reality, Candida was what Dulcinea was to
Don Quixote. G.B.S.]
[** _George Bernard Shaw_, pp. 120-1.]
Yet Shaw's limitations are those of a great man and a genius. In an
age of narrow specialism he has "stood up for the fact that
philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death." In an age
that has almost chosen death, "Shaw follows the banner of life; but
austerely, not joyously." Nowhere, in dealing with Shaw's philosophy,
does Chesterton note his debt to Butler. Shaw has himself mentioned
it, and no reader of Butler could miss it, especially in this matter
of the Life Force. It is the special paradox of our age, Chesterton
notes, that the life force should thus need assertion and can thus be
followed without joy.
To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a
love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a
military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the
command of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of
Nature instead of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as
obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn
to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at
least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the
heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think
that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time
been depicted as a man-trap into which we may just have the manhood
to jump. Think of all those ages through which men have talked of
having the courage to die. And then remember that we have actually
fallen to talking of having the courage to live.*
[* _George Bernard Shaw_. Week-End Library, p. 190.]
Here comes the great parting of the two men's thought. G.K. believed
in God and in joy. But he saw that Shaw had much of value for this
strange diseased world. His primary value was not merely (as some
said) that he woke it up. The literary world might not be awake to
the social evil, but it was painfully awake to the ills, real or
imaginary, inherent in human life.
We do not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all
its results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The
modern mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The
modern mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which two
amateur motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces but
are not quite clever enough to put together again.*
[Ibid., pp. 245-6.]
Shaw had not merely asked questions of the age: that would have been
worse than useless. What he had done was at moments to rise above his
own thoughts and give, through his characters, inspired answers: G.K.
instances _Candida_, with its revelation of the meaning of marriage
when the woman stays with the strong man because he is so weak and
needs her. And Shaw had brought back philosophy into drama--that is,
he had recreated the atmosphere, lost since Shakespeare,* in which
men were thinking, and might, therefore, find the answers that the
age needed. And here again we come back to the world which these men
were shaking and to the respective philosophies with which they
looked at it. It was a world of conventions and these conventions had
become empty of meaning. Throw them away, said Shaw and Wells; no,
said Chesterton; keep them and look for their meaning; Revolution
does not mean destruction: it means restoration.
[* Hard on Goethe and Ibsen, to say nothing of Mozart's Magic Flute
and Beethoven's 9th symphony. G.B.S.]
The same sort of discussion buzzed around this book as around the
controversies of which it might be called a prolongation. Shaw
himself reviewed it in an article in the _Nation_, in which he called
it, "the best work of literary art I have yet provoked. . . .
Everything about me which Mr. Chesterton had to divine he has divined
miraculously. But everything that he could have ascertained easily by
reading my own plain directions on the bottle, as it were, remains
for him a muddled and painful problem." From an interchange of
private letters it would seem that the move to Beaconsfield took
place later in this year than I had supposed. Bernard Shaw's letter
is probably not written many days after an undated one to him from
G.K.:
48, Overstrand Mansions,
Battersea Park. S.W.
DEAR BERNARD SHAW,
I trust our recent tournaments have not rendered it contrary to the
laws of romantic chivalry (which you reverence so much) for me to
introduce to you my friend Mr. Pepler, who is a very nice man indeed
though a social idealist, and who has, I believe, something of a
practical sort to ask of you. Please excuse abruptness in this letter
of introduction; we are moving into the country and every piece of
furniture I begin to write at is taken away and put into a van.
Always yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
10, Adelphi Terrace, W.C.
30th October 1909.
CHESTERTON.
SHAW SPEAKS.
ATTENTION!
I saw your man and consoled him spiritually; but that is not the
subject of this letter. I still think that you could write a useful
sort of play if you were started. When I was in Kerry last month I
had occasionally a few moments to spare; and it seemed to me quite
unendurable that you should be wasting your time writing books about
me. I liked the book very much, especially as it was so completely
free from my own influence, being evidently founded on a very hazy
recollection of a five-year-old perusal of Man and Superman; but a
lot of it was fearful nonsense. There was one good thing about the
scientific superstition which you came a little too late for. It
taught a man to respect facts. You have no conscience in this
respect; and your punishment is that you substitute such dull
inferences as my "narrow puritan home" for delightful and fantastic
realities which you might very easily have ascertained if you had
taken greater advantage of what is really the only thing to be said
in favour of Battersea; namely, that it is within easy reach of
Adelphi Terrace. However, I have no doubt that when Wilkins Micawber
junior grew up and became eminent in Australia, references were made
to his narrow puritan home; so I do not complain. If you had told the
truth, nobody would have believed it.
