Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Archer, however, was not free. For some weeks he continued to work laboriously as art critic for The World ‘until my conscience could endure it no longer’. He then persuaded Shaw to do a specimen article which he sent to Yates and which secured him the post. In Shavian language, Archer had ‘rescued me by a stratagem’, having deliberately planned to resign his post as soon as Shaw got a firm hold on it. This, so Archer held, was a lovely essay in a priori Shavianism, where true belief becomes a matter of will over chronology.

  *

  Shaw held the post of art critic on The World from the spring of 1886 to the autumn of 1889. He had in June 1885 started to contribute an ‘Art Corner’ (covering all the arts) to Our Corner, having met its editor Annie Besant at the Dialectical Society that January, and he continued this column until September 1886. ‘On art I am prepared to dogmatize; on traffic, ask a policeman,’ he wrote. It was his comic dogmatism that made these catalogues of pictures so entertaining to readers of Our Corner and The World:

  ‘Concerning Mr Poynter’s “Difference of Opinion”, with its expanse of closely-clipped grass glittering in the sun, one can only suggest, not disrespectfully, that it would make a capital advertisement for a lawn-mower...’

  ‘Mr Phil Morris’s “Storm on Albion’s Coast” contains a raging ocean made of what I think is called “tulle”... Mr Kennedy has spent much careful work to doubtful advantage on something resembling an East End starveling stuffed into the tail of a stale salmon, and called a mermaid. Miss Dorothy Tennant is reviving the traditional “brown tree” with a vengeance, as a background to her dainty little nude figures. The humorous picture of the year is Mr C. Shannon’s “Will he come in?” a group of primeval men in a pond, where they have taken refuge from a red-haired mammoth...’

  ‘“Disaster” is the title given by Mr Walter Langley to his scene in a Cornish fishing-village; and, on the whole, I agree... The tiger in “Alert” is sitting for its portrait with immense self-satisfaction...’

  ‘The President’s [Walter Crane’s] design, in which Mr Gladstone axe in hand, cuts down a serpent a thousand feet high, is allegory reduced to the desperation of mixed metaphor...’

  Shaw’s two gods in matters of art were Ruskin and Morris. Of Ruskin, ‘a really great artist-philosopher,’ he was to write: ‘He begins as a painter, a lover of music, a poet and rhetorician, and presently becomes an economist and sociologist, finally developing sociology and economics... to an almost divine condition.’ Even in a small way Shaw considered himself as carrying on Ruskin’s business. ‘In a society in which we are all striving after the thief’s ideal of living well and doing nothing,’ he said, ‘...and in which the only people who can afford to buy valuable pictures are those who have attained to this ideal, a great artist with anything short of compulsory powers of attraction must either be a hypocrite... or starve.’ We looked for no valuable advance in art, he argued, ‘until we redistribute our immense Wealth and our immense Leisure so as to secure to every honest man his due share of both in return for his share of the national labour’.

  Shaw enjoyed affronting picture-gallery conventions. He advised artists to sell their paintings ‘by the foot’. ‘Did they never teach you that the frame is the most important part of the picture, and a good “trade finish” (like Van Eyck’s) its most indispensable quality?’ he innocently asked Austin Spare.

  Shaw followed Ruskin’s taste as well as his example. ‘I went into the National Gallery and spent more than an hour over the Turner drawings in the basement with deep pleasure in them,’ he noted in his diary. But he claimed to be as much a politician at the press-view as a Member of Parliament on the hustings: ‘I am always electioneering.’ Recalling his work as art critic half a dozen years later, he wrote: ‘Certain reforms in painting which I desired were advocated by the Impressionist party, and resisted by the Academic party. Until these reforms had been effectually wrought I fought for the Impressionists... [and] did everything I could to make the public conscious of the ugly unreality of studio-lit landscape and the inanity of second-hand classicism.’

  Shaw criticized the ‘insistently mundane’ exhibitions at Burlington House and championed the Society of British Artists led by Whistler who ‘must be at least as well satisfied as any propagandist in London,’ he commented. ‘The defeat of his opponents at the [1887] winter exhibitions is decisive.’ This was an example of Shavian electioneering by a critic who privately believed Whistler to be a gentleman painter clever enough to make a merit of his limited ability. Yet his work was preferable to that of the future President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Leighton, who specialized in ‘the arts of the toilet as practised by rich ladies’.

  Shaw was ideologically committed to progress and sensed that the notations of Whistler’s ‘symphonies’ and ‘harmonies’, dashed off in an hour or two, were shorthand messages from the future. At the same time Whistler was Ruskin’s enemy, and had declared in his famous Ten O’Clock lecture that art was ‘selfishly preoccupied with her own perfection only... having no desire to teach’. Shaw’s art criticism is impressive in its political dexterity: he treats Whistler more as a campaigner-artist than an artist-philosopher. Closer to his natural taste were the Pre-Raphaelites. The prize painter of the Brotherhood was Burne-Jones, who ‘has the power to change the character of an entire exhibition by contributing or withholding his work’.

