On Hampstead Heath nine months later, Grace and Shaw hurried past each other without a word. Both felt that injustice had been done, Grace to her genuine feelings, Shaw to his good intentions, and no words had been able to reconcile such feelings and intentions. If Shaw treated Grace’s unhappiness rather easily, this was partly because, compared with the awful poverty which was the chief concern of the Fabians, her romantic disappointment seemed almost an indulgence. He had enjoyed Grace’s company and he seems to have found her good-looking. But he had never proposed marriage; he had never compromised her sexually; and if he had compromised her socially then it was due to absurd mores which she should have been too intelligent to accept.
‘Someday a pair of dark eyes, a fierce temperament and a woman will obtain your body and soul,’ Elinor Huddart had written to him. If he was on the lookout for such a creature, it was in order to avoid her. Even before the Gilchrist excitement was over, Shaw was gazing at ‘a pretty girl named Geraldine Spooner’. He neither pursued the ‘fair and fluffy’ Miss Spooner nor ignored her but, after two years doing neither, decided that he was ‘rather in love with Geraldine’ – after which he saw a good deal less of her. He seemed to her ‘a strange and very wonderful looking man, tall, and thin as a whipping post’. He had walked her to railway stations and they had eaten lunches at an Aerated Bread Shop. Each seemed to be presenting the other with opportunities for taking the initiative and neither of them took it – until, Shaw’s lack of initiative growing excessive, Geraldine married the philosopher Herbert Wildon Carr. As soon as it was too late Shaw plunged into action, advancing on ‘my old love Geraldine’, in spite of the desperate fact of her now living in Surrey.
If I could truly now declare
I love but you alone...
But he couldn’t. The visit had been in the nature of a reconnaissance – to learn whether the Carrs might grow into another of those families where he could act the Sunday husband. When Geraldine drove him off to the station in the horse cart, he made straight for the Salts where his Sunday husbandship was by now well-established.
Shaw was a lifelong admirer of Henry Salt. They shared many tastes – Ruskin and Shelley, vegetarianism and anti-vivisection. But though Shaw described his Old Etonian socialist colleague as ‘a born revolutionist’ he seemed more of a born naturalist, armed only with binoculars and eventually ‘working all day at my profession which is looking for, and at wildflowers’. Salt, who was ‘the mildest-mannered man that ever defied society’, made a centre for his reforming spirit in the Humanitarian League of which he was a co-founder and whose journals, dedicated to the abolition of blood sports, corporal punishment, the death penalty and the commercial vulgarization of the countryside, he edited for a quarter of a century.
At the Salts Shaw bathed, rode on a tandem tricycle, made friends with Cosy, ‘a cat of fearful passions’, put into practice his special theories of bed-making and washing-up, cheated outrageously at an exhibition of table turning, gossiped, sang and played a great quantity of piano duets with Mrs Salt – and that was all he did. There was no need for ‘gallantries’ with Kate Salt since she only fell in love with other women. She treated Shaw as a confidant but she felt an idealized love for Edward Carpenter who was homosexual. This preference sometimes riled Shaw. ‘Attacked Carpenter rather strongly over his lecture – perhaps too strongly,’ he confessed in his diary. In Shaw’s opinion, Carpenter exalted Kate’s lesbianism into a cult (she called herself an Urning, one of the chosen race). Her problems would vanish when she had two or three children to look after. Kate hated this chilling cheeriness of Shaw’s. ‘Mrs Salt complained considerably of me,’ he revealed after a breezy visit in 1896:
‘...said she believed I had been practising scales (an unheard-of accusation); said I was in a destructively electrical condition and made her feel that she wanted to cry; said that if I undressed in the dark when going to bed, sparks would come out of me; and generally made me conscious of a grinding, destroying energy, and a heart transmuted to adamant... I am really only fit for intercourse with sensitive souls when I am broken and weary.’
*
Shaw counted his friendship with the Salts as one of the most successful of his triangular liaisons. More questionable were the appearances he was making in the family life of William Morris’s daughter, May.
