Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Janet was now on her own: ‘the time for pupilage is past.’ Yet wherever she went Shaw’s voice went with her. He seemed unable to leave his pupil alone. He prescribed distilled water, oatmeal bannocks, walnuts, honey and peaches. ‘I urge you to go to church once a day at least to tranquillise your nerves... Read the gospel of St John and the lives of the saints: they will do everything for you that morphia only pretends to do.’ She must not seek bold type; she must not purr or smoke; she must not place New York at her feet; she must not be fringy or fluffy. He recommended she part her hair in the middle – better still, send for a barber and ‘have your hair shaved absolutely bald. Then get a brown wig.’ She would become like the Madonna by Antonio Rossellino he had seen at Santa Croce in Florence.

  Having told her what way to go, he told Mansfield to let her go her own way. ‘She comes from Manchester,’ he explained, ‘she will grab everything you try to keep from her... Give her everything she dares ask... I hereby authorize you to announce her as the authoress of the play, if that will please her.’

  Having condescended to everyone’s follies, Shaw awaited the results. They came swiftly: a cablegram from Janet telling him and Charrington that Candida had been withdrawn. It seemed that she and Mansfield, far from being transformed by Shaw’s words, had never been more themselves. In Mansfield’s opinion there were two things wrong: Shaw’s play and Shaw’s actress. Mansfield could see too that Shaw had put a lot of himself into the play, and there, perhaps, lay the fault. Now, as Mansfield knew, the world was tired of all this morbid philosophy and womanish whatnot – a bustling, striving, pushing, stirring American audience wouldn’t stand for it or sit through it, and Mansfield wholeheartedly agreed with them. ‘All the world is crying out for deeds – for action!’ he informed Shaw.

  On the subject of Janet, too, Mansfield was obligingly frank. ‘I couldn’t have made love to your Candida (Miss Janet Achurch) if I had taken ether,’ he began.

  ‘I detest an aroma of stale tobacco and gin. I detest intrigue and slyness and sham ambitions. I don’t like women who sit on the floor – or kneel by your side and have designs on your shirt-bosom – I don’t like women who comb their tawny locks with their fingers, and claw their necks and scratch the air with their chins.’

  Mansfield represented everything that Shaw was to pit his strength against over the next three years. But his success in the theatre, begun with Arms and the Man and soon to be established with The Devil’s Disciple, was to be achieved by a man with whom he could not remain on speaking terms.

  He did not show Mansfield’s letter to Charrington who, his face swelling alarmingly, was fingering Atlantic time-tables and rehearsing the strangulation of Mansfield in New York. Shaw envied Charrington in that moment. ‘Charrington is right because he is a fool... hating what he doesn’t like and loving what he likes, fighting the one and grudging it its crust, backing up the other in the teeth of all justice.’

  But over Candida Shaw conceded defeat. ‘I have played my last card, and am beaten, as far as I can see, without remedy,’ he told Janet. For once his equanimity seemed to falter. Mansfield produced an unusual effect on him. ‘He drives me out of my senses.’ Since this often prevented them from addressing each other, Shaw conducted much of his business with Mrs Mansfield, ‘which is much pleasanter’. The rivalry that Shaw neutralized with this stratagem had begun to show itself in the two men’s struggle over Janet. Mansfield offered to produce Candida with her in the leading role ‘if I need not appear’. But Shaw, believing that Mansfield was looking to put on the play with a bad cast so as to establish its failure ‘and prevent Janet from making a success in New York’, forbade him from producing it ‘on any terms whatever’. Despite his dislike of Janet, Mansfield invited her to join his company knowing how hard Shaw would be hit if she accepted. But Shaw’s influence persisting, she refused and, surrounded by many exciting rumours of her plans, she sailed in the second week of June back to London.

  SIX

  1

  Living with the Saturday

  We all swore by the Saturday... Life was not worth living without it; it gave us the latest news from the front. And we craned our necks nightly over the gallery rails to see Shaw our champion take his seat among the well-groomed critics in their ‘glad rags’. Shaw played up well to us in the gallery.