Now to business. When one breathes Irish air, one becomes a
practical man. In England I used to say what a pity it was you did
not write a play. In Ireland I sat down and began writing a scenario
for you. But before I could finish it I had come back to London; and
now it is all up with the scenario: in England I can do nothing but
talk. I therefore now send you the thing as far as I scribbled it;
and I leave you to invent what escapades you please for the hero, and
to devise some sensational means of getting him back to heaven again,
unless you prefer to end with the millennium in full swing.*
[* The scenario dealt with the return of St. Augustine to the England
he remembered converting.]
But experience has made me very doubtful of the efficacy of help as
the means of getting work out of the right sort of man. When I was
young I struck out one invaluable rule for myself, which was,
Whenever you meet an important man, contradict him. If possible,
insult him. But such a rule is one of the privileges of youth. I no
longer live by rules. Yet there is one way in which you may possibly
be insultable. It can be plausibly held that you are a venal ruffian,
pouring forth great quantities of immediately saleable stuff, but
altogether declining to lay up for yourself treasures in heaven. It
may be that you cannot afford to do otherwise. Therefore I am quite
ready to make a deal with you.
A full length play should contain about 18,000 words (mine
frequently contain two or three times that number). I do not know
what your price per thousand is. I used to be considered grossly
extortionate by Massingham and others for insisting on £3. 18,000
words at £3 per thousand is £54. I need make no extra allowance for
the republication in book form, because even if the play aborted as
far as the theatre is concerned, you could make a book of it all the
same. Let us assume that your work is worth twice as much as mine;
this would make £108. I have had two shockingly bad years of it
pecuniarily speaking, and am therefore in that phase of extravagance
which straitened means have always produced in me. Knock off 8% as a
sort of agent's commission to me for starting you on the job and
finding you a theme. This leaves £100. I will pay you £100 down on
your contracting to supply me within three months with a mechanically
possible, i.e., stageable drama dealing with the experiences of St.
Augustine after re-visiting England. The literary copyright to be
yours, except that you are not to prevent me making as many copies as
I may require for stage use. The stage right to be mine; but you are
to have the right to buy it back from me for £250 whenever you like.*
The play, if performed, to be announced as your work and not as a
collaboration. All rights which I may have in the scenario to go with
the stage right and literary copyright as prescribed as far as you
may make use of it. What do you say? There is a lot of spending in
£100.
[* I could not very well offer him £100 as a present. G.B.S.]
One condition more. If it should prove impossible to achieve a
performance otherwise than through the Stage Society (which does not
pay anything), a resort to that body is not to be deemed a breach of
the spirit of our agreement.
Do you think it would be possible to make Belloc write a comedy? If
he could only be induced to believe in some sort of God instead of in
that wretched little conspiracy against religion which the pious
Romans have locked up in the Vatican, one could get some drive into
him. As it is, he is wasting prodigious gifts in the service of King
Leopold and the Pope and other ghastly scarecrows. If he must have a
Pope, there is quite a possible one at Adelphi Terrace.
For the next few days I shall be at my country quarters, Ayot St.
Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts. I have a motor car which could carry me on
sufficient provocation as far as Beaconsfield; but I do not know how
much time you spend there and how much in Fleet Street. Are you only
a week-ender; or has your wise wife taken you properly in hand and
committed you to a pastoral life.
Yours ever,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
P.S. Remember that the play is to be practical (in the common
managerial sense) only in respect of its being mechanically
possible as a stage representation. It is to be neither a
likely-to-be-successful play nor a literary lark: it is to be
written for the good of all souls.
