CHAPTER IX
When the history of the last quarter of the nineteenth century comes to be written, it will be seen that the name of Bernard Shaw is inextricably linked with five epoch-making movements of our contemporary era. The Collectivist movement in politics, ethics and sociology; the Ibsen-Nietzschean movement in morals; the reaction against the materialism of Marx and Darwin; the Wagnerian movement in music; and the anti-romantic movement in literature and art—these are the main currents of modern thought for which Shaw has unfalteringly sought to open a passage into modern consciousness.
On the death of Mr. Edmund Yates, the editor of the World, in 1894, Shaw gave up his “labour of Hercules” as music critic of that paper, and was succeeded by Mr. Robert Hichens. By this time Shaw had only one more critical continent to conquer; but he wanted the right editor, he has told us—“one with the virtues of Yates—and some of his faults as well, perhaps.” On Mr. Frank Harris's revival of the Saturday Review, it was matter for no surprise that the author of The Quintessence of Ibsenism and of four plays besides, should have been offered the post of dramatic critic on that magazine. Shaw did not begin his career as an actor, as is sometimes stated; he never was on the stage, nor ever dreamt of going on it. He has taken part in a copyrighting performance, and once acted at some theatricals, got up for the benefit of an old workman member of the “International,” with Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, May Morris, and Sidney Pardon, all amateurs; and impersonated a photographer at William Morris's house at one of the soirées of the Socialist League. But there is not the remotest foundation for the statement that he began his career as an actor. Although Shaw had written a number of plays, he realized that dramatic authorship no more constitutes a man a critic than actorship constitutes him a dramatic author; but he rightly judged that a dramatic critic learns as much from having been a dramatic author as Shakespeare or Pinero from having been actors. It was his chief distinction to have touched life at many points; unlike many contemporary dramatic critics, he had not specialized to such an extent as to lose his character as man and citizen, and become a mere playgoer. “My real aim,” he asserted in reference to his work on the Saturday Review, “is to widen the horizon of the critic, especially of the dramatic critic, whose habit at present is to bring a large experience of stage life to bear on a scanty experience of real life, although it is certain that all really fruitful criticism of the drama must bring a wide and practical knowledge of real life to bear on the stage.”
Jowett's characterization of Disraeli as “a curious combination of the Arch-Priest of Humbug and a great man,” has a certain appropriateness for Bernard Shaw. That fictitious personage known as G. B. S. is Shaw's most remarkable creation. With characteristic daring, his very first article broke the sacred tradition of anonymity, inviolate till then in the conservative columns of the Saturday Review. With the innate instinct of the journalist, he devoted himself to sedulous self-advertisement, creating a traditionary character unrivalled in conceit, in cleverness, and in iconoclastic effrontery. Charged with being conceited, he replied: “No, I am not really a conceited man: if you had been through all that I have been through, and done all the things I have done, you would be ten times as conceited. It's only a pose, to prevent the English people from seeing that I am serious. If they did, they would make me drink the hemlock.” Do not make the mistake of concluding, from this confession, that Shaw was merely a ghastly little celebrity posing in a vacuum. If “New lamps for old” is the cry of this ultra-modern fakir, “Remember Aladdin” is the warning of the suspicious populace. Shaw's chief claim for consideration is not merely that he has spent his life in crying down the futility and uselessness of the old lamps, but that with equal earnestness he has advertised the merits of the new. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in his attitude towards Shakespeare and Ibsen.
Pope Innocent X.
Original in the Doria Palace, Rome.By Velásquez.
The Modern Pope of Wit and Wisdom.
After Velásquez. From the original painting, exhibited in 1907.
(From a photograph by Emery Walker.)
The Hon. Neville S. Lytton.
Courtesy of the Artist.
Shaw's incorrigible practice of “blaming the Bard,” publicly inaugurated in the Saturday Review, is no mere antic in which he indulges for the fun of the thing, but as inevitable an outcome of his philosophy as is his championship of Ibsen. His inability to see a masterpiece in every play of Shakespeare's arises largely from the fact that he knows his Shakespeare as he knows his Bunyan, his Dickens, his Ibsen. It is flying in the face of fact to aver that a man who knew his Shakespeare from cover to cover by the time he was twenty does not like or admire Shakespeare. “I am fond,” says Shaw, “unaffectedly fond, of Shakespeare's plays.” He looks back upon those delightful evenings at the New Shakespeare Society, under F. J. Furnival, with the most unfeigned pleasure. A careful perusal of his score or more articles on Shakespeare in the Saturday Review shows that he has not only studied Shakespeare consistently, and periodically interpreted him from a definite point of view, but that he always fought persistently for the performance of his plays in their integrity. And although he has by no means taken advantage of all his opportunities, yet he has managed to see between twenty and thirty of Shakespeare's plays performed on the stage.
When Shaw first read Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's words: “Surely the crowning glory of our nation is our Shakespeare; and remember he was one of a great school,” he almost burst, as he put it, with the intensity of his repudiation of the second clause in that utterance. Against the first clause he had nothing to say; but the Elizabethans Shaw has always regarded chiefly as “shallow literary persons, drunk with words, and seeking in crude stories of lust and crime an excuse for that wildest of all excitements, the excitement of imaginative self-expression by words.” Mr. Shaw once defined an Elizabethan as “a man with an extraordinary and imposing power of saying things, and with nothing whatever to say.” Indeed, it was not to be expected that the arch-foe of Romance, in modern art and modern life, would be edified with the imaginative and romantic violence of the Elizabethans. Nothing less than a close and, so to speak, biologic study of humanity in the nude can satisfy one who avers that Romance is the root of modern pessimism and the bane of modern self-respect.
To call the Elizabethans imaginative amounted with Shaw to the same thing as saying that, artistically, they had delirium tremens. The true Elizabethan he found to be a “blank-verse beast, itching to frighten other people with the superstitious terrors and cruelties in which he does not himself believe, and wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and strenuous animal passion as only literary men do when they become thoroughly depraved by solitary work, sedentary cowardice, and starvation of the sympathetic centres.” He passes them in review, calling them a crew of dehumanized specialists in blank verse! Webster, a Tussaud laureate; Chapman, with his sublime balderdash; Marlowe, the pothouse brawler, with his clumsy horse-play, his butcherly rant, and the resourceless tum-tum of his “mighty line.” Even in this dust-heap, Shaw managed to find some merit and variety. Was not Greene really amusing, Marston spirited and “silly-clever,” Cyril Tourneur able to string together lines of which any couple picked out and quoted separately might pass as a fragment of a real organic poem? Though a brutish pedant, Jonson was not heartless; Marlowe often charged his blank-verse with genuine colour and romance; while Beaumont and Fletcher, although possessing no depth, no conviction, no religious or philosophic basis, were none the less dainty romantic poets, and really humorous character-sketchers in Shakespeare's popular style. “Unfortunately, Shakespeare dropped into the middle of