  Dan Rider, Adventures with Bernard Shaw (1929)

  ‘The first man I wrote to was George Bernard Shaw,’ wrote Frank Harris.

  Harris had been editor of the Conservative Evening News in direct competition with W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette. He had quadrupled its circulation by sending his New Journalists to the police courts, and startling his readers with alluring headlines: ‘Extraordinary Charge Against a Clergyman’; ‘Gross Outrage on a Female’. It was Harris who had reported in scabrous detail the divorce case of Lady Colin Campbell, receiving an indictment for obscene libel that assisted the paper’s Tory proprietor in dismissing him in 1886. From this crisis he quickly recovered, replacing John Morley as editor of the Fortnightly Review, a sober literary magazine that (as its title somehow fails to suggest) appeared once a month. The sensationalism of the Evening News was unknown to the editor of the Fortnightly. ‘Every month the review appears regularly,’ complained Whistler, ‘just what one looks for, a work of high-class English mediocrity: lamentable...’ Yet from time to time Harris would pluck aside the skirts of respectability by printing Verlaine’s poems, or Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, or his own short story about the adulterous passion of a Baptist minister for one of his deacons’ wives.

  It was at this period that Harris first asked Shaw to write for him: ‘Is there no subject on which you would like to unbosom yourself in the Fortnightly?’ Intermittently during the early 1890s, Shaw would hand him contributions on subjects ranging from Home Rule to ‘The Religion of the Pianoforte’ and including early drafts of Fabian tracts such as Socialism and Superior Brains. None of these could have pleased Frederick Chapman of Chapman & Hall, the proprietor-publisher of the Fortnightly, to whom ‘Bernard Shaw was anathema’. Worse still were Harris’s flirtations with anarchism, reflected in an article that praised two bomb-throwers, ‘the sweetest and noblest of men’, and led, in the autumn of 1894, to Harris being fired. But in next to no time he was back in London and had taken over the editorship of the Saturday Review, a moribund magazine that, at £560, was being hawked around for the price of one pound per reader.

  While editor of the sensational Evening News he had been torridly in love with ‘Laura’, the obsessive passion of his life. As editor of the dignified Fortnightly he lived smartly in Park Lane as the husband of a woman of ‘high position’, often entertaining the Duke of Cambridge. But in 1895 the new editor of the Saturday Review was a single man, who had turned his back on advancement through marriage and decided to become immortal through his genius as a man of letters. He wished to raise the Saturday Review, then known as the Saturday Reviler, from a finder of faults to a finder of stars. But the stars he gathered round him were irresistible fault-finders. Shaw’s theatre criticism (‘Happy is the nation that has no history, and happy the play that has no criticism in this column’), led to some managements withdrawing their free seats; and several of the book reviewers were so severe that publishers cancelled their advertisements, obliging Harris to fill the spaces with publicity for pneumatic tyres and South African mining companies.

  Shaw had been summoned to the Saturday Review office in Southampton Street during the late afternoon of 4 December 1894. He was, Harris observed, ‘thin as a rail, with a long, bony, bearded face. His untrimmed beard was reddish, though his hair was fairer. He was dressed carelessly in tweeds with the inevitable Jaeger collar. His entrance into the room, his abrupt movements – as jerky as the ever-changing mind – his perfect unconstraint, his devilish look, all showed a man very conscious of his ability, very direct, very sharply decisive.’ They were as ill-matched as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. And yet, Shaw decided, Harris wa
s ‘the very man for me, and I the very man for him’.

  Although he had been happy to resign as The World’s music critic, Shaw was soon missing the bustle and involvement of weekly journalism. Harris’s offer came at exactly the right time (as he was finishing Candida) and guaranteed him a salary of £6 a week – £1 more than Edmund Yates had given him: ‘not bad pay in those days’. He would end up ‘a ruined man,’ he had predicted to McNulty, ‘if I cannot make something out of the theatre’. It was as theatre critic rather than playwright that he was to make his basic income over the next three and a half years.

