Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

Irving’s magisterial ‘Governor’ at the Lyceum was an equivalent self-production to Shaw’s phenomenal G.B.S. of the Saturday Review. ‘I really care deeply for nothing but fine work,’ Shaw had insisted, and the same was true of Irving. Since their work stood opposed they appeared implacable enemies. It is hard not to feel sympathy for Irving. ‘The artist sacrifices everything to his art, beginning with himself,’ Shaw had written of Irving. ‘But his art is himself; and when the art is the art of acting, the self is both body and soul.’ It was Irving’s body and soul that Shaw held up to ridicule in the Saturday Review. ‘Mr Irving must remember that we now applaud him, not critically, but affectionately,’ he reminded him.

  ‘...We indulge him, every evening at the Lyceum, with a broadsword combat the solemn absurdity of which quite baffles my powers of description. If we treat his orations as lectures, do we not also treat Mr Gladstone’s tree-felling exploits as acts of statesmanship? No one can say that we are not indulgent to our favorites.’

  What could have exasperated Irving more than the Shavian endorsement of his knighthood conferred on him, Saturday Review readers understood, ‘by his own peremptory demand, which no mere gentleman would have dared to make lest he should have offended the court and made himself ridiculous’. It was a battle of author versus actor, dramatist against theatrical manager. Who should rule the theatre?

  ‘The history of the Lyceum, with its twenty years’ steady cultivation of the actor as a personal force, and its utter neglect of the drama, is the history of the English stage during that period. Those twenty years have raised the social status of the theatrical profession, and culminated in the official recognition of our chief actor as the peer of the President of the Royal Academy, and the figure-heads of the other arts. And now I, being a dramatist and not an actor, want to know when the drama is to have its turn. I do not suggest that G.B.S. should condescend to become K.C.B.; but I do confidently affirm that if the actors think they can do without the drama, they are most prodigiously mistaken.’

  In the Saturday Review Shaw dramatizes the ghastly struggle between Irving and Shakespeare, urging his readers to bear in mind the venerable actor’s deep sincerity in preferring his own treasons ‘to the unmutilated masterpieces of the genius’ on whom he had ‘lavished lip-honor’. For these treasons Shaw recommended a small penalty: ‘my regard for Sir Henry Irving cannot blind me to the fact that it would have been better for us twenty-five years ago to have tied him up in a sack with every existing copy of the works of Shakespeare, and dropped him into the crater of the nearest volcano.’ By such tricks did Shaw hope to arrange for Irving’s entrances on stage to be greeted with bursts of laughter – a fitting penalty for the actor who (in one sense or another) had played the dramatist off the stage, and become ‘the despair of all authors and true Shakespeareans’.

  Shaw is here classing himself among the true Shakespeareans. He had kept up to date with new textual criticism of Shakespeare, and his attack on the Lyceum’s mutilated versions complemented the philological and photographic facsimile scholarship of F. J. Furnival (whom he had met at the New Shakespere Society), and the austere Elizabethan production methods of William Poel (which he had studied as a dramatic critic). As Sonny, he had lived in Shakespeare’s world more vividly than his own, and to the extent that something of Sonny persisted in Shaw, to that extent there lived on in him a legacy of love for Shakespeare. But when Sonny had turned to Dickens, he had taken his first step into the theatricality of the stage where G.B.S. now enshrined Ellen Terry. His emotional instincts tended to despair; but his mind needed optimism as the oxygen with which to go on breathing. The Shavian theatre became a factory for the manufacture of this life-supporting tonic.

  At their best Shaw’s tirades against ‘the poor foolish old Swan’ were part of theatre politics, and an attempt to cleanse the Victorian theatre of its snobbish bardolatry. But at their worst they dissolve into a stream of puerilities as irrelevant to Shakespeare’s work as anything performed at the Lyceum by Henry Irving; and as self-advertising: ‘With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.’ Irving had reduced Shakespeare to a pantomime pet; Shaw fashioned him into a journalistic Aunt Sally whose politics ‘would hardly impress the Thames Conservancy Board’. Whenever this rain of abuse against Shakespeare’s ‘economics’ abates, Shaw’s scrupulous knowledge of the poetry gleams through. ‘It is as though he resented his own susceptibility,’ Hilary Spurling was to observe, as though he had to punish him before he could ‘admit how deeply he has been moved – overpowered is his own word – by the beauties of the play in question’.