Among the reviewers of the book, our old friend, the _Academy_,
surprised me by hating Shaw so much more than Chesterton that the
latter came off quite lightly. There was a good deal of the usual
misunderstanding and lists were made of self-contradictions on the
author's part. Still in the main the press was sympathetic and even
enthusiastic. But when Shaw reviewed Chesterton on Shaw, more than
one paper waxed sarcastic on the point of royalties and remuneration
gained by these means. The funniest of the more critical comments on
the way these men wrote of one another was a suggestion made in the
_Bystander_ that Shaw and Chesterton were really the same person:
. . . Shaw, it is said, tired of socialism, weary of wearing
Jaegers, and broken down by teetotalism and vegetarianism, sought,
some years ago, an escape from them. His adoption, however, of these
attitudes had a decided commercial value, which he did not think it
advisable to prejudice by wholesale surrender. Therefore he, in order
to taste the forbidden joys of individualistic philosophy, meat, food
and strong drink, created "Chesterton." This mammoth myth, he
decided, should enjoy all the forms of fame which Shaw had to deny
himself. Outwardly, he should be Shaw's antithesis. He should be
beardless, large in girth, smiling of countenance, and he should be
licensed to sell paradoxes only in essay and novel form, all stage
and platform rights being reserved by Shaw. To enable the imposition
to be safely carried out, Shaw hit on the idea of residence close to
the tunnel which connects Adelphi with the Strand. Emerging from his
house plain, Jaeger-clad, bearded and saturnine Shaw, he entered the
tunnel, in a cleft in which was a cellar. Here he donned the
Chesterton properties, the immense padding of chest, and so on, the
Chesterton sombrero hat and cloak and pince-nez, and there he left
the Shaw beard and the Shaw clothes, the Shaw expression of
countenance, and all the Shaw theories. He emerged into the Strand
"G.K.C.," in whose identity he visited all the cafés, ate all the
meats, rode in all the cabs, and smiled on all the sinners. The day's
work done, the Chesterton manuscripts delivered, the proofs read, the
bargains driven, the giant figure returned to the tunnel, and once
again was back in Adelphi, the Shaw he was when he left it--back to
the Jaegers, the beard, the Socialism, the statistics, and the
sardonic letters to the _Times_.*
[* From _The Bystander_. 1 September, 1909.]
Bernard Shaw is a man of unusual generosity, but I think from his
letters he must also be quite a good man of business. G.K. was so
greatly the opposite that G.B.S. urged him again and again to do the
most ordinary things to protect the literary rights of himself and
others. Thus, in the only undated letter in the whole packet, he begs
Gilbert to back up the Authors' Society:
MY DEAR G.K.C.,
I am one of the unhappy slaves who, on the two big committees of
your Trade Union (the Society of Authors) drudge at the heartbreaking
work of defending our miserable profession against being devoured,
body and soul, by the publishers--themselves a pitiful gang of
literature-struck impostors who are crumpled up by the booksellers,
who, though small folk, are at least in contact with reality in the
shape of the book buyer. It is a ghastly and infuriating business,
because the authors _will_ go to lunch with their publishers and sell
them anything for £20 over the cigarettes, but it has to be done; and
I, with half a dozen others, have to do it.
Now I missed the last committee meeting (electioneering: I am here
doing two colossal meetings of miners every night for Keir Hardie);
but the harassed secretary writes that it was decided to take
proceedings in the case of a book of yours which you (oh Esau, Esau!)
sold to John--(John is a--well--no matter: when you take your turn on
the committee you will find him out) and that though the German
lawyer has had £7 and is going ahead (£7 worth of law in Germany
takes you to the House of Lords) everything is hung up because you
will not answer Thring's* letters. Thring, in desperation, appeals to
me, concluding with characteristic simplicity that we must be friends
because you have written a book about me. As the conclusion is
accidentally and improbably true, I now urge you to give him whatever
satisfaction he requires. I have no notion what it is, or what the
case is about; but at least answer his letters, however infuriating
they may be. Remember: you pay Thring only £500, for which you get
integrity, incorruptibility, implacability, and a disposition greatly
to find quarrel in a straw on your behalf (even with yourself) and
don't complain if you don't get £20,000 worth of tact into the
bargain. And your obligations to us wretched committee men are simply
incalculable. We get nothing but abuse and denigration: authors weep
with indignation when we put our foot on some blood-sucking,
widow-cheating, orphan starving scoundrel and ruthlessly force him to
keep to his mite of obligation under an agreement which would have
revolted Shylock: unless the best men, the Good Professionals, help
us, we are lost. We get nothing and spend our time like water for you.