  At least three times a week Shaw would abscond from literature and art, go down among the Fabians and, like a man bathing himself, ‘talk seriously on serious subjects to serious people. For this reason... I never once lost touch with the real world.’ The real world without art was deeply unsatisfying to Shaw, but the art world without reality seemed worse. As a compromise he supported the Arts and Crafts movement:

  ‘It has been for a long time past evident that the first step towards making our picture-galleries endurable is to get rid of the pictures – the detestable pictures – the silly British pictures, the vicious foreign pictures, the venal popular pictures, the pigheaded academic pictures, signboards all of them of the wasted talent and perverted ambition of men who might have been passably useful as architects, engineers, potters, cabinet-makers, smiths, or bookbinders. But there comes an end to all things; and perhaps the beginning of the end of the easel-picture despotism is the appearance in the New Gallery of the handicraftsman with his pots and pans, textiles and fictiles, and things in general that have some other use than to hang on a nail and collect bacteria. Here, for instance, is Mr Cobden Sanderson, a gentleman of artistic instincts. Does Mr Cobden Sanderson paint wooden portraits of his female-relatives, and label them Juliet or Ophelia, according to the colour of their hair? No: he binds books, and makes them pleasant to look at, pleasant to handle, pleasant to open and shut, pleasant to possess, and as much of a delight as the outside of a book can be.’

  Shaw promoted artists as people who, while apparently providing something that few people wanted, anticipated a demand. Whether it preached or argued, exposed, assured, revealed, consoled, art was a magic and, like Prospero’s Ariel, it commanded kings. Through new combinations of sound, new bridges of feeling and rhythms of colour, people absorbed information that, presented merely as information, they would reject from prejudice or boredom. This was the penetrating power of art, and when Shaw spoke of it he turned naturally to music. ‘And great artists, in order to get a hearing, have to fascinate their hearers; they have to provide a garment of almost supernatural beauty for the message they have to deliver. Therefore, when a man has a message to deliver in literature, with great effort and toil he masters words until he can turn them into music.’

  This formed part of Shaw’s case against Whistler’s concept of art. We must not limit art, he argued, to the satisfaction of our desire for beauty. People cannot endure beauty any more than they can endure love. The paradoxical triumph of romanticism was to have drugged us into believing that we worshipped love and beauty even as we struggled to avoid their demands. Self-respect curdled
into self-love, in Shaw’s prescription, unless preserved by seriousness: the dilettante was always narcissistic. Oscar Wilde appeared the pre-eminent dilettante; the best example of the serious man was William Morris. His love of the medieval world sprang from a longing to regain those happy years ‘when I was a little chap’. He summoned up a vision of the long past, a garden of happiness where nature, in the pattern of leaves and flowers, invaded the rooms: ‘it was a positive satisfaction to be in his houses,’ Shaw remembered. Morris had set his heart on founding a brotherhood that, by seeking medieval cures for the malaise of capitalism, would crusade against industrial squalor and replace it with a regenerated Britain – a green-tree land of gardens, fields and forests. His revolutionary politics followed a revolution in his own life to which Shaw’s attitude is revealing.

  Like Shaw, Morris had an extreme fear of emotional suffering; like Shaw, he identified schools as prisons, locking him out of Eden. But he returned to Eden when, in 1859, he married ‘an apparition of fearful and wonderful beauty’, Janey Burden, the daughter of a groom. For her, as for Augustus John’s Dorelia, beauty had been a means of emancipation. She looked like a ‘figure cut out of a missal,’ Henry James said, and had been raised from her simple working-class life to be Queen of the Pre-Raphaelite kingdom, a Blessed Damozel, tragic, imposing, silent. Morris’s developing interest in the working class seemed to threaten her with a return to the mean conditions of her past. Shaw observed no unhappiness. ‘Their harmony seemed to me to be perfect. In his set, beauty in women was a cult.’ When Morris, in old age, covered the forests of his wallpapers with whitewash, Shaw recognized not the extinction of something essential but an advance in ‘his need for the clean, the wholesome, & the sensible’.

  To Shaw, it was as if Morris had woken up from an impossible dream of fair women, opened his eyes on a Ruskinian landscape and strode out to reach the communism that ‘was part of his commonsense’. He had transferred his hopes from an individual to a collective sphere, achieving fulfilment through the integration of politics and art. No matter that he had little natural aptitude for politics. Shaw acknowledged his position as head of the Socialist League to be ‘absurdly false’, recommending that he be treated with marked consideration as ‘a privileged eccentric and in no way an authority as to socialist policy’ – almost exactly in the same manner as the Labour Party was later to regard G.B.S. himself.

  Morris was the clearest example of a hero in the Shavian iconoclastic world. Shaw felt wonderfully at home at his house on Hammersmith Terrace where he met many kindred spirits – men such as Sydney Cockerell and Walter Crane. In place of Wilde’s aesthetics for the elite stood a man who worked with others on behalf of everyone – a man who wanted to bring applied arts and the perspective of beauty into all life. The ‘idle singer of an empty day’ had grown into the busy singer of a bursting day. Shaw believed that the artist’s wares had to be marketed in the knowledge that most customers hated beauty because, as a reflection of love, it could hurt them. Though his capacity for loving was undeveloped, Shaw did not lack emotion. Cunningly fenced off behind some of the most brilliantly unsentimental prose in the language, is plenty of feeling. His faith in the employment of the arts is expressed in a puritan encyclical:

  ‘The claim of art to our respect must stand or fall with the validity of its pretension to cultivate and refine our senses and faculties until seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting become highly conscious and critical acts with us... The worthy artist or craftsman is he who serves the physical and moral senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays and dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable activity. The great artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.’

  3

  The Prospective Lover

  People who are much admired often get wheedled or persecuted into love affairs with persons whom they would have let alone if they themselves had been let alone.

  These words appear in a short story, ‘Don Giovanni Explains’, that Shaw wrote in the summer of 1887. He makes use in this story of his experiences with women over the past three years to find the best truth available to him. Like Shaw, Don Giovanni had been born a shy man.

  ‘On rare occasions, some woman would strike my young fancy; and I would worship her at a distance for a long time, never venturing to seek her acquaintance... At last a widow lady at whose house I sometimes visited, and of whose sentiments towards me I had not the least suspicion, grew desperate at my stupidity, and one evening threw herself into my arms and confessed her passion for me. The surprise, the flattery, my inexperience, and her pretty distress, overwhelmed me. I was incapable of the brutality of repulsing her; and indeed for nearly a month I enjoyed without scruple the pleasure she gave me, and sought her company whenever I could find nothing better to do. It was my first consummated love affair; and though for nearly two years the lady had no reason to complain of my fidelity, I found the romantic side of our intercourse, which seemed never to pall on her, tedious, unreasonable, and even forced and insincere except at rare moments, when the power of love made her beautiful, body and soul.’

  There were three categories of relationship in Shaw’s life: flirtations with single women, usually at this time young Fabian girls; philanderings with the wives of friends, usually socialist colleagues; and a consummated love affair with a divorced or separated lady. With Alice Lockett he had tried to combine all his emotional needs in one person, and concluded that it could not be done. On 29 September 1888, more than three years after they had parted, Alice spent the day with Shaw in London. ‘I sang some of the old Figaro bits with Alice, who presently went home,’ he noted in his diary, ‘overcome, I think, by old associations.’

  There was no chance of Shaw being overcome: he overcame. He had plumed himself into a dazzling lecturer, enthralling audiences with his vitality and wit. He was marvellously adroit too in debate, catching his opponents’ sallies in mid-air like a conjuror and returning them with amazing speed. The expectations he raised are beautifully caught by a young Fabian called Grace Black. ‘People are so exceedingly miserable in every class, that I should lose hope if I did not know there are many who devote themselves entirely to trying to make things better,’ she wrote to him.

  ‘...you have a greater power of seeing truth than most people: you can do more than most. It is impossible to help expecting a great deal from you and now is the point – don’t fail – please don’t. For one thing I don’t know how I could bear it – but that is not the point. What I fear is that you do not care for nor believe in people sufficiently... do care more for people for that is where you seem to fail.’

  Shaw recognized at once a case of Fabian love. He could diagnose love as efficiently as a doctor identifying death. His objection to it was part of his hatred of private property. People said that all the world loved a lover: the truth was that a lover loved all the world, and therein lay his crime. Providing we were in love, the world was a fine place, and we condoned its awfulness. That we needed to love, he knew. But he represented the partiality of romantic love as a perversion of our deepest desire. For it was not to this person, then to that person, but to the whole world that we owed the comprehension of love. The world, however, was not ready for love. To renounce the indulgence of loving was in itself an act of love – the act of deferred love we call faith.

  Grace Black had asked for no answer – ‘if you sent me one, you might make me unhappy,’ she told him. But Shaw could not let this alone. He sent his first letter to her by return of post. Her reply was a rebuke:

  ‘I guessed you would think I was in love with you. So I am, but that has nothing to do with my letter and it is a pity if that thought has clou
ded my meaning. My personal happiness is certainly connected with your success as a teacher of socialism, & in a less degree by that of Hyndman & Morris, because I care very much for what is implied to me by socialism. But apart from that I do love you, & why do you wish to dissuade me from that and from believing in you?... There is nothing in my attitude of humility, dependence or expectancy which would give reason for irritation... But it is true that I wish that love were an easier simpler thing than it is now; but that is to wish for heaven... You are not much older than me, but all experience is to the bad. I am serious.’

  Shaw’s experience of love had been ‘to the bad’, and from Grace Black’s feelings he took care to protect himself. His description of Grace’s announcement in 1889 of her marriage is a good example of inverted Shavian romanticism: she ‘sent me a note to say what she was going to do,’ he wrote, ‘adding, by way of apology for throwing me over, that she could never marry a man she loved’. The letter he actually received read as follows:

  ‘You know that the reason I began to love you was because I believed you cared more for truth and would do more to help socialism than any other man... Long ago I saw that my love for you was a waste of force, because you were so different to me: but it is only lately I have been able to love anyone else. I do now, and am engaged to marry Edwin Human a Socialist... You have a place deep in my heart: my feelings have run through all the personal currents in respect of you & can’t go back but have ended as they began in something quite impersonal, rather painful but in a way sacred.’