Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  It was positive Hegelianism that Shaw wanted to import into English politics. This is made explicit in a letter he sent some fifteen years later to the Labour Member of Parliament Charles Trevelyan. ‘A Government... if it is really to govern and propagate its species... must have a common religion, which nowadays means a philosophy and a science, and it must have an economic policy founded on that religion.

  ‘Well, I contend that such a nexus exists... you will find it in Thomas Hardy’s poems at one extreme of literature and in the blitherings of Christian Science at the other. But take two expositions that may be known to you: the third act of Man and Superman and Bergson’s Creative Evolution. These are totally independent of one another: Bergson and I would have written as we did, word for word, each if the other had never been born. And yet one is a dramatization of the other. Our very catch-words, Life Force and Elan Vital, are translations of one another... why not a creative-evolutionist party?...

  The economic policy of the party is clear enough. Everyone who can see the sun shining at noon can also see that there is only one main problem to be solved, and that is the redistribution of income. Also that it is not only an economic question, but a political and biological one. Here you have a body of doctrine on which a party could be built literally over a whole epoch.’

  Towards the third act of his play Shaw felt especially protective. Its long second scene, staged as a dream and held in a chronological paradox ‘Beyond Space, Beyond Time’, is a science fiction made from Shaw’s retrospective longings. It is a contest between his optimism for which the Tanner-surrogate Don Juan speaks, and his pessimism which is represented by Mendoza’s counterpart, the Devil. Agreeing on much, they are divided in their debate over the need and practicality of human progress. Both are contemptuous of the morality of pretence which filled the Victorian theatre and reflected the conventions of life outside. But what are the alternatives? The Devil says fantasy and play; Don Juan says the evolution of a higher type of human being.

  Heaven and hell are not states of afterlife but metaphors for opposing temperaments, values and philosophies. Juan defines hell as ‘the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness... Here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are... in a word, bodiless... here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance.’

  This aspect of Shaw’s hell was to become a factor of his theology almost twenty years later in Back to Methuselah where the tyranny of the flesh disappears in a whirlpool of pure thought. Here was a three-hundred-year romance by an extremely fastidious man whose disgust with the physical condition of human beings compelled him to eliminate them from his philosophy. ‘There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions.’ Shaw’s formula for hell in Man and Superman has enough in common with the bodiless Utopia of Back to Methuselah to suggest that the Devil may surreptitiously be going to win a good part of his case.

  Conventional morals will always succumb to the Devil’s attractions. To resist his hell, Juan argues, we need evolutionary morals. If reality is worry, ugliness and age, sadness and tragedy and death, why not, asks the Devil, use your ingenuity to create a life of endless escape from it? For two reasons, answers Juan. Nature has given man a brain; he needs the power of self-awareness and understanding. The direct pursuit of happiness and beauty leads to misery – happiness may only be gained as a byproduct of other endeavours. Secondly, life is not composed as the Devil would like us to believe. It is an illusion to think that we can solve our problems. From each problem solved springs some new challenge. So life must forever progress upwards: or end. Man’s quest for knowledge has set him off on the great adventure of transforming his environment and understanding the universe. He may not stop the world and go off on a perpetual holiday.

  Juan’s belief in brains provokes the Devil into his first great counterattack. ‘Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately?’ he enquires. What have human brains done but produce more awful weapons of destruction? It is when we become too ambitious on behalf of the human race that we end up destroying ourselves. His monologue amounts to a conservative attack on the illusions of progress and a recommendation of the aristocratic principle of cultivated living.

  Don Juan’s reply reveals his belief that salvation depends upon the urge to transcend past achievements. It is easily conceivable that the world will blow itself up, or Western civilization peter out, unless this human urge is renewed. But the Devil is no vulgar hedonist. ‘I am also on the intellectual plane,’ he says. It is the credulous strivers after perfection in the social organization, he insists, who slaughter millions. He, the Devil, stands for moral principles in that he treats people as ends, not means.

  The resolution to their debate comes through Doña Ana with her cry at the end of the scene: ‘a father for the Superman!’ And so, from the two ways of serving the Life Force, the biological and the intellectual, Shaw gives priority in time to the first. Evolutionary progress, he suggests, depends on sexual instinct; on the coming together of opposites to produce through generations a better human combination of mind and body. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism and The Perfect Wagnerite, the battle had been fought between realist and idealist for the mind of the philistine; in Man and Superman the evolutionary need for greater intelligence lies in the sexual conquest of the realist by the philistine. So the dramatic pursuit of the intellectual Tanner by the predatory Ann is not a defeat for intelligence after all. Tanner’s dream and disquisition with the Devil is Shaw’s attempt, through operatic argument, to achieve the ‘drama of thought’. But Don Juan’s speeches grow too long and, behind their resolute optimism, reveal Shaw’s panic.

  There is no doubt that Shaw intended Don Juan to win the debate. Against the common belief in a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, he postulated a God who looked and saw it could be bettered. ‘I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it,’ says Juan. ‘That is the law of my life.’ That this purpose is Shaw’s own is made clear by a parallel passage in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, where he writes: ‘This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.’

