Wisely, John Bull’s Other Island – written by Bernard Shaw at Yeats’s request as ‘a patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre’ – was put on by the Court Theatre in London, the scene of many Bernard Shaw first nights. Had it started life in Dublin it would have provoked riots which made the Playboy disturbances seem trivial. The audience would have enjoyed the satire on the traditional English attitude to Ireland. Much to his credit, King Edward, at a royal command performance, laughed so much at the caricature of his subjects that he broke his chair. But the play was intended to be ‘uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement’. No doubt the visionary priest who sees heaven as ‘a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine’ would have caused deep offence amongst the pious Catholics in the auditorium. But it would have been the judgement on Irish Nationalists that brought the house down – in the wrong sort of way. ‘If you want to interest an Irishman in Ireland, you’ve got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she’s a little old woman. It saves thinking.’43 The audience would not have realised that – out of either ignorance or malice – Shaw had misspelt the name of Ireland’s mystical queen.
George Bernard Shaw was an English playwright who happened to have been born in Ireland – a quality he shared with Oscar Wilde. In other respects they could hardly have been more dissimilar. Shaw was, by nature, an activist. He was present at the inaugural conference of the Independent Labour Party, editor of the Fabian Essays on Socialism and he campaigned for causes which ranged from votes for women through vegetarianism to a new English alphabet. He was an unsuccessful novelist and occasional journalist until he wrote, for the Saturday Review, a series of articles on what he regarded as the inadequacies of the late Victorian stage. But, paradoxically, it was a political event which defined his view of the theatre. A Fabian Society lecture series – portentously entitled Socialism in Contemporary Literature – included a paper by Shaw on the work of Henrik Ibsen. It was expanded and published as The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Its title renounced all claim to literary criticism but claimed to examine Ibsen’s contribution to a civilised education. It was also a plea for iconoclasm. Realism – ‘the unflinching recognition of facts and the abandonment of the conspiracy to ignore such of them as do not bolster up our ideas’ – was only the beginning. It was essential ‘to get away from idolatry and get to the truth’. Shaw had set out the quintessence of his theory of drama.
The application of that theory to the real stage often resulted in hard pounding for the audience. Fortunately he found a theatre that was prepared to produce new plays which it was reasonable to expect would become critical triumphs but commercial disasters. Harley Granville-Barker – who had played Marchbanks in the 1900 production of Candida and received Shaw’s commendation for his comedy The Marrying of Ann Leete – was hired by J. H. Leigh, a wealthy businessman and amateur actor, to produce a series of new plays at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. Granville-Barker ‘believed in taking risks’. He practised what he preached in 1904 when he opened his first season with six performances of Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus. The risk he took most regularly was George Bernard Shaw.
Granville-Barker believed that long runs were ‘bad for plays and bad for acting’44 – an unusual view amongst producers. But Shaw’s Man and Superman, performed at the Royal Court in 1903 without its third act, ran for 176 performances. It might well not have enjoyed such longevity if the ‘Don Juan in Hell scene’, in which the hero dreams, amongst other things, that he is the captive of Sierra Nevada brigands, had been allowed to add another thirty minutes of philosophical discussion to the end of the play. Had a part of the Edwardian public not been scandalised by the heroine’s brazen pursuit of the man she hoped to make her lover, the run might have lasted even longer. Four years later, the Royal Court staged the ‘Don Juan in Hell’ scene as a play – or at least a moral discussion – in its own right. It shared the bill with Man of Destiny, Shaw’s ‘trifle’ about the life of the young Napoleon Bonaparte.
There followed, in 1905, Major Barbara in which the hero, Adolphus Cusins (nicknamed Euripides to emphasise his intellect), was based on Gilbert Murray. Next year the Royal Court was home to fifty performances of The Doctor’s Dilemma. Shaw never wrote to order, but he always rose to a challenge. Man and Superman was his response to a suggestion made by Arthur Bingham Walkley of The Times that he would find it difficult to write a play about Don Juan. The Doctor’s Dilemma was the result of the demand from William Archer (a leading theatrical critic and close friend) that Shaw try his hand at a full-length death scene. It became an argument about the sanctity of life. Shaw, with some justification, believed himself to be a philosopher as well as a playwright.
Max Beerbohm believed that the works of George Bernard Shaw were better ‘on the page than on the stage’. That was the form in which thousands of intellectuals first became acquainted with them, for very often they were printed and published years before production. How many Shavian devotees worked their way through the prefaces or read The Revolutionists’ Handbook and Pocket Companion, which accompanied Man and Superman, it is difficult to say, but there is no doubt that Shaw had brought ideas on to the Edwardian stage. Indeed he had encouraged their exposure in both the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern theatre. At the end of the Edwardian era, Androcles and the Lion was published in Berlin and performed in Hamburg, and Pygmalion, a play entirely concerned with the English preoccupation with the symbols of status and the incompatibility of the classes, was staged in Berlin.
