Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  When Vivie Warren ‘buries herself luxuriously in her actuarial calculations as the curtain falls we are conscious that she has experienced horror and a sense of contamination’. This was the reaction, too, of G.B.S. who tried to turn himself from his mother’s son into an immaculate speaking and writing machine. There is autobiographical passion and pathos in the final stage directions:

  [Mrs Warren goes out, slamming the door behind her. The strain on Vivie’s face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her place at the writing table; pushes the electric lamp out of the way; pulls over a great sheaf of papers... Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in its figures.]

  ‘I do not think there is the least chance of the play being licensed,’ Shaw wrote cheerfully to Grein. He had not foreseen that Grein would feel that Mrs Warren’s Profession was unfit ‘for women’s ears’ and that, since it might lead even strong men to ‘insanity and suicide’, he could not allow a private production. ‘I am at my wits end about this unlucky play of mine,’ Shaw told the actress Elizabeth Robins.

  Mrs Warren’s Profession had to wait until 1902 for the first of two private performances by the Stage Society and until 1925 for its first public production in Britain: ‘too late,’ Shaw remarked. He failed to get a copyright performance in Ireland, and after its world première in the United States in 1905, it was prosecuted in the courts. Even as late as 1955 the play was banned as ‘amoral’ from the Salle Luxembourg in Paris by the selection committee of the Comédie Française.

  Shaw had taken immense trouble to tailor his play to the conventions of the stage. The difficulties preventing its performance thrust him deep into a vigorous campaign against theatre censorship; and it changed his orientation as a dramatist. Slum-landlordism, the marriage laws and prostitution had all proved ‘unspeakable’ subjects on the Victorian stage, and Shaw made the decision to write no more plays with a social purpose, and to become a writer of plays with no purpose ‘except the purpose of all poets and dramatists’ – that is ‘plays of life, character and human destiny’. In order to get his words spoken on the stage he moved the emphasis ‘from the public institution to the private imagination’; set out to make his audiences laugh rather than feel uncomfortable (though sometimes to laugh at themselves); and resolved to ‘sport with human follies, not with crimes’. Having put aside Mrs Warren’s Profession, he went back to the beginning and started again – this time with a nursery play. His diary entry for 26 November 1893 reads: ‘spent the evening beginning a new play – a romantic one – for F[lorence] E[mery].’

  3

  Arms and the Man

  I greatly regret that my play, ‘Arms and the Man’, has wounded the susceptibilities of Bulgarian students in Berlin and Vienna. But I ask them to remember that it is the business of the writer of a comedy to wound the susceptibilities of his audience. The classical definition of his function is ‘the chastening of morals by ridicule‘...When the Bulgarian students, with my sincerely friendly assistance, have developed a sense of humor there will be no more trouble.

  The World Wide News Service Inc. (16 November 1924)

  By the mid-1890s, despite all his reverses, Shaw had become thoroughly well known. Scurrilous attacks, disguised as interviews, were regularly made on him by the press. Extra-special reporters, athletic rather than intellectual, would force their way into his room apparently for no purpose other than to bully and insult him. Shaw would defend himself in heartrending tones. ‘I have kept my temper for eighteen years, and have never been uncivil to an interviewer,’ he explained. Many readers felt that here was an astonishing example of Christian forbearance. Only a few realized that the interviews had been written by himself.

  ‘I presume, Mr Shaw,’ one imaginary reporter asked before the opening of his new play, ‘that when the eventful night comes, the most enjoyable part of it will be your speech after —.’ Stepping out before the curtain after the first performance of Arms and the Man, Shaw addressed his short speech to the solitary man who in a cheering audience had uttered a loud ‘Boo!’ ‘My dear fellow,’ he exclaimed, ‘I quite agree with you, but what are we against so many?’