For years he had enveloped May Morris in a romantic haze that emanated from his feelings for what she called ‘the father’. ‘Great men are fabulous monsters, like unicorns, griffins, dragons, and heraldic lions,’ Shaw was to write. ‘...William Morris was great not only among little men but among great ones.’ He still saw Morris as a crusader, struggling to make nasty people nice and ugly places beautiful. To go from the barren places of the Fabians to the ‘Morris paradise’ at their house in Hammersmith was wonderfully refreshing. Shaw went there often and sometimes, he owned, ‘to see May Morris’. In what was to become a famous passage Shaw tells of a particular incident between them that took place in 1886.
‘One Sunday evening after lecturing and supping, I was on the threshold of the Hammersmith house when I turned to make my farewell, and at this moment she came from the diningroom into the hall. I looked at her, rejoicing in her lovely dress and lovely self; and she looked at me very carefully and quite deliberately made a gesture of assent with her eyes. I was immediately conscious that a Mystic Betrothal was registered in heaven, to be fulfilled when all the material obstacles should melt away, and my own position rescued from the squalors of my poverty and unsuccess... I made no sign at all: I had no doubt that the thing was written on the skies for both of us.’
Characteristically, this metaphysical episode contains and conceals the truth. When Shaw submitted it fifty years later as part of his Introduction to the second volume of May’s book on her father, she allowed its publication. ‘People who don’t count will view it as an amusing romance in the Shaw manner, and those who count – so few left – will read it understanding.’
The Shaw manner suggests that he treated May as an ornament in her father’s Pre-Raphaelite world. She was a picture, not real; something to look at and never touch. But she had never occupied the jewelled place he ascribed to her in the William Morris world. ‘Yes, well, of course I’m a remarkable woman,’ she later told him, ‘ – always was, though none of you seemed to think so.’ The affair was one of suppers, songs, socialism. He wooed her politically, tried to seduce her from the Socialist League to the Fabians: ‘I shall have to overcome my shyness of the Fabians – they are all so gruesomely respectable,’ she protested. It was Shaw’s respectability that made her shy. It was like a strait-jacket and he an inspired lunatic, tied hand and foot. Sometimes he made her laugh so much she felt enfeebled the next day; and it was beautiful to hear him lecture so passionately. ‘I don’t know if you are aware that our audiences love you very much,’ she told him; ‘their faces broaden with pleasure when we promise them that if they are good Bernard Shaw shall be their next teacher.’ Did he love her? It seemed impossible to tell. ‘You have succeeded in perplexing me. I don’t believe I know you a bit better now than when we were first acquainted,’ she wrote to him, after they had known each other for more than a year. ‘Inscrutable man! I suppose this is your form of vanity.’
He seems to have been terrified of the unhappiness he would risk if she became real. Instinctively he countered fear with fear, making her feel that, although she wanted to be close to him, ‘you keep me in a constant state of terror by your fantastic sarcasms, so I suppose it is impossible’. Sometimes, in her frustration, she was short-tempered: ‘I do not know what possesses me to be always so rude when you are invariably kind and courteous to me,’ she apologized. In another letter she referred to ‘our harmless personal relations’. After a year or more of harmlessness, she turned elsewhere. Early in April 1886, Shaw wrote in his diary: ‘Came back with Sparling, who told me of the love affair between him and May Morris.’ Henry Halliday Sparling was a socialist colleague, ‘a tall slim i
mmature man,’ Shaw decided, ‘with a long thin neck on champagne bottle shoulders’.
Shortly afterwards May wrote Shaw a letter accepting, as it were, his mystic rejection of her the previous year. ‘Your resolution when we became acquainted not to make love was most judicious and worthy of all praise, having, as you say, the most entirely satisfying results. I dont think our intercourse could have caused you more pleasure than it has me.’
Her irony was well-merited. By treating May Morris as a woman-on-a-pedestal, Shaw exhibited all the sentimental idealism he later attacked so vividly in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The insignificance of Sparling amounted almost to an invitation for Shaw to supplant him. But still he could not escape the strait-jacket. ‘So nothing happened,’ he wrote, ‘except that the round of Socialist agitation went on and brought us together from time to time.’ They spent almost a week together at Kelmscott Manor in August 1888, Shaw rowing and sailing on the river, playing hide and seek, shooting bows and arrows, guessing ‘animal, vegetable or mineral’ with various children, and feeling very happy. But on 14 June 1890, May married Sparling.