  Shaw’s attitude to Shakespeare and Irving reflect his attitudes to sex and power. As there are two Shakespeares in Shaw’s world, so there were two Irvings: the dictatorial actor-manager and the man with humours parallel to Shaw’s own.

  ‘All attempts to sustain our conduct at a higher level than is natural to us produce violent reactions... I remember years ago going into the Lyceum Theatre under the impression that I was about to witness a performance of Richard III. After one act of that tragedy, however, Mr Irving relapsed into an impersonation of Alfred Jingle. He concealed piles of sandwiches in his hat; so that when he afterwards raised it to introduce himself as “Alfred Jingle, Esq., of No Hall, Nowhere,” a rain of ham and bread descended on him... He was simply taking his revenge on Shakespear and himself for months of sustained dignity... I am the last person in the world to object; for I, too, have something of that aboriginal need for an occasional carnival in me.’

  Through absurdity we become human. It was this humanity that Shaw warmed to whenever he could change their positions and make Irving the clown or outsider. ‘Does H.I. really say that you are in love with me?’ he asked Ellen. ‘For that be all his sins forgiven him!... I am also touched by his refusing to believe that we have never met.’

  *

  Shaw’s article on Irving’s Richard III had appeared in December 1896, and like a time-bomb exploded four months later under The Man of Destiny. The play had seemed fated to bring Shaw and Ellen Terry together. But in April 1897 the Lyceum decided after all not to stage his play.

  It was almost a relief. ‘I hate failure,’ Shaw had once confided to Ellen. So did Irving. It seemed important to each man that he should be judged by Ellen to have acted the better. She was their referee, and in her reaction was success to be sought. For many Saturdays Shaw had been prodding out his dramatic opinions and trying to goad his opponent into committing some moral foul. For eighteen months they had circled each other while Ellen, believing it actually was a dance and not a fight, looked on.

  Irving’s sudden action took Ellen by surprise. At first he gave Shaw no reason, allowing the great paradoxer to make a conventional deduction. ‘I am in ecstasies. I have been spoiling for a row,’ Shaw told Ellen. But Ellen felt irritated. Why were these men quarrelling? They were like schoolboys. ‘My dear, this vexes me very much,’ she reproved Shaw. ‘My friends to fight! And I love both of them, and want each to win.

  ‘Henry has been much vexed lately (I only learned this last evening) by what he calls “your attacks” upon him in the Saturday Review, the Olivia article especially annoying him... I said I believed he had another reason... I believe he was ashamed and I felt strangely powerfully sorry for him... he and I are going for a long drive this afternoon, and he shall tell me all then.’

  Shaw did not wait to be told more. ‘Of course I knew all about it,’ he answered:

  ‘a good surgeon knows when his knife touches a nerve; a good critic knows the same with his pen. There was a terrible thing in that “Olivia” notice... if he is clever enough to tell you on that afternoon drive – as I should in his place – that he is giving up the play because he is jealous of me about you, take his part and console him: it is when a man is too much hurt to do the perfectly magnanimous thing that he most needs standing by.’ />
  Shaw then proceeded to what he assumed must be a quick magnanimous victory. He informed Irving’s manager that if the Lyceum broke its pledge on no other grounds than that his Saturday Review criticism had been impolite, then the only conclusion to be made was that Irving had used The Man of Destiny to purchase good notices. ‘I am not likely to put myself in the wrong,’ he assured Ellen, ‘with you standing between us.’

  By the time she read this Ellen realized it was to be a more complicated business. On their drive that Sunday, Irving indicated that Shaw’s article on Richard III was an accusation of drunkenness on stage. With someone who used his journalistic position for such a libel no gentleman’s agreement was binding.

  Shaw’s criticism in the Saturday Review contains too many oblique references to drunkenness to be accidental.