  In this Wildean mot Shaw placed his true feelings. Writing to his fellow-playwright, Henry Arthur Jones, some eight months later, he explained: ‘Like you, I write plays because I like it, and because I cannot remember any period in my life when I could help inventing people and scenes.’ But, he went on:

  ‘I am not a storyteller: things occur to me as scenes, with action and dialogue – as moments, developing themselves out of their own vitality... my quarrel with the conventional drama is that it is doctrinaire to the uttermost extreme of dogmatism... clever people predominate in a first night audience; and, accordingly, in ‘Arms & the Man’, I had the curious experience of witnessing an apparently insane success... and of going before the curtain to tremendous applause, the only person in the theatre who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure.’

  Part of the ‘intelligent misunderstanding’ of Shaw’s plays arose from his method of dressing himself in the strait-jacket of theatrical conventions and performing tricks of elastic unconventionality. But it came too from the discrepancy between a sophisticated intellect and emotions that still responded to the adult world from the doorway of the nursery. Of the horrors of war Arms and the Man conveyed as little as Mrs Warren’s Profession did the pleasures of sexual intercourse. ‘I do not yet feel grown up,’ he wrote when almost fifty.

  Mrs Warren’s Profession had derived from Janet Achurch: Arms and the Man revolved round Florence Farr, who had received a sum of money via an occult society to promote a theatrical season at the Avenue Theatre in London. Her backer, whose identity was kept secret from Shaw for another dozen years (it came to him, he would claim, in a dream), was Annie Horniman. Thin and medieval in appearance (she wore a huge jewelled dragon in oxidized silver round her neck), Annie Horniman smoked cigarettes and bicycled in slacks (she had a black eye when Shaw finally met her). ‘She was wonderful about the money really,’ Florence Farr later told Shaw, ‘& just gave it me to do anything I liked with in the way of advertising myself.’

  Florence asked both Yeats and Shaw to write plays for her. ‘I have made a desperate attempt to begin a real romantic play for F.F. in the style of Victor Hugo,’ Shaw reported to Janet Achurch. ‘The first act is nearly finished; and it is quite the funniest attempt at that style of composition ever made.’ But he was too dilatory for Florence. By way of encouragement she would read to him from her own novel, The Dancing Faun (at the end of which her Shavian cad, George Travers, is most satisfactorily shot by his titled mistress); and she invited him to Dalling Road to hear Yeats read his verse play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, in which a wife escapes domestic drudgery, through death, into fairyland. Following these goadings, Shaw would surge onwards.

  In its first version, tentatively entitled Alps and Balkans (Salt had suggested Battlefields and Boudoirs), he had given the play no geography – ‘nothing but a war with a machine gun in it’ – the names of the places being left blank and the characters simply called the Father, the Daughter, the Heroic Lover, the Stranger and so on. He then went to Sidney Webb and asked him to find a good war for his purpose. Webb ‘spent about two minutes in a rapid survey of every war that has ever been waged and then told me that the Servo-Bulgarian was what I wanted,’ Shaw remembered. ‘I then read the account of the war in the Annual Register with a modern railway map of the Balkan peninsula before me, and filled in my blanks, making all the action take place in Servia, in the house of a Servian family.’ He also got a good deal of information from Admiral Serebryekov, who had commanded the Danube flotilla for the Bulgarians, as a result of which the ‘play proved impossible from beginning to end,’ Shaw told Charles Charrington. ‘I have had to shift the scene from Servia to Bulgaria, and to make the most absurd alterations in detail
for the sake of local color,’ which, Shaw added, would convince people that ‘I have actually been in Bulgaria’.