‘This was perfectly natural, and entirely my own fault for taking the Mystical Betrothal for granted; but... [Sparling] was even less eligible than I was; for he was no better off financially; and, though he could not be expected to know this, his possibilities of future eminence were more limited.’
Yet Shaw, who had accepted the love affair, could not accept the marriage. In fantasy, he saw May as belonging to her father: William Morris was her man. By marrying her, Sparling had violated the idyllic union between father and daughter that Shaw in ‘my limitless imagination’ had dreamed into existence, with himself understudying the great William Morris.
He continued seeing the Sparlings, playing the piano with May sometimes till past midnight, as if nothing had happened. One evening, in the summer of 1891, after leaving Hammersmith for Jenny Patterson’s house in Brompton Square, he noted: ‘May only appeared as I was leaving... Gloomy evening. Sorry I left Hammersmith.’ But was there any need to leave? That autumn he began staying at Hammersmith odd nights; and then having, as it were, placed one foot in the door, he felt obligated to call on the other foot to follow. Fitzroy Square seemed ‘unbearable’ when, late in 1892, the building was being redecorated. To escape the smell of paint, and of the drains, he moved to Hammersmith Terrace for part of November, December and January 1893. This was the nearest he came to impersonating Vandeleur Lee and reproducing the Dublin ménage à trois. His description of these months, though revealing the satisfaction this arrangement gave him (he even borrowed ‘a change of clothes from Sparling’), is skilfully disingenuous. The ‘young couple... invited me to stay with them awhile. I accepted, and so found myself most blessedly resting and content in their house...
‘Everything went well for a time in that ménage-à-trois... It was probably the happiest passage in our three lives.
But the violated Betrothal was avenging itself. It made me from the first the centre of the household; and when I had quite recovered and there was no longer any excuse for staying unless I proposed to do so permanently and parasitically, her legal marriage had dissolved as all illusions do; and the mystic marriage asserted itself irresistibly. I had to consummate it or vanish.’
Reader, he vanished.
Like George Carr Shaw, Sparling had been reduced to nullity in the house. Shaw’s explanation for what happened went naturally back to his childhood. ‘My mother was enabled to bear a disappointing marriage by the addition to our household of a musician of genius,’ he wrote. ‘...I had therefore, to my own great advantage, been brought up in a ménage à trois, and knew that it might be a quite innocent and beneficial arrangement.’ In Shaw’s scheme, the music critic of the 1890s must do nothing that the musician of genius had not done in the 1860s. ‘I was perfectly content to leave all that to Sparling and go on Platonically,’ he added, ‘but May was not.’ So there was no alternative but to leave.
But Shaw left less convincingly than Sparling. For having gone, he often returned to Hammersmith, admiring her embroidery, reading poetry and ‘playing all the evening with May’. Soon she started calling for tea at Fitzroy Square – ‘the worst of it was she always wore her heart on her sleeve,’ Lucy Shaw remembered, ‘and everyone knew about her madness for G[eorge]’. They seemed to go everywhere together – to concerts, theatres; on long walks in the park; for skating and sculling along the river together between Chiswick and Barnes (‘and got abominably blistered’).
Shaw’s conviction that this ménage à trois ‘was probably the happiest passage in our three lives’ has the same Panglossian ring as his description of George Carr Shaw’s last years in Dublin after Bessie and the children had left: ‘the happiest time of his life’. Sparling apparently believed that Shaw and May had slept together. In the summer of 1893 they had even gone to Zurich – with sixty other members of the British delegation to the International Socialist Workers’ Congress. In any event, Shaw captivated May who ‘might have been an iceberg so far as her future relations with her husband went’. Sparling finally went to live in Paris. ‘The ménage which had prospered so pleasantly as a ménage-à-trois proved intolerable as a ménage-à-deux,’ Shaw wrote. ‘Of the particulars of the rupture I know nothing; but in the upshot he fled to the Continent and eventually submitted chivalrously to being divorced as the guilty party, though the alternative was technically arranged for him.’