  ‘He [Irving] was not, as it seemed to me, answering his helm satisfactorily; and he was occasionally a little out of temper with his own nervous condition. He made some odd slips in the text... Once he inadvertently electrified the house by very unexpectedly asking Miss Milton to get further up the stage in the blank verse and penetrating tones of Richard. Finally, the worry of playing against the vein tired him. In the tent and battle scenes his exhaustion was too genuine to be quite acceptable as part of the play. The fight was, perhaps, a relief to his feelings... If Kean were to return to life and do the combat for us, we should very likely find it as absurd as his habit of lying down on a sofa when he was too tired or too drunk to keep his feet during the final scenes.’

  On 10 April Sardou’s Napoleon play had opened at the Lyceum, where the box-office manager, making a half-hearted attempt to refuse admission to Shaw, was brushed aside. Shaw’s notice, treating Madame Sans Gêne almost as a rehearsal for The Man of Destiny, had come out on the same day as he received the Lyceum’s rejection. It had been nicely timed. The Era suggested that previous reports of the Lyceum having accepted the play were false; the Glasgow Herald announced that Irving, having found Shaw’s Napoleon unsuited to him, ‘has thought it best to return the manuscript to the author with, it is understood, a handsome compliment and a present’. Suddenly Shaw found himself in a flurried situation where his own moral supremacy seemed unclear. It was, he told a friendly journalist, ‘enough to make a saint swear’.

  ‘For the first time in all my long long life I am most frightfully disspirited,’ Ellen wrote to him. ‘Oh God, how frightful it is... Dont quarrel with H[enry]. That would add to my unhappiness.’ ‘This is at heart a tragic business,’ Shaw admitted. ‘...Dont be anxious: I’ll behave nicely and nothing particular will happen.’ By behaving nicely Shaw meant that instead of going to the press he would try to settle matters privately with Irving. On 29 April he wrote to him in brisk and embattled fashion. There had been no imputation of drunkenness, he stated: ‘I never dreamt of such a thing.’ Irving’s reply was unaccommodating. ‘I had not the privilege of reading your criticism – as you call it – of Richard. I never read a criticism of yours in my life. I have read lots of your droll, amusing, irrelevant and sometimes impertinent pages, but criticism containing judgement and sympathy I have never seen by your pen.’

  With journalists clamouring for some riposte, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Shaw to remain silent. But for Ellen’s sake he decided to make one more appeal to Irving. Either the Lyceum must announce the production of The Man of Destiny later that year; or they must concoct together an explanation, highly creditable to them both, for the abandonment of the play. For this second course Shaw had ready a scenario involving Mrs Patrick Campbell and Johnston Forbes-Robertson as an alternative cast. ‘If you can think of anything better than this, let me know,’ he offered. But for Irving anything was better – even nothing was better. To accept such a plan would reduce him to a Shavian puppet. So he simply arranged for his manager to send back the manuscript of Shaw’s play with a brief note of rejection, followed by a more indignant expostulation drafted by his secretary.

  Ellen had begged Shaw not to quarrel with Irving. Quarrel he would not; but a ‘mild tussle,’ he advised, would clear the blood. To Ellen it appeared that Irving was behaving much the worse. She had not seen his first performance in Richard III, and could find nothing wrong with Shaw’s notice of it in the Saturday Review. His rudeness to her friend and lack of consideration for herself made her feel ‘tired and sad and hopeless’. After all those years together, she still could not penetrate the elegant-grotesque veneer of his personality. Sometimes she found herself hating him – and immediately hated herself for doing so. ‘H and I are out! A little bit,’ she confided to Shaw. For the first time she began to criticize one man to the other. ‘I’ve spoiled him! I was born meek. (Ugh)... I do assure you it is I all along who wished so hard for the play. He never wishes for anything much outside his own individual effort. I admire him for it, and I hate him for it, that he appreciates NOTHING and NOBODY... He wants a good slapping, but you must not do that, and I wont.’

  The men had had their tussle and Shaw, by not going to the newspapers, would win her tribute. But as she turned to him, so he turned to his public.

  The Lyceum door had been slammed in his face for all to see. Ellen, after all, did not seem to be his Strange Lady; Irving, when not acting (like Napoleon when not soldiering), was nobody – and in respect of Shaw’s plays would remain nobody. ‘Forgive me; but your Henry is not a hero off the stage,’ he wrote to Ellen. He was almost forty-two and he had written eight plays. The Man of Destiny had been one more battle lost. He needed two things as his spoils of defeat: to revenge himself on Irving through Ellen; and to rewrite the whole history of the event through the press.