  All this research and rewriting meant that the play, now called Arms and the Man from the first line of Dryden’s heroic verse translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (‘Arma virumque cano’), was not ready for the opening of Florence Farr’s season. Instead, using Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire as a lever de rideau, she produced A Comedy of Sighs by the Irish pastoral playwright, John Todhunter. Shaw, who attended the first night on 29 March, noted that ‘the play at the Avenue Theatre failed rather badly’. Yeats was to describe the fiasco more voluminously. ‘For two hours and a half, pit and gallery drowned the voices of the players with boos and jeers that were meant to be bitter to the author who sat visible to all in his box surrounded by his family, and to the actress struggling bravely through her weary part,’ he remembered. Todhunter sat on ‘listening to the howling of his enemies, while his friends slipped out one by one, till one saw everywhere their empty seats’. Archer described Florence’s performance as ‘panic-stricken’ – and this was the most excruciating part of the evening for Shaw: ‘have you ever seen so horrible a portent on the stage as this transformation of an amiable, clever sort of woman into a nightmare, a Medusa, a cold, loathly, terrifying, grey, callous, sexless devil?’ he asked Elizabeth Robins.

  ‘What madness led Todhunter to write her a part like that? – what idiocy has led me to do virtually the same thing in the play which I have written to help her in this hellish enterprise?... Had she been able to give full effect to herself, the audience would have torn her to pieces. I lay under harrows of red hot steel.’

  The next day Shaw received a telegram summoning him to the theatre where he found Florence with Widowers’ Houses open before her, contemplating its production in despair. Dissuading her from this he took ‘my new play out on to the Embankment Gardens and there and then put the last touches to it before leaving it to be typewritten’.

  Arms and the Man went into rehearsal on 11 April, three days before Todhunter’s play was withdrawn. Among the audience on the first night were Archer, Henry Arthur Jones, H. W. Massingham, George Moore, Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, whose little play was again used as a curtain raiser. Sidney Webb, who ‘might possibly bring a cabinet minister if he has a box’, was joined by fellow-Fabians Sydney Olivier and Graham Wallas. The Charringtons came, Janet being specially seated ‘where her beauty will not be lost’. Edith Bland, too, Shaw estimated, ‘will be worth a thousand posters in Blackheath’. ‘Chuckers out’ were hired, and the only group Shaw forgot to invite was his family.

  Shaw himself arrived towards the end of Yeats’s play. His chocolate cream soldier forced his way into Raina’s bedroom some twenty minutes later, in what seemed to be the start of a stereotype military melodrama. ‘The whole pit and gallery, except certain members of the Fabian Society, started to laugh at the author and then, discovering that they themselves were being laughed at, sat there not converted – their hatred was too bitter for that – but dumbfounded, while the rest of the house cheered and laughed,’ Yeats later recalled. ‘...I listened to Arms and the Man with admiration and hatred. It seemed to me inorganic, logical straightness and not the crooked road of life, yet I stood aghast before its energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill by Mr Epstein or of some design by Mr Wyndham Lewis... Presently I had a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.’

  No one forgot this opening performance. ‘It was applauded,’ wrote G. K. Chesterton, ‘by that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the genuine thing prevail against the plausible.’ Yeats described this venture as ‘the first contest between the old commercial school of theatrical folk and the new artistic school’. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) came and kept repeating: ‘The man is mad, the man is mad.’

  Arms and the Man presents the adult world of warfare through the eyes of a child. Shaw contrasted the child’s simplicity with the farcical sophistication of parents trying to escape the consequences of their own childhood. Arms and the Man is a ‘play’ in the sense of it being a childish activity. Every stage trick in its clockwork machinery ‘suggests a puppet play for human actors, or a moving toy shop,’ writes Margery Morgan. ‘...The ease with which Shaw regressed to childishness can be regarded as a sign of psychological weakness and emotional immaturity... [but] released within the frame of the play, it is this childishness that constitutes Shaw’s genius. He used it as a means of attacking insidiously and openly every form of humbug and pretentiousness, including the unnaturalness of moral virtue that children... instinctively detect.’