  Tanner wins all his word-battles. Ann wins the actual battle between them. Shaw’s Superman was a symbol for the synthesis between word and deed.

  Only the obtuseness of theatre managers, as Beerbohm had said, was able to postpone Shaw’s success as a playwright. The younger generation of theatre audiences was waiting for him. Almost two years after publication of the book the three-act play was first performed. This version, full of melancholic autobiographical undertones, has a precise theatrical unity. It is a romantic courtship comedy about the stock subjects of marriage and money, and has all the farcical episodes of the love-chase. The Victorian and Edwardian theatregoer would easily recognize the situations and characters. There is a love-pursuit through Europe, a capture by brigands and a rescue; there is a clandestine marriage, an emotional triangle, the reading of a will, a happy ending; the stage is peopled by standard figures – the romantic artist, the heavy father, the lover and the servant in a long line from Leporello and Sancho Panza to Sam Weller and Jeeves.

  Yet nothing is what it seems to be and everywhere romantic expectation is confounded. Shaw replaces the woman-on-a-pedestal with the female huntress; the new woman with the technological man. The play is crowded with paradoxical reversals. His brigands are vestrymen and Fabians, their leader a love-afflicted sentimentalist; the rich and difficult father turns out to be a social eccentric who wants a misalliance for his son and is reconciled to his marriage not by his daughter-in-law’s purity and sweetness but her business acumen. A daughter dominates her mother; a servant rules his employer; and the governing action of
the play is the woman’s pursuit of her lover. Hell is revealed as a sentimentalist’s picture of heaven.

  In this skill at inverting popular conventions and creating genre antitypes lay the special power of Shaw’s ‘heretical’ plays. He welcomed his audience into a world where everything was familiar to them, then upset all its values and forced it to ‘reconsider its morals’.

  5

  John Bull’s Other Island

  The object of the play is to teach Irish people the value of an Englishman as well as to shew the Englishman his own absurdities.

  ‘Author’s Instructions to the Producer’, John Bull’s Other Island

  Two years separated the completion of Man and Superman from the composition of Shaw’s next play. Shortly before the publication of Man and Superman, Shaw confided to Yeats that he had it ‘quite seriously in my head to write an Irish play (frightfully modern – no banshees or leprechauns)’; but he did nothing further until what seemed a fair chance appeared.

  It was Yeats who gave him this chance. Together with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, he had founded the Irish Literary Theatre which proposed to create in Dublin ‘a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature... [with] that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England’. They must ‘escape the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce’ which clung to London’s West End.

  There was much that was familiar in this to Shaw and much that appealed to him. Lady Gregory was to his mind ‘the greatest living Irishwoman’; Edward Martyn, an owl-blinking misogynist, lover of wine and caviar, and first president of Sinn Fein, was an admirer of Ibsen; and Yeats manoeuvred his theatre colleagues with all the skill Shaw devoted to the Fabians. In 1902 Yeats fell in with the Fay brothers, Frank and Willy, and their little band of Irish actors. From this association, the following year, the Irish National Theatre Society was born with Yeats himself as president, and a new set of colleagues, Maud Gonne, Douglas Hyde and the poet, theosophist and visionary painter George Russell (known as A.E.) its vice-presidents. In the spring of 1904, the Society was invited to play at the Royalty Theatre in London, and Shaw went along to watch them. They played Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea; Yeats’s The King’s Threshold and A Pot of Broth; and Padraic Colum’s Broken Soil, all showing the influence of Gordon Craig’s revolt against the elaborate productions of Irving and Beerbohm Tree. It was then that Shaw opened his eyes to a renaissance in the Irish theatre.

  Yet it had been, until this year, a hole-and-corner affair not dissimilar, in its fashion, to the Stage Society. What changed matters was the involvement of Annie Horniman who bought a ninety-nine-year lease on a small music-hall theatre within the Mechanics Institute on the corner of Lower Abbey Street, and adjacent premises in Marlborough Street that ‘had served as a bank, the home of a nationalist debating society, a recruiting centre for the Fenian movement, and the City Morgue’. She now offered Yeats, as president of the Society, use of the new theatre cost-free. The Abbey Theatre was to open its doors at the end of 1904, and it was for this opening, ‘as a patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre’, that Yeats invited Shaw to write his next play.

  ‘Not a word of the play yet on paper,’ Shaw promised Lady Gregory on 20 June. In fact he had begun writing it, under the provisional title Rule Britannia, in a pocket notebook three days earlier while staying with Charlotte at Hindhead. It continued seething in his mind and filling his notebooks over the next ten weeks.

  On 7 September Shaw sent the completed play to Ethel Dickens with instructions to type it out and forward a copy to Yeats. He had been horrified to find that the autograph manuscript, scattered through four pocket notebooks, contained about 32,000 words. Henry Arthur Jones, he recollected, had put 18,000 as the correct length, ‘but I am too exhausted to attempt to cut it,’ he told Yeats.