[* Herbert Thring was the barrister employed by the Society of
Authors.]
All we ask you to do is to answer Thring and let us get along with
your work.
Look here: will you write to Thring.
_Please_ write to Thring.
I say: have you written to Thring yet?
G.B.S.
I doubt whether he had. Those chance sums he poured from time to time
into Frances' lap were usually not what they should have been, an
advance on a royalty. _Orthodoxy_ he sold outright for £100. No man
ever worked so hard to earn so little.
When later Gilbert employed Messrs. A. P. Watt as his literary agents
a letter to them (undated, of course, and written on the old
notepaper of his first Battersea flat) shows a mingling of gratitude
to his agents with entire absence of resentment towards his
publishers, which might be called essence of Chesterton:
The prices you have got me for books, compared with what I used
weakly to demand, seem to me to come out of fairyland. It seems to me
that there is a genuine business problem which creates a permanent
need for a literary agent. It consists in this--that our work, even
when it has become entirely a duty and a worry, still remains in some
vague way a pleasure. And how can we put a fair price on what is at
once a worry and a pleasure? Suppose someone comes to me and says, "I
offer you sixpence for your _History of the Gnostic Heresy_." Why,
after all, should I charge more than sixpence for a work it was so
exuberant to write? You, on the other hand, seeing it from the
outside, would say that it was worth--so and so. And you would get it.
Shaw continued his attempts to stimulate the reluctant playwright.
Two years after drafting the scenario, he writes:
10 Adelphi Terrace, W.C.
5th April 1912.
DEAR MRS. CHESTERTON,
I have promised to drive somebody to Beaconsfield on Sunday
morning; and I shall be in that district more or less for the rest of
the day. If you are spending Easter at Overroads, and have no
visitors who couldn't stand us, we should like to call on you at any
time that would be convenient.
The convenience of time depends on a design of my own which I wish
to impart to you first. I want to read a play to Gilbert. It began by
way of being a music-hall sketch; so it is not 3½ hours long as
usual: I can get through it in an hour and a half. I want to insult
and taunt and stimulate Gilbert with it. It is the sort of thing he
could write and ought to write: a religious harlequinade.* In fact,
he could do it better if a sufficient number of pins were stuck into
him. My proposal is that I read the play to him on Sunday (or at the
next convenient date), and that you fall into transports of
admiration of it; declare that you can never love a man who cannot
write things like that; and definitely announce that if Gilbert has
not finished a worthy successor to it before the end of the third
week next ensuing, you will go out like the lady in A Doll's House,
and live your own life--whatever that dark threat may mean.
[* Androcles and The Lion evidently. G.B.S.]
If you are at home, I count on your ready complicity; but the
difficulty is that you may have visitors; and if they are pious
Gilbert will be under a tacit obligation not to blaspheme, or let me
blaspheme, whilst they are beneath his roof (my play is about
Christian Martyrs, and perfectly awful in parts); and if they are
journalists, it will be necessary to administer an oath of secrecy. I
don't object to the oath; and nothing would please Gilbert more than
to make them drink blood from a skull: the difficulty is, they
wouldn't keep it. In short, they must be the right sort of people, of
whom the more the merrier.
Forgive this long rigmarole: it is only to put you in possession of
what _may_ happen if you approve, and your invitations and domestic
circumstances are propitious.
Yours sincerely,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
Chesterton at last did write _Magic_--but that belongs to another
chapter.
Like the demand for a play, the theme of finance recurs with great
frequency in Shaw's letters, and after _Magic_ appeared he wrote to
Frances telling her that "in Sweden, where the marriage laws are
comparatively enlightened, I believe you could obtain a divorce on
the ground that your husband threw away an important part of the
provision for your old age for twenty pieces of silver. . . . In
future, the moment he has finished a play and the question of
disposing of it arises, lock him up and bring the agreement to me.
Explanations would be thrown away on him."