  Shaw was particularly exasperated when his deconstruction of heroism – professional soldiers who carry chocolates instead of cartridges and weep when scolded; battles waged mostly by paperwork and won through ludicrously lucky errors – was treated not in the tradition of Cervantes but as Gilbertian cynicism. Gilbert was the child who mimicked the adult world; Shaw was the child who saw through it. In a letter to Archer, Shaw explained what he felt was the difference:

  ‘Gilbert is simply a paradoxically humorous cynic. He accepts the conventional ideals implicitly, but observes that people do not really live up to them. This he regards as a failure on their part at which he mocks bitterly. This position is precisely that of Sergius in the play... I do not accept the conventional ideals... and no longer use them even for dramatic effect. Sergius is ridiculous through the breakdown of his ideals, not odious from his falling short of them. As Gilbert sees, they dont work; but what Gilbert does not see is that there is something else that does work, and that in that something else there is a completely satisfactory asylum for the affections.’

  ‘On my honor it was a serious play,’ Shaw protested. But the ‘tragedy’ with which he insisted he had replaced Gilbertian ‘heartlessness’ was a petit tragedy – though a delightful comedy. The attempt to show pragmatism and instinct in triumphant league against idealism and rationalism was ingeniously outflanked by the public’s instinctive, and the critics’ reasoned, misunderstanding. Shaw changed the subtitle from ‘A Romantic Comedy’ to ‘An Anti-Romantic Comedy’, but the joyous misapprehension continued to swell, finally exploding in Oscar Straus’s comic opera The Chocolate Soldier (‘that degradation of a decent comedy into a dirty farce,’ as Shaw called it).

  Arms and the Man ran for fifty performances between 21 April and 7 July, and was followed by a provincial tour and a production in the United States. But Shaw had doubts over the play. In the contest between ‘the old commercial school of theatrical folk and the new artistic school’, G.B.S. the new artist suspected he had borrowed too much from the armoury of the old commercial school. It was not quite the masterpiece he needed.

  His royalties from Arms and the Man at the end of 1894 came to £341 15s. 2d. (equivalent to £17,000 in 1997). That autumn, after seven years of continuous musical criticism, he dropped his column in The World. ‘I had not before realized the severity of the strain on the attention involved by musical criticism,’ he noted in his diary. It seemed as if, in entering his thirty-ninth year, he had at last achieved popularity. ‘When you take a theatre of your own,’ he told the manager of the Avenue Theatre, ‘just bring me pen and ink, a ream of paper, a bottle of ginger beer, and a few beans, and you shall have the most brilliant play of the century to open with.’ But privately he knew the quicksand on which he was advancing. ‘I have taken the very serious step,’ he confided to McNulty, ‘of cutting off my income by privately arranging to drop the World business at the end of the season; and now, if I cannot make something out of the theatre, I am a ruined man.’

  4

  The Playwright and the Actress

  I hereby warn mankind to beware of women with large eyes... and a love of miracles and moonshees. I warn them against all who like intellectual pastimes; who prefer liberty, happiness and irresponsibility to care, suff
ering and life... who reject the deep universal material of human relationship and select only the luxuries of love, friendship, and amusing conversation.

  Shaw to Florence Farr (14 October 1896)

  Florence Farr’s performance in Todhunter’s play had been shocking, and Shaw’s relegation of her from the part of Raina, the romantic lead, to that of Louka, her maidservant, in Arms and the Man represented a fall in his estimation, almost from grace. Florence was aware of this. Walking back from the Avenue Theatre in the evenings with Yeats, they would often discuss Shaw. What feelings lived under his bright surface and, among all that rattle of words, what poetry? For all his knowledge, his vitality, his busy politics, there seemed (except for its impenetrable absence) no mystery, no beating of a religious pulse. Florence, like Yeats, had been caught up in the stream of occultism flowing over traditional Western religion. She had looked into Egyptology and Babylonish lore, hovered over astral projections, investigated alchemy, covered the walls at Dalling Road with Oriental drapery, practised the hermetic arts; and she was about to be promoted to Praemonstratrix in the ineffable Order of the Golden Dawn. The chasm separating her aspirations from her abilities, starkly illuminated by the footlights, vanished amid these mysteries.