  In John Bull’s Other Island Shaw contrasted the twenty years of his upbringing in Dublin with the twenty years of his career in London. At one level, which he later developed in his Preface, the play is about the opposing political histories and national characteristics of the two countries. But Ireland and England are also metaphors for differing philosophies: and Shaw’s experiment at reconciling them is the theme of this self-revealing work.

  ‘Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal.’ This wish, voiced by Larry Doyle, the exiled Irishman working in England, was the motive-power behind these middle-period plays. Larry Doyle is the vertex of a triangle at one corner of which stands the successful English businessman Tom Broadbent, and at the other Peter Keegan, the unfrocked Irish priest, who meet over Broadbent’s plan to form a Land Development Syndicate.

  In Broadbent Shaw created, for Irish audiences, the stage-Englishman, having in the first scene chased the stage-Irishman Tim Haffigan off as an impostor. Broadbent represents the world of facts, however brutal; Keegan the world of dreams, however unreal. Broadbent is the perfect philistine, a ‘robust, full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life’. His kingdom is the material world. He feels happy in what Keegan describes as ‘very clearly a place of torment and penance’. On the contrary, Broadbent declares, it is ‘quite good enough for me: rather a jolly place, in fact’.

  The key to Broadbent’s success is his narrowness of intelligence and imagination. He simplifies everything for profitable use. ‘The only really simple thing is to go straight for what you want and grab it,’ says another philistine, Ann Whitefield, in Man and Superman. Broadbent is the acquisitive man. Within twenty-four hours of arriving at Rosscullen he has collared the parliamentary seat, taken up Larry’s sweetheart Nora Reilly and acquired the land for development. He brings to Ireland a terrible corruption of Shaw’s belief in improvement, but he brings it cheerfully. The stage directions picture him as ‘always buoyant and irresistible’.

  Everything that is absent from Broadbent goes to make the character of Peter Keegan. Broadbent could be played by a Falstaffian performer; Keegan needed ‘a poetic actor’. Broadbent is a land speculator interested in the modern technology of motor cars, neat golf links, new hotels. Keegan, who loves the land, speaks with grasshoppers and calls the donkey, the ass and the pig his brothers. In contrast to Father Dempsey, the parochial reality, Keegan is ‘an ideal Catholic’, the first and most convincing of Shaw’s mystical sages, who retreats at the end of the play to the Round Tower and will reappear briefly as Androcles and later as the damaged Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House.

  Into Keegan’s mouth Shaw put his own fastidious sense of horror at Broadbent’s world –

  ‘[a] place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing, and the weak in character are put to the horrible torture of imprisonment, not for hours but for years, in the name of justice.’

  Broadbent’s schemes for the future (‘this place may have an industrial future, or it may have a residential future’) do not impress Keegan who replies that it ‘may have no future at all’.

  Broadbent embodies action, Keegan speaks for the emotions and Larry Doyle represents the intellect. Throughout the play there is a bias in favour of action. Larry has had only two ideas: ‘to learn to do something; and then to get out of Ireland and have a chance of doing it’. Ireland ‘produces two kinds of men in strange perfection: saints and traitors,’ we are told. If Keegan is the saint, Larry Doyle is the traitor. He has repressed everything he shares with Keegan: he has rejected Ireland. Shaw’s stage directions throughout Larry’s long speech on ‘the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!’ of Ireland underline the personal fe
eling he put into these pages: ‘With sudden anguish... Savagely... bitterly, at Broadbent... With fierce shivering self-contempt... Dropping his voice like a man making some shameful confidence.’

  Not sharing Keegan’s self-sufficiency, Larry must borrow his strength from Broadbent’s self-confidence. Otherwise, he says, ‘I should never have done anything’. It is Broadbent who sees clearly the price Larry has paid. ‘He has absolutely no capacity for enjoyment,’ Broadbent tells Nora: ‘he couldn’t make any woman happy. He’s as clever as be-blowed; but... he doesn’t really care for anything or anybody.’

  Keegan is the man Sonny might have grown into if he had been able to endure the anguish of living in the Land of Dreams; Larry Doyle, with his ‘clever head’, his ‘suggestion of thinskinnedness and dissatisfaction’ and determination to be ruthless, must have been Shaw’s nightmare. The syndicate which Keegan and Broadbent have formed (in which Larry owns a ‘bit of the stock’) is not the synthesis between dreams and facts for which Shaw was looking. It is a business partnership in which Larry’s intellectual powers are used to serve Broadbent’s philistine aims.

  The second partnership in the play, that between Broadbent and Nora, is not a marriage of body and spirit, but a devouring of the spirit by the body. A ‘frail figure’, she is ‘almost sexless’ and he, with his ‘good broad chest’, promises to ‘plump out your muscles and make em elastic and set up your figure’. She is his ethereal ‘ideal’ and he will make her into the housewife of ‘a solid four-square home’.

  Everyone remains separated in the play and no one is converted. Broadbent takes charge of the world; Keegan retires to his tower; and the conflict within Larry is not reconciled. He has split life into dreams and facts, and chosen facts as reality.