  He had long wanted to have a regular theatre column. ‘I wish for the sake of Ibsen that I could get a turn at dramatic criticism,’ he had told Janet Achurch when still employed by The World. There was one qualm that delayed his acceptance of the job: the question of whether a playwright should also play dramatic critic.

  ‘The cardinal guarantee for a critic’s integrity is simply the force of the critical instinct itself. To try to prevent me from criticizing by pointing out to me the superior pecuniary advantages of puffing is like trying to keep a young Irving from going on the stage by pointing out the superior pecuniary advantages of stockbroking. If my own father were an actor manager, and his life depended on his getting favorable notices of his performance, I should orphan myself without an instant’s hesitation if he acted badly... So stubborn is the critic within me, that with every disposition to be as goodnatured and as popular an authority as the worst enemy of art could desire, I am to all intents and purposes incorruptible.’

  On New Year’s Day 1895, he went to the Garrick Theatre to see Slaves of the Ring by Sydney Grundy. Next week, readers of the Saturday Review were able to share the experience with him.

  ‘It is not a work of art at all: it is a mere contrivance for filling a theatre bill... Mr Grundy somehow managed to plunge me into the densest confusion as to who was who, a confusion which almost touched aberration when I saw a double leading lady walk on to the stage, both of her in full wedding dress... The spectacular effect alone of so much white silk was sufficiently unhingeing. But when the two brides proceeded solemnly to marry one another with a wedding ring, I really did feel for a moment a horrible misgiving that I had at last broken through that “thin partition” which divides great wits from madness.’

  2

  Some Dramatic Opinions

  The whole world is ruled by theatrical illusion... The great critics are those who penetrate and understand the illusion: the great men are those who, as dramatists planning the development of nations, or as actors carrying out the drama, are behind the scenes of the world instead of gaping and gushing in the auditorium after paying their taxes at the door.

  ‘Toujours Shakespeare’, Saturday Review (5 December 1896)

  ‘I enjoy a first night,’ Shaw wrote, ‘as a surgeon enjoys an operation.’ Sometimes the evening would open with a curtain raiser, ‘to keep the gallery amused whilst waiting for the plutocracy to finish their dinners and get down to their reserved seats’. Then came the main play – a never-ending melodrama or all-conquering farce. Melodramas were equipped with ‘French windows’ and misdirected bottles of poison, and kept going with soliloquies (accompanied by harps, horns and violins writhing ‘like a heap of trodden worms’ in its pit). The action was waged immaculately off-stage, being announced to the audience by telegrams or reported by characters staring wildly through the wings. What the melodrama lacked in reality it tried to make up in verisimilitude. Real water cascaded; a couple of horses were led on for the race or polo match; and some actual guns for the battle in the fourth act. Why not, Shaw eagerly enquired, a mad bull to exercise the hero? Real babies, ostentatiously dandled, were popular; and no drawing-room dared reveal itself without an elaborate display of spirit stands, siphons and decanters, combining ‘the charms of the private and the public house’. The gentleman-hero, husky with emotion, would have his knuckles imprinted with the kisses of kneeling ladies and his back resoundingly thumped by manly men. The villain, with his accomplice the comic Jew, knew he was performing well if the theatre filled with hisses whenever he presented himself before his arrest in the ballroom at the final curtain. Farces were not so different from melodramas, though the humour usually depended on the underclothing of the ladies, such ‘abject little naughtinesses furtively slipped in under cover of the tamest propriety’.

  Upright and silent in the stalls sat Shaw, isolated in his boredom from the starched and sweating audience; acutely conscious of the bad smells, bad music, humbug and snobbery playing round him; his spirits sinking as the hour grew late until ‘at such moments I pull out handfuls of my hair, and sit contemplating them vacantly, asking myself what I am doing in such an absurd place as the British theatre’.

  The real question that Shaw was asking himself was how, without abandoning all hope, could such idiocy be explained. Money-making in the theatre was founded on the assumption that it was ‘impossible to underrate the taste and intelligence of the British public’. To enter a theatre was to go back two hundred years. Theatrical art had become an exploitation of the public – what was called giving the public what pleased it. But audiences did not want to be pleased.