At the beginning of the century, Scotland, still reacting against Walter Scott’s notion that it was North Britain, was determined to assert its own cultural identity. The Scottish Repertory Theatre opened in Glasgow in April 1909 with the stated purpose of guaranteeing ‘Scotland’s own theatre, financed by Scottish money, managed by Scotsmen and established to make Scotland independent of London for its dramatic supplies’. What became the Citizens’ Theatre lacked a national playwright – writing for Scotland – of the status of Synge or Lady Gregory in Ireland, but it enjoyed the distinction of presenting Chekhov’s Seagull for the first time in Britain.
Light comedy and the drawing-room drama did not disappear from the English stage. Indeed it continues still. But Edwardian England began a real debate about the fundamental purpose of the theatre. By 1912 London audiences were prepared to accept Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes, a play about a marriage between the classes. But, because the heroine declined to be made ‘an honest woman’ until her own good time, it was not the sort of play that London had come to expect. Masefield satirised in three lines the progress of the normal way in which a ‘fallen woman’ was expected to behave.
Curtain rises and discovers housemaid scrubbing floor
She speaks
O the misery of a double life!
Stanley Houghton’s heroine was made of sterner stuff.
I’m a Lancashire lass and so long as there’s weaving sheds in Lancashire I shall earn enough brass to keep me going. I wouldn’t live at home again after this, not anyhow … I’m going to be on my own in future …
Working women of independence – and working men of character – had established their place in English drama. Their position at the centre of the stage was to be confirmed, when the era had passed, by the new theatrical phenomenon which was to close the provincial theatres and make playgoing an occasional occupation rather than a regular form of entertainment.
In America in 1893, Thomas Edison had made a two-minute film which depicted the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. In the following year the Broadway kinescope opened to show ‘moving pictures’. Five years later, the French made a film called The Trial of Dreyfus. Britain lagged behind in production, but the demand created by a popular enthusiasm for the new entertainment was met by foreign film-makers. In 1902, Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon (made in Paris) ran in London for nine months. In 1908 the growing interest
was illustrated by a tragic example of the excitement the cinema caused. In Barnsley, four hundred children attended a ‘moving picture show’ in a church hall specially hired for the purpose. A crowded staircase made some of them fear that they would not get a seat. They began to push. Others panicked. Sixteen children were crushed to death. In the following year local authorities were required to issue ‘safety licences’ before films were shown.
Although Britain was the first country to put safety regulations in place, the Edwardians were dilatory in pushing forward with film production. A young man called Charlie Chaplin, who had played the wolf in the first performance of Peter Pan on stage, took his comic genius to America and made thirty-five films for Mack Sennett in 1914. In the year that the world changed, popular entertainment began to change too. But the ‘theatre of ideas’, resurrected, if not born, in Edwardian Britain, endured, and remains.
*The Irish Literary Theatre (founded by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1899) became the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903. It moved into the new Abbey Theatre in 1904.
CHAPTER 14
Literature Comes Home
Most historians agree about who the Edwardians were and how long the Edwardian era lasted. Usually they extend the actual period of the reign from the turn of the century to the outbreak of the First World War, so that they can work within distinct boundaries. They can agree that Balfour, Lloyd George and Asquith were the dominant political figures, that Churchill was on his way up, Joe Chamberlain was on his way out, that female suffrage, Irish Home Rule and trade union rights stirred genuine passions and that the world was never quite the same again after August 1914.
But a life in literature often lasts longer than a career in politics, so there are arguments about whether writers who did the best of their work in Edwardian England can properly be called ‘Edwardian’ if most of their poetry or prose was published in another reign. And there are more fundamental questions to be answered. Did literature, during the early years of the twentieth century, have a defining characteristic? Is Edwardian fiction simply identified by a publication date, or does it denote a spirit, a style and a view of life? And is Edwardian poetry in some way a reflection of its time and place?
In one paradoxical particular, it is possible to draw a poetic boundary line. The ‘Georgian Poets’, whose work was published ‘in the belief that English poetry is now putting on a new strength and beauty’, were Edwardians. G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Ross and Sturge Moore were included in the first Georgian Anthology1 but omitted from the second with a gracious apology. ‘They belong to an earlier poetic generation and their inclusion must be admitted to be an anachronism.’ Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were not included in the original collection, but Housman was offered a place. He declined with the message, ‘I do not belong to you.’ A Shropshire Lad had been written in 1896. Housman did not believe that he belonged to anybody. ‘To include me in a book of the nineties would’, he wrote with a strange choice of image, ‘be just as technically correct and just as essentially inappropriate as to include Lot in a book on Sodomites.’2
The search for a common theme in Edwardian literature is complicated by the diverse reactions to the new age that Edwardian writers recorded. W. B. Yeats thought that he noticed a change in attitude on or about New Year’s Day 1900. From then on ‘everybody got down off their stilts. Henceforward, nobody drank absinthe with their coffee. Nobody went mad. Nobody committed suicide. And nobody joined the Catholic Church.’3 He was celebrating the eclipse of the ‘aesthetic movement’ in all its extravagantly romantic forms – a welcome event which he associated with the death, at the end of the nineteenth century, of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.
