Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  On stage his family is in Shaw’s power. He can dress them up, make them move to his music, manhandle them into pleasant reconciliation. His characters all carry the germs of real suffering. Bohun, the lawyer, speaks for everyone when he says: ‘It’s unwise to be born; it’s unwise to be married; it’s unwise to live; and it’s wise to die.’ And his father, the waiter, gives Shaw’s answer: ‘so much the worse for wisdom!’

  But in an unwise world what can human beings do? First, Shaw suggests, they can use their intelligence. Bohun, even in a false nose and goggles, represents the ‘terrifying power’ of the trained mind, and demonstrates how tragedies may be avoided in advance by using intelligence freely; the encouraging presence of the waiter shows how we can avoid giving pain at the time by exercising tact and the spirit of acceptance recommended by Shakespeare’s As You Like It and What You Will (Twelfth Night); and in Valentine the dentist we are given an example of how to deal with pain in retrospect, extracting it with magical ease. He is the only character without a surname and therefore a character without a past.

  You Never Can Tell is Shaw’s attempt to enact Valentine’s philosophy. Mr Crampton acknowledges ‘in sudden dread’ that feeling is ‘the only thing that can help us’. But the emotions are dangerous. ‘Stop. Youre going to tell me about your feelings, Mr Crampton. Dont,’ Bohun interrupts. And Gloria too interrupts Valentine: ‘Oh, stop telling me what you feel: I can’t bear it.’ The sea (‘You can imagine that the waves are its breathing, and that it is troubled and stirred to its great depths by some emotion that cannot be described’) was used by Shaw to indicate the unconscious feelings and is a remnant from the imagery in The Lady from the Sea. But he eliminated much of this imagery from the published version of his play and presents us for the most part with a happy seaside spectacle. And for this, he implies, our response should echo the first two words with which Dolly opens the play after her successful operation in the dentist’s chair: ‘Thank you.’ The dentist’s anaesthetic at ‘five shillings extra’ is Shaw’s own numbing of emotion (‘I have never felt anything since’).

  The title, with its Shakespearian associations, summed up most people’s reactions to the play. They couldn’t tell: and Shaw, perhaps because he flinched from this violation of his own past, was politely unhelpful. There was always hope. ‘Cheer up, sir, cheer up... You never can tell, sir: you never can tell.’

  By 18 May 1896 it was officially finished, though three months later he was still toiling ‘to get it ready for the stage’. This stage was the Haymarket Theatre whose ‘exceptionally brilliant’ management, he told Ellen Terry, ‘appear to be making up their minds to ruin themselves with it’. He had designed it for the West End; and the West End had apparently accepted it. On 26 February 1897 a memorandum of agreement was finally signed with Frederick Harrison and the actor-manager Cyril Maude who was to play the waiter in the Haymarket production.

  The rehearsals started badly and grew worse. Shaw prowled the theatre getting on everyone’s nerves. He was particularly disliked by Alan Aynesworth, a young man who had played Algy in The Importance of Being Earnest, and to whom Cyril Maude was anxious to give the lead. Shaw had suspected that the Life Force love scene at the end of Act II was beyond Aynesworth, and now found his suspicions confirmed. At one moment of exasperation Aynesworth turned on Shaw and demanded: ‘Let us see you play it yourself.’ Shaw sprang up on to the stage and delivered his lines. ‘But that,’ protested the actor, ‘is comedy!’ Why had no one told him they were in a comedy? Both of them turned to Cyril Maude who seemed affably paralysed.

  After a fortnight Shaw went to Frederick Harrison, the manager of the Haymarket, telling him he must come to the next rehearsal. ‘After the rehearsal,’ Shaw later recounted, ‘Harrison joined us with such a long face that Maude saw it was all up.

  ‘It was a miserable moment: they had been a thoroughly happy family; and my confounded play was going to break it up... I rescued them by saying that “we” had better withdraw the play and wait for another opportunity. They were enormously relieved.’