  ‘They want to be excited, and upset, and made miserable, to have their flesh set creeping, to gloat and quake over scenes of misfortune, injustice, violence, and cruelty, with the discomforture and punishment of somebody to make the ending “happy”. The only sort of horror they dislike is the horror that they cannot fasten on some individual whom they can hate, dread, and finally torture after revelling in his crimes.’

  In a number of devastating passages Shaw’s anger brings forth the misery and disgust he feels with his fellow human beings. This is not sexual disgust – he strongly attacks the secretary of the National Vigilance Association for that form of misanthropy (‘Human nature and the human body are to him nasty things. Sex is a scourge. Woman is a walking temptation which should be covered up’). Shaw’s horror derives from people’s brutality and silliness exploited for profit by theatre managers. He used all his ingenuity to escape the Shakespearian pessimism to which these reflections naturally led. The British public could not stand being given what it wanted for long. The indiscriminate bawling and booing, hissing and hooting of the audiences (‘like dogs who had been purposely run over’), the riots and uproars lasting up to half an hour were all evidence of their dissatisfaction.

  The monopoly of the star system, Shaw argued, was being broken and only progress was safe. ‘Let their flatterer slip, as he always does sooner or later, and they are at his throat mercilessly before he can recover himself,’ he gloatingly warned. As with critics so with dramatists: ‘there is nothing the public despises so much as an attempt to please it.’ Obsequiousness never created beauty, it aped fashion, did not produce drama, but a fuss. ‘No great play,’ he declared, ‘can ever be written by a man who will allow the public to dictate to him.’ He assured his readers that the business of the playwright, as of the politician, was ‘to strive incessantly with the public; to insist on earnest relations with it, and not merely voluptuous ones; to lead it, nerve it, withstand its constant tendency to relapse into carelessness and vulgar familiarity; in short, to attain to public esteem, authority, and needfulness to the national welfare (things undreamt of in the relations between the theatrical profession and the public today), instead of to the camp-follower’s refuge of mere popularity’.

  This was Shaw bringing the philosophy of his Quintessence of Ibsenism to the practical matters of stage business. He tried to persuade theatre managers that there was money in Ibsen and the German playwright Hermann Sudermann; he urged British dramatists to raise their courage in the face of that legendary dragon, the great British donkey of the public. He waved his pen and the philistine brute disappeared. The way was clear for masterpieces – and yet it was not clear after all. One man stood obstructing: the Lord Chamberlain in the person of his Examiner of Plays. ‘He is the Tsar of the theatres, abl
e to do things that no prime minister dare do,’ Shaw explained. Early in 1895 the holder of this office, E. E. Smyth Pigott, died, and the press teemed with tributes to his ‘admirable discretion’, his ‘kindly blue pencil’. To these plaudits, Shaw added his own citation in the Saturday Review.

  ‘The late Mr Pigott is declared on all hands to have been the best reader of plays we have ever had; and yet he was a walking compendium of vulgar insular prejudice... He had French immorality on the brain; he had American indecency on the brain; he had the womanly woman on the brain; he had the Divorce Court on the brain; he had “not before a mixed audience” on the brain; his official career in relation to the higher drama was one long folly and panic... It is a frightful thing to see the greatest thinkers, poets, and authors of modern Europe – men like Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoi, and the leaders of our own literature – delivered helpless into the vulgar hands of such a noodle as this amiable old gentleman – this despised and incapable old official – most notoriously was.’

  This is quintessentially Shavian – and oddly courageous since, while attracting the charge of being ‘a cowardly attack on a dead man’, it risked a good deal of unpopularity from among the living. Shaw insists that the late censor, a ‘stupendously incompetent’ man, uttering bushels of ‘immoral balderdash’, was invincibly well-intentioned, that his ‘personal character’ was never in question – indeed that he was ‘as excellent a man for all private purposes as Charles P.