H. G. Wells rejoiced at what he believed to be a new liberalism which he hoped would sweep through England after Queen Victoria’s death. He thought of the Old Queen as a paperweight that held the country down. Without her looming presence, there was less inhibition and restraint, ‘So things blew about all over the place.’4 Thomas Hardy was less optimistic about the chances of change and improvement. His fiction had always won the acclaim of at least part of the intellectual Establishment, but the general public, encouraged by a popular press which was both prudish and prurient, regarded his novels as immoral. That is to say they dealt with commonplace, but irregular, sexual unions. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) had been the subject of particular vilification. Hardy feared that he would fare little better at the mercy of Edwardian hypocrisy than he had in the hands of Victorian propriety. So he gave up fiction and the risks of writing about forbidden love. He lived until 1928. But, in Edwardian England, he lived as a poet.
Rudyard Kipling sensed a new spirit and set off in a new direction. He had anticipated the national mood of doubt and disillusion which was to follow Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and written ‘Recessional’, ‘lest we forget’. The Boer War, which he witnessed at first hand, changed, at least for a while, his whole poetic style. The poet of Empire and the Army which had ‘salted it down with its bones’ had become famous for
It’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy go away!’
But it’s ‘Thank you Mister Atkins, when the band begins to play.
Back home he wanted to write about a quieter England:
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago
With ‘the gentlemen in khaki’ once again ‘fighting penny wars at Aldershotit’ he gave up martial verse. The First World War reignited his patriotic fervour, and his son’s death in battle revived his emotional attachment to what he had once called ‘a thin red line of ‘eroes’. But in Edwardian England there were no poems about South Africa’s new relationship with the Mother Country or the imperial duty (pace Joe Chamberlain) to impose import duties on ‘foreign goods’ and so give ‘preference’ to trade with the colonies. He wrote about England.
One poet, throughout the whole period of 1900 to 1914, spoke – loud and clear – for the significant section of Edwardian England who remained true to the simple patriotism that Kipling had represented. Sir Henry Newbolt never wrote about the exacting innovations of the new century. Votes for women, the motor car, wireless telegraphy, the creation of a self-governing Commonwealth all passed him by. He represented that strong and vocal section of society, with members in all the classes, who gloried in Britain’s illustrious past and believed that the example of historic heroism could inspire a new generation to build a more mighty nation. For twenty years he received ‘almost daily enquiries from editors who wanted poems from him’.5 And he wrote what came to be the most satirised poem in the English language.
Newbolt’s critics have concentrated most of their time on the first two lines.
There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight –
Ten to make and a match to win
But what they disliked about ‘Vitaï Lampada’ – ‘an especially nasty kind of imperialistic jingoism’6 which ‘exalted public school verities’ – is better represented in the second stanza.
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke,
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
‘Play up! Play up! and play the game!’
The banality of ‘Vitaï Lampada’ is beyond dispute, and the whole poem is littered with examples of imperial hypocrisy. The ‘sodden red’ desert sand which that last verse would bring to most readers’ minds was undoubtedly a stretch of open ground outside Omdurman – the scene of the last cavalry charge in British military history. The battle (which took place in 1898) ended with fewer than three hundred British casualties and (since most of the Gatling guns had not jammed) twenty thousand Dervishes dead or wounded. In the circumstances, ‘Play up! and play the game!’ seems an inadequate description of the way in which the engagem
ent was conducted.
‘Vitaï Lampada’ is one of the few examples, in the whole of Newbolt’s canon, of a poem about contemporary, or near contemporary, heroism. Newbolt normally inspired his patriotic listeners with stories of ancient valour. The titles of almost all the poems which made him famous were evocations of English (not British) history – ‘Drake’s Drum’, ‘Admirals All’, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’. There were exceptions. Some poems exalted the public school virtues. But they were all related to imperial greatness.
Clifton College (where Newbolt ‘thought the thoughts of youth’) made him. His contemporaries at the school included Douglas Haig and Francis Younghusband. Haig, after meritorious service in South Africa and India, commanded the British forces in the Battle of the Somme. Younghusband just failed to climb Everest, discovered the secret kingdom of Tibet and then negotiated a Treaty of Friendship between the Dalai Lama and King Edward. Like them, Newbolt served the King and Empire.
The Edwardians Page 34