  ‘I don’t know how to express my appreciation of the way in which you met us over the withdrawal of your play,’ Frederick Harrison wrote to him. Shaw was adept at concealing disappointment. His behaviour was impeccable. But a fear had been planted in him as to whether his plays were unactable. Could any actor play Valentine? ‘There is no difficulty about You Never Can Tell,’ he told Mrs Mansfield eighteen months later, ‘except the difficulty of getting it acted. The end of the second act requires a consummate comedian; and that comedian has never been available.’ Only occasionally did he reveal the keenness of his disappointment. ‘It maddens me,’ he burst out to Ellen Terry. ‘I’ll have my revenge in the preface by offering it as a frightful example of the result of trying to write for the théâtre de nos jours.’

  You Never Can Tell was not presented in public for another three years when it was staged at the Strand Theatre. Once again ‘the rehearsals lacerated my very soul’, and he refused to let it proceed beyond six matinées. He had believed You Never Can Tell to be what he later called ‘a champion money-maker’. But for eight years it made him almost nothing.

  In one respect he was successful. When in 1903 Cyril Maude was writing his history of the Haymarket Theatre, he sent Shaw the chapter dealing with this period and Shaw replied with his own version, written as if from Maude’s point of view, which was tipped into the book as Chapter XVI, under the transparent guise of it having been composed by Maude. The narrative describes how Svengali-Shaw hypnotized Aynesworth into confusion over the end of Act II; how he almost caused a divorce between Mr and Mrs Maude; how, using ‘a certain superficial reasonableness’, he took over the whole business of stage-managership: and then surveyed the wreckage he had created ‘with that perfidious air of making the best of everything which never deserted him’. Finally, having unnerved them all, he entered the theatre in a new suit of clothes bought in anticipation of the play’s royalties.

  The burlesque into which he turned his disappointment was a counterpart of the pantomime at the end of the play, and proof that he could dissolve bitterness and grievance into ‘lightness of heart’. But it was also evidence of how he excelled at overcoming rather than confronting truth. For the truth was devastating. ‘I sincerely hope that you will bring us another comedy presently,’ Frederick Harrison had written to him, ‘which we can carry to a successful issue.’ But for Shaw, now in his early forties, the time for comedy seemed over. He had finished with the stage.

  *

  You Never Can Tell, the last of Shaw’s pleasant plays, advocated lightness of heart; The Devil’s Disciple, the first of his plays for Puritans, advocated seriousness of instinct. The Life Force which appears in You Never Can Tell as a biological current moving mainly through women, changes its course in The Devil’s Disciple and works politically through the men.

  The form of melodrama was suggested by William Terriss, a member of Irving’s company who had moved to the Adelphi Theatre, which, by the 1890s, had reached the summit of its glory as the home of melodrama. Terriss himself, now in his fiftieth year, invariably played the hero; his mistress, Jessie Millward, was the heroine; and comic relief came from Harry Nichols. On the afternoon of 7 February 1896, Shaw went to the Adelphi where Terriss informed him that he intended to make a world tour and would like to add to his repertoire a play that should contain ‘every “surefire” melodramatic situation’ – a series of hair-raising adventures with (between the acts) miraculously unexplained escapes. These would culminate in a hanging that, to preserve the happy ending, turned out to be the nightmare of a sleeping bridegroom shortly before his marriage – the tolling death bell at the hero’s execution developing as he woke into a brilliant peal of wedding bells. From Terriss’s cupboard of ingredients, why should Shaw not cook up a masterpiece?

  Shaw judged the scenario to be not quite ‘in my line’. In a letter the following morning, he explained that what Terriss needed for a world tour
was not another Adelphi melodrama but ‘something like Hamlet – on popular lines’.