  He felt safe in attacking Irving because Ellen had already begun to criticize him herself. ‘You must not take his part now: I declare him unworthy of my Ellen,’ he wrote to her.

  ‘Your career has been sacrificed to the egotism of a fool: he has warmed his wretched hands callously at the embers of nearly twenty of your priceless years; and now they will flame up, scorch his eyes, burn off his rumbathed hair, and finally consume him... He tries to hide himself from himself with a rampart of lies; and he got behind it to hide himself from me. That was why he became an actor – to escape from himself.’

  This was sent to Ellen on 13 May, by which day he had already drafted a long interview with himself for the Daily Mail. It was characteristic of Shaw to make this the occasion for helping a young office clerk in his ambition to become a journalist; and that this man, Reginald Golding Bright (later to become Shaw’s London theatrical agent), should turn out to have been that solitary member of the audience who had heckled Arms and the Man. ‘Vengeance I leave to Destiny,’ Shaw announced to Ellen. What better evidence of this superiority to vengeance could there now be than his helping hand to Golding Bright? Their ‘interview’ in the Daily Mail contained no obvious malice at all, though by describing Irving as ‘still obstinately under the spell of my genius’ he converts him to a comic Shavian invention.

  But Ellen wasn’t fooled. She could tell from Irving’s furtive expression how much he was affected. His last letter to Shaw was in effect a cry of ‘For God’s sake, leave me alone!’ How much more human this seemed than all Shaw’s acrobatics. ‘My poor Henry!’ she exclaimed. Why hadn’t Shaw been able to leave him alone – for her sake? ‘Well, you are quite stupid after all and not so unlike other people. You should have given in and said, “Take the play and do it when you can...” I’m angry with you.’

  Shaw had told Ellen that sometimes on Sundays he used to see her and Irving driving along Richmond Terrace ‘like two children in a gigantic perambulator, and [I] have longed to seize him, throw him out, get up, take his place, and calmly tell the coachman to proceed’. What Ellen had learnt from this quarrel was that Shaw wanted to let her proceed alone. ‘And NOW – well go your ways,’ she decided. They were self-centred impractical men, and jealous.

  She could not always remember her lines; she was on the verge of breaking down – and yet
at a sound or a touch, she could still feel a throb of her heart. ‘I fly from “throbs” in these days. It is not becoming. It’s absurd.’ She flew to her work, which was another sort of love. ‘Work hardens and alerts me,’ she confirmed in Shavian style. But the discipline of work without a little bit of real love became mechanical. Neither Irving nor Shaw could give her real love; neither would touch her, produce that throb.

  From the wreckage of those hopes they had placed in each other, kindness persisted. And from that kindness came an honesty; and from honesty a muted revival of hope. Shaw’s letters to Ellen tell of his childhood, of his dilemma of loving and the escape from incest into fantasy.

  ‘I have only one thing to say to you... wanting to sleep, and yet to sleep with you. Only, do you know what the consequences would be? Well, about tomorrow at noon when the sun would be warm & the birds in full song, you would feel an irresistible impulse to fly into the woods. And there, to your great astonishment & scandal, you would be confined of a baby that would immediately spread a pair of wings and fly, and before you could rise to catch it it would be followed by another & another and another – hundreds of them, and they would finally catch you up & fly away with you to some heavenly country where they would grow into strong sweetheart sons with whom, in defiance of the prayerbook, you would found a divine race. Would you not like to be the mother of your own grandchildren? If you were my mother, I am sure I should carry you away to the tribe in Central America where – but I have a lot of things to say...’

  In such passages, and without ever stating openly that the need he felt for his mother’s love had set a pattern for his relationships with women, Shaw tried to indicate why he had supplanted the physical act of love with ‘a lot of things to say’. In his fashion he loved Ellen; at any rate he wanted to love Ellen; but he could more easily hurt than touch her and felt he must ‘get beyond love’. However much of this Ellen understood, she recognized the integrity and limitation of his feeling for her: ‘You are a dear old kind fellow, as well as everything else.’