Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  *

  He saw a good deal of the Webbs during the first half-dozen years of their marriage. The income that Beatrice inherited from her father enabled Sidney to retire from the Colonial Office; and together they planned to give unpaid service to society in return for this unearned income. Beatrice immediately put Sidney to work, writing their books on trade unionism, industrial democracy and English local government. This work established the Fabian tradition of research. It was complemented by their ‘permeation’ policy of infiltration and persuasion. Under Beatrice’s direction, this was to take a more social turn. She was not a good hostess. Like Shaw, her achievement was built on the repression of the body. She grew addicted to fasting, weighing herself regularly at Charing Cross Station and gloating over each little loss of weight. Her bare lunches and dinners, though feasts of intellect, never added an atmosphere of seduction to the manipulating activity of permeation.

  Beatrice was to be the salonnière of the Fabian Society, with Shaw its instant historian. What his audiences heard from him on the platform, what they read by him in their newspapers, kept morale sparkling with the sense that political events were going their way. It also enabled them the more easily to accept decisions in their name that had been made exclusively by the Webbs and Shaw.

  Only one Socialist, Keir Hardie, had been returned to Parliament at the General Election of 1892. The Fabians generally supported the Liberals on whom, by means of what was called the Newcastle programme, they believed that they had imposed a detailed plan for constructive social reform. At the beginning of 1893, the future of a Labour Party in Parliament was remote; but implementation by Gladstone’s Liberal Government of the Fabian-inspired Newcastle Programme, involving new factory legislation, the extension of free education, municipal reform, payment of MPs and the ‘mending or ending’ of the House of Lords, seemed imminent. Six months later, it had become clear that Gladstone had abandoned almost all radical reforms and handed Parliament’s time over to an Irish Home Rule Bill. To the Fabians, this was a waste of time (literally so, since the House of Lords halted the Home Rule Bill), and a betrayal of election promises. ‘We must,’ Shaw wrote to a hesitant Graham Wallas, ‘...satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the ardent spirits by getting out a furious attack on the Government.’

  This furious attack, written by Shaw with Webb’s assistance and signed ‘By the Fabian Society’, appeared in the November Fortnightly Review using the Biblical call to revolt, ‘To Your Tents, Oh Israel!’ Acknowledging that legislative reforms might have been limited by the small Liberal majority, Shaw’s manifesto examined each of the departments of State and showed what administrative reforms, not subject to this limitation, might have been effected so that individual ministers could redeem some of their Government’s pledges. ‘Had the will existed,’ the manifesto concluded, ‘there would have been no difficulty about the way.’ This was a triumphant piece of political journalism, which Shaw elaborated in January 1894 into Fabian Tract No. 49, A Plan of Campaign for Labor, which called for the trade unions to raise ‘a parliamentary fund of at least £30,000, and the running of fifty independent Labor candidates at the next general election’. But this manifesto produced two reactions: it alienated the Liberal Party and all those Fabians who still saw in Liberalism a means of introducing a progressive programme into Parliament; and it came too late to kindle sympathy with men such as Keir Hardie, who was to lose his seat in the 1895 General Election, and who described the Fabians as ‘the worst enemies of the social revolution’. For though A Plan of Campaign for Labor proposed similar measures to those of the Independent Labour Party, Shaw feared that any amalgamation would lead to the extinction of his Fabian family. Already by the spring of 1894 the Society, which Shaw was to urge not to ‘waste another five minutes on permeation’, was drifting back to the idea of grafting collectivism on to Rosebery who had then succeeded Gladstone as Liberal Prime Minister. At the 1895 General Election, ‘sitting with their hands in their laps’, the Fabians neutrally committed themselves to the principle of a Collectivist Party, distinct from Liberals, Conservatives and the ILP. The large Conservative victory that summer seemed to mark an end to the socialist resurgence in Britain. The trade-union movement had faltered, the ILP had done badly, and the Fabians had done nothing at all.