  That autumn Shaw agreed to have his portrait painted by a Slade School artist, Nellie Heath, and turned the sittings to account by scrawling his play in a series of pocket notebooks. ‘The play progresses,’ he told Ellen Terry on 16 October 1896, ‘...such a melodrama! I sit in a little hole of a room off Euston Road on the corner of a table with an easel propped before me so that I can write and be painted at the same time.’ It was more than melodrama; it was all the plots of all the melodramas he had ever sat through for the Saturday Review. ‘The whole character of the piece must be allegorical, idealistic, full of generalisations and moral lessons,’ he had written, describing the ideal Adelphi production; ‘and it must represent conduct as producing swiftly and certainly on the individual the results which in actual life it only produces on the race in the course of many centuries.’ It was in this last concept that Shaw believed there was room for original ideas. The danger was that, attempting simultaneously to exploit and subvert the stage melodrama, he would get trapped within its conventions. ‘I finished my play today,’ he wrote to Ellen Terry on 30 November, ‘...but I want your opinion; for I have never tried melodrama before; and this thing, with... its sobbings & speeches & declamations, may possibly be the most monstrous piece of farcical absurdity that ever made an audience shriek with laughter.’

  He had written it round the scene of Dick Dudgeon’s arrest ‘which had always been floating in my head as a situation for a play’ and which had probably floated in from Sydney Carton’s heroic sacrifice at the end of A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens’s novel was regularly dramatized for the Victorian stage which, though it never dared exhibit sexual love, always alleged that love was the motive behind noble action. Like all theatrical heroes, Sydney Carton went to the gallows for the sake of the heroine. Shaw took this situation and gave it another motive. Judith Anderson, who embodies the love motive, concludes that Dick Dudgeon has taken the place of her husband and let himself be arrested ‘for my sake’. But Dick Dudgeon, like Hamlet, is a ‘tragic figure in black’. He has ‘no motive and no interest’, and denies acting out of love. Everyone, he tells Judith from prison, could ‘rise to some sort of goodness and kindness when they were in love [the word love comes from him with true Puritan scorn]. That has taught me to set very little store by the goodness that only comes out red hot. What I did last night, I did in cold blood, caring not half so much for your husband, or [ruthlessly] for you [she droops, stricken] as I do for myself... I have been brought up standing by the law of my own nature; and I may not go against it, gallows or no gallows.’

  Like Shaw, Dick appears a mountebank, mixing instinctive good manners with the desire to shock by acting impersonally. That Shaw recognized himself in Dick can be shown by comparing Dick’s prison speech to Judith with a letter Shaw himself wrote over ten years later: ‘The only aim that is at all peculiar to me is my disregard of warm feelings. They are quite well able to take care of themselves. What I want is a race of men who can be kind in cold blood. Anybody can be kind in emotional moments.’

  He placed the action during the American Revolution, and he fixed the date in October 1777 with the surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga. This, he implied, like the distant background of Madeira in You Never Can Tell, was culturally equivalent to modern Ireland. Shaw’s Burgoyne is a fabricated figure through whom the Shavian comedy works best and who, making his entrance in the last act, often steals the show. In The Devil’s Disciple (as in his next play, Caesar and Cleopatra) Shaw rewrote history and set it on course for the future he wanted. ‘What will History say?’ Major Swindon asks Burgoyne as he contemplates the defeat of Britain by the Americans. ‘History, sir, will tell lies as usual,’ Burgoyne assures him. For these schoolroom lies Shaw substitutes a dramatic narrative that eliminates evil and identifies the real enemy of human progress as ‘Jobbery and snobbery, incompetence and Red Tape’. The America of 1777 is a man’s world full of crude notions that women can see through but do not have the legal or political status to alter.

  ‘The Devil’s Disciple has, in truth, a genuine novelty in it,’ Shaw later wrote. But he was careful not to let this novelty spoil the story. It is, in that sense, one of the least Shavian of his plays. He took it to Terriss even before it was completely finished. But Terriss’s dreams of a world tour had failed and he had no recollection of his arrangement with Shaw. The reading took place at Jessie Millward’s flat and was probably, Shaw believed, at her insistence. His account of what happened in some respects resembles his story of reading Widowers’ Houses to Archer. Terriss ‘composed himself dismally’ as if Jessie Millward ‘had taken him to church’, listening in deep perplexity as Shaw plunged into his play. At the climax of the first act, he suddenly interrupted to ask whether ‘this is an interior?’ Then, a short way into the second act, he again apologetically broke in: ‘I beg your pardon: but is this an interior?’ Shaw’s answer, he declared, had set him ‘completely at rest’. This seemed to be true, for a few minutes later he uttered a long drawn snore.

  After that nothing seemed to go right for The Devil’s Disciple. ‘I think I shall die lonely,’ Shaw wrote to Ellen Terry, ‘as far as my third acts are concerned.’ He still believed that Terriss would be the best person to do it, but on 16 December 1897 Terriss was motivelessly assassinated on the steps of the Adelphi and died in Jessie Millward’s arms. So he became ‘only a name and a batch of lies in the newspapers’, while the history of The Devil’s Disciple, Shaw told Charrington, ‘has given me such practice in hardening my heart that I have lost all human sympathy’.

  *

  He was not to start another play for fifteen months, when he gave up his drama criticism for the Saturday Review. ‘What is the matter with the theatre, that a strong man can die of it?’ he was to enquire in his Preface to Three Plays for Puritans. He had been attracted to the stage by the opportunities it seemed to offer him of overriding his private life with a public career. He wanted to be reborn through his work and use the theatrical world to develop his new identity, fulfilling what he called ‘my instinct... to turn failure into success’. His rejection by the West End hit the same spot made sensitive by all his early neglect – though this was now a well-bandaged wound. He had looked to the stage for another existence but as Terriss’s assassination suggested, the insidious illusion of the theatre flowed out and contaminated ordinary life. ‘When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column: and there we are rarely disappointed.’

  There is anger and disgust in Shaw’s condemnation. He had entered a paradise of fools where the actor-manager was enthroned as god, the actress as star: and the author was merely its word-carpenter. Everyone, even his friend Archer, insisted that he could not write plays. Yet he persisted. ‘Here am I, after 20 years drudging away, at last venturing to tell myself that if I begin writing for the stage, I will master the business by the time I am fifty or so,’ he wrote to Janet Achurch in the spring of 1896. But the rejection of his last two plays seemed to have cracked this confidence. He had risked prostituting his talent. His thought was far more subtle than his orchestration of it for trumpet and big drum suggests. The rhetoric, the overstatement, the ear-catching tricks, jokes to the gallery, all proceeded from his need to be heard; but they masked what he wanted to say and enabled the public, whose ear he eventually caught, to hear only the voice of an Irish paradoxer who did not mean half of what he said.

  Even his sentimental loyalties, it seemed to Shaw, had played him false. He had failed to liberate Ellen Terry from the hypnotic rule of Irving; he had failed to separate Janet Achurch from Charrington or to free her from the dominance of alcohol and morphia; he had failed to make an actress of Florence Farr. In all these endeavours he had sent his plays out to do his work, but the scarcity and poor quality of their performances gave life no chance to imitate the Shavian drama. ‘Give up wanting to have the plays produced,’ he advise
d another dramatist, ‘if you value your happiness as a man and your dignity as an artist.’ Early in 1897 he took this advice himself. On being elected a member of the St Pancras Vestry he plunged into local politics, recognizing ‘that there is better work to be done in the Vestry than in the theatre’. At about the same time, in another essay at turning failure into success, he decided to publish his plays.

  It was not an easy decision. Only two categories of drama were commonly published as books: non-dramatic plays by poets such as Browning and Tennyson; and acting editions, using a good deal of technical stage business.

  Towards the end of 1896, one of W. T. Stead’s young men, Grant Richards, having set up a new publishing company, offered to become ‘publisher in ordinary and publisher extraordinary’ of his dramatic works. Shaw replied categorically that ‘the public does not read plays’. But Richards was not put off: ‘I went after G.B.S.’ He caught up with him after a theatrical first night and together they walked back, Shaw in a baggy Jaeger suit, Richards in evening dress, to Fitzroy Square.