Shaw made Sparling into a Hardyesque figure pursued by the remorseless Fates, while he himself is an observer of this retribution. But it is difficult to credit that he knew ‘nothing’ of the particulars of the rupture he had caused. How, for example, did he know that Sparling had legal grounds for obtaining a divorce against May – the ‘alternative’ that had been ‘technically arranged for him’ – unless perhaps that technicality had been arranged on one of the nights he slept at her house? But by the time Sparling left, Shaw had entered a new triangular liaison. In his imagination, May had returned to the immortal William Morris and her predestined place for all time. Even Morris’s death in 1896 could not alter this: ‘You can lose a man like that by your own death,’ Shaw wrote, ‘but not by his.’ May’s divorce (decree nisi) from Sparling became law on 18 July 1898. ‘May and I discontent one another extremely,’ Shaw admitted, ‘carefully avoiding the subject we are both thinking of. I mount my bike and fly.’
May reverted to her maiden name, and never remarried. ‘I made a mess of things then,’ she wrote, ‘and always, and [have] only myself to blame for a waste of life.’ But thirty years later she could accept Shaw’s re-creation of their relationship because by then it was ‘a story out of another world’, as it always had been for him.
4
Corno di Bassetto
Only a musician’s appreciation has any gratification for me.
Shaw to Neville Cardus (6 January 1939)
The first duty for ‘The Star’s Own Captious Critic’ was to invent a resounding pseudonym: Corno di Bassetto.
The basset horn had been used by Mozart in his Requiem because of its ‘peculiar watery melancholy’; Shaw’s musical journalism was designed to drive melancholy away, as music itself had driven melancholy from his Dublin home. Lee’s music had not unified Shaw’s mother and father, but under its spell Sonny had been able to forget the divisions in the house. If there was love during those years, it was love conveyed by the play of musical instruments and the coming together of voices. The miraculous world of opera became a necessity in Shaw’s life. What others found in loving relationships, Shaw believed he experienced in music. The years of self-tuition from mastering the classics in piano transcription in Dublin to the study of musical treatises in the British Museum, the lessons in harmony and counterpoint, and the long variety of piano duets with everyone’s wife, amounted to an unsentimental labour of love. For him words were the ‘counters of thinking, not of feeling’, and music ‘the sublimest of the arts’.
Between February
1885 and February 1889 he had written some ninety thousand words of music criticism for the Dramatic Review, the Magazine of Music, the Pall Mall Gazette. In these papers the spirit of ‘Corno di Bassetto’ was conceived. The readership of The Star was ‘the bicycle clubs and the polytechnics’, not ‘the Royal Society of Literature or the Musical Association’. The collaboration he now started between Star-writer and Star-reader, and the changes he imposed on himself to make this collaboration effective, were part of the human engineering behind his development into a public man. What had begun with almost-an-apology was to become almost-a-boast. In a letter to the conductor August Manns two months before the birth of Bassetto, he had written: ‘The writer who ventures to criticize you in a public newspaper is... a person of no consequence whatever... and he was never more astonished and flattered in his life than when he learned that his irresponsible sallies had attracted your attention.’
This, the voice of Shaw’s father, appeared to be drowned in later years by a clamour of self-approval, and was only heard again when he confronted people such as Rodin or Einstein, who had not made the sort of public compromise at which G.B.S. excelled. His attitude to this compromise sometimes betrays the self-disgust that was one side of his nature. ‘I daresay these articles would seem shabby, vulgar, cheap, silly, vapid enough if they were dug up and exposed to the twentieth century light,’ he wrote of his Bassetto pieces in 1906. In his Preface, written in 1935, to the publication of London Music in 1888–89 As Heard by Corno di Bassetto, Shaw’s tone has shifted: ‘Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author’s equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus... I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was then refined and academic to the point of being unreadable and often nonsensical.’
Bernard Shaw Page 19