  Fabian strategy during the 1890s exemplified Shaw’s dogma of adaptability. He excelled at seizing the initiative in retrospect. In whichever direction history plunged, there was the Fabian waiting to guide and explain. To some extent these twists and weavings were the natural trials and errors of Shaw’s political education. He felt strongly convinced that the humane and reasoned voice of the intellectual must not be lost amid the struggle of party politicians and the rough and tumble of popular democracy. To be heard, seen, and valued as advocates of progress with safeguards against revolution, the Fabians needed someone to play these political games and command popular appeal – while leaving the central concept of egalitarian English socialism uncontaminated. It was on such an understanding that Shaw was exploiting his dialectical skills.

  2

  Plays Unpleasant

  Widowers’ Houses seemed to me better worth printing than burning... I am not burning it: I am just finishing another play... Then I shall write another; and I have no doubt that when I have written ten or eleven more or less simple and crude plays I shall be able to write a complex and perhaps powerful one.

  Shaw to Karl Pearson (20 June 1893)

  He had been hovering on the edge of writing plays for a long time. This fascination with the stage, deriving from those visits in Dublin to the Theatre Royal and the new Gaiety Theatre, had hidden itself in his novels, for he was (so he confessed to readers of the Pall Mall Gazette), ‘a sufferer from that strange brain disease which drives its victims to write long stories that are not true, and to delight in them more than in any other literature’.

  In 1884 he had begun his first serious attempt to write a full-length play in collaboration with Archer. The plan was for Archer to borrow a plot from a domestic ‘cup-and-saucer comedy’ by Emile Augier called Ceinture Dorée, Archer doing it into English scene by scene and ladling it out to Shaw who would set about reconciling it, in sparkling dialogue, with his Marxist passion for political economy. It was to be called The Way to a Woman’s Heart, though they soon began calling it Rheingold (later anglicized to Rhinegold). Shaw started on 18 August and by 12 September completed the first act. A month later, the second act was also completed; but in mid-November, after writing twenty-three lines of Act III, he stopped, with the explanation that he had exhausted all Archer’s plot. In fact he was able to find use for all too little of it. His difficulty lay in matching this contrived Parisian structure to an analysis of contemporary slum landlordism. Increasingly he was driven away from Augier’s story to plunder other sources – Little Dorrit, some scenes from his own last novel, An Unsocial Socialist, and a penny pamphlet called The Bitter Cry of Outcast London that was to lead to a Royal Commission. But eventually he ‘gave up fiction and took to Socialism,’ as he explained to Janet Achurch.

  There were occasions over the next two or three years when, coming across his notebooks, Shaw would copy out some pages of Rhinegold in the hope of regaining his momentum. But the play still lacked direction. ‘Wrote no new fiction,’ Shaw noted at the beginning of his 1886 diary. He felt the lack of creative writing, and by 14 April 1887 observed himself to be ‘hovering on the confines of beginning a novel’. A month later he registered in his diary that he ‘began a new novel and sat up till 3 at it. Hooray!’ But after two months there is no further mention of it. Having put aside the novel he again picked up his play. Early that autumn he made a fair copy in longhand of the first two acts which he left with Archer on 4 October. ‘They are not supposed to be complete,’ he told him, ‘but they present a series of consecutive dialogues in which your idea is prepared and developed... but I have no idea of how it is to proceed.’

  Two days later Shaw read Archer t
he first act of their unfinished drama. A long argument followed, and when Shaw began reading the second act, Archer closed his eyes. ‘I softly put the manuscript away,’ Shaw wrote, ‘and let him have his sleep out.’

  Archer believed that realism represented ‘the hope of the dramatic future’. Ibsen had told him that there was always a stage when his writing might as ‘easily turn into an essay as a drama’. What his playwriting experiment taught Archer was that his own future lay in writing realistic essays. There was not even money to be made from a collaboration with Shaw who was a fantasist rather than a realist. So he closed his eyes on a playwriting dream.

  Archer’s opinion was important to Shaw. Though he had trained himself to do without encouragement, he needed the support of this man who had given him so much of his theatrical education. Not receiving it, he was lost.

  The following year he tried something new. ‘Worked at the plan of the play which has come into my head,’ he noted in his diary on 29 June 1889. The idea of this play had been stimulated by an incident involving Janet Achurch and the Archers. Frances Archer had apparently objected to Shaw having declared his love for Janet, a married woman. Shaw replied that conventional marriage stifled the imagination. He even told Archer that his wife was spoiling him and that he would be ‘a lost man’ unless he broke free. Archer replied that Shaw must not visit their home while he held views so disparaging to his wife.

  But the notion that marriage had meant ‘checkmate’ to Archer as a playwright ‘for years to come’ persisted in Shaw. Why else had Archer let him down over Rhinegold? The idea began to infiltrate a new work. At odd moments, in parks and restaurants, on trains and political platforms – even during the intervals of other people’s plays – he would write passages of dialogue for what was turning out to be a comedy of intrigue, called The Cassone, with characters based on the Archers, the Charringtons and himself. It was a revenge for Rhinegold and a precursor to Candida, a battle of the artistic versus the domestic instinct. But his life was so pell-mell with politics and journalism he had no opportunity to complete The Cassone.

  After the failure of his collaboration with Archer, Shaw had despaired of writing an actable play. ‘I wish I could write you a real play myself,’ he told the actress Alma Murray, ‘but unfortunately I have not the faculty.’ But he did not completely give up. ‘I was surprised one day when he told me that he had been trying his hand at a new sort of stuff, some of which he showed me, written lengthwise in a reporter’s note-book in his exquisite handwriting, unaffected by the vibration of railway travelling, and which I realized was a dramatic dialogue,’ Sydney Olivier remembered.

  ‘...I was surprised, because the quality of British play-wrighting, and the deadly artificiality and narrow conventions of native contemporary British Drama were at that time so repellent to me that I could not imagine any man of the intelligence of Shaw... conceiving that there was any possibility... for expressing himself in that medium.’

  What nerved Shaw to continue was the example of Ibsen who had demonstrated how serious business (such as the working out of a new system of social values) could be conducted from the stage. After seeing Archer’s translation of A Doll’s House acted by the Charringtons, he had written:

  ‘I find people enjoying themselves there who have been practically driven from the other theatres by the intolerable emptiness of the ordinary performances. I miss the conventional lies of the stage there; and I do not droop, wither, and protest I am being poisoned for want of them... [I] see a vital truth searched out and held up in a light intense enough to dispel all the mists and shadows that obscure it in actual life. I see people silent, attentive, thoughtful, startled – struck to the heart, some of them.’

  From the affinity he felt with Ibsen, Shaw emerged with new confidence. ‘But not only has the comedy to be made, but the actors, the manager, the theatre, the audience. Somebody must do these things,’ he wrote.

  It was a Dutchman, J. T. Grein, who did this thing by starting what Shaw called ‘the most important theatrical enterprise of its time’. Hiring a cheap hall (‘the nearest thing to a barn left in Tottenham Court Road’), Grein announced a performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts in 1891 to inaugurate ‘The Independent Theatre’, with Thomas Hardy, Henry Arthur Jones, Meredith, George Moore and Pinero among its members. ‘Result – barn too small; performance transferred gloriously’ to the Royalty Theatre, and Grein, suddenly the most famous theatrical entrepreneur in Britain.

  It was Grein who, the following year, struck the spark of encouragement Shaw needed. While the two of them were walking one autumn night from Hammersmith, Grein mentioned his disappointment at the absence of new British playwrights for his theatre; and Shaw replied that he had written a new British play ‘that you’ll never have the courage to produce’. Grein answered the challenge by asking for the manuscript. It came, a few days later, ‘written partly in a large notebook and for the rest on loose sheets,’ Grein recalled, ‘and I spent a long and attentive evening in sorting and deciphering it. I had never had a doubt as to my acceptance... But I could very well understand how little chance that play would have had [with]... the average theatre manager.’

  The two acts of Rhinegold had lain among Shaw’s discarded manuscripts for over four and a half years until, on 29 July 1892, while attempting to set his papers in order, he came across them. Next day he had ‘set to work to finish the comedy’. On 31 July he was ‘still amusing myself finishing the comedy’, and by 2 August he ‘began to revise the comedy’. That he was now to solve the problem that had baffled him in the 1880s was due to his education by Ibsen. The hero of the play, Harry Trench, proposes to Blanche Sartorius and is accepted by her in Act I. But in Act II, finding that her money comes from slum properties, he breaks off their engagement. How then was Shaw to bring the lovers together without violating his own and his hero’s principles? His solution, by the summer of 1892, was to make the hero less ‘heroic’, and by showing the slum landlord Sartorius to be not a villain but the symptom of a social system in which everyone was implicated.

  ‘I think, by the bye, that the title Rheingold ought to be saved for a romantic play,’ he had suggested when leaving the first two acts with Archer. ‘This is realism.’ On 20 October 1892, while working at a new scene near the end of Act II, he decided on the ‘far-fetched Scriptural title’, Widowers’ Houses. From its conception over seven years earlier the play had changed so fundamentally as to make Archer a collaborator only in the sense of having set Shaw’s imagination to work.

  The ramshackle rehearsals, scheduled for 14 November, started punctually the following day at a public house, ‘the Mona Hotel’. Sometimes there were not enough actors to carry through a rehearsal at all. When they did turn up they vied anxiously with one another to avoid various parts – in particular Lickcheese, the Dickensian rent collector, who was played by James Welch after entering the pub for a drink. Shaw was there, he was everywhere, until begged to stay away so that the actors could get their words.

  Widowers’ Houses opened at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, Soho, on 9 December, the most obvious vocal part that evening being the prompter’s. It was a curious example, commented Archer in The World, ‘of what can be done in art by sheer brainpower’. At the end of the performance, Shaw hurried before the curtain to make a speech and was acclaimed with hisses. At the second and final performance, a matinée on 13 December, he again climbed on to the stage and, there being no critics present, was applauded.

  If it had not achieved success, it had ‘made a sensation,’ Shaw contended. After more than eight years, he squeezed out the stimulus he needed. Widowers’ Houses had been born: its job now was to give birth to him as a professional dramatist.

  *

  The novelty of Widowers’ Houses lay in the anti-romantic use to which Shaw put theatrical cliché. When the father discovers his daughter in the arms of a stranger, he omits to horsewhip him, but pitches into negotiations over the marriage – and these negotiations reveal
a naked money-for-social-position bargain. It is the young girl, not the young man, who takes the initiative in the love scenes, and when her fiancé initially refuses to accept his father-in-law’s dowry because it has been acquired from appalling exploitation of the poor, she does not forsake all for love – in fact, she does the opposite. Unlike Augier’s hero, who tips his tainted gold into the Rhine, Shaw’s hero comes to accept it (‘We’re all in the same boat it appears’); and the final happy ending is a lustful surrender to corruption. In relation to the Victorian theatre, this ‘was a prodigious feat,’ wrote the critic Eric Bentley some fifty years later; ‘it remains the most revolutionary act in modern English drama.’

  Standing on stage that first night in his dazzling Jaeger wool, Shaw welcomed the turbulent hooting by agreeing that, ‘yes’, it was a disgraceful state of affairs they had just witnessed, a true picture of things then going on in middle-class society that he hoped would soon become unintelligible to London audiences. Later on, Shaw would instruct producers that Lickcheese, the reptilian rent-collector, should be played with pathos and sincerity, even geniality. ‘There should be absolutely no unpleasantness at all about him... The audience should delight in him in a thoroughly friendly way: and he should wallow in their friendliness.’ Shaw’s point was that Lickcheese, the other characters, and the audience itself, were all incapable of being better than the world around them: it is a cast of philistines, with Sartorius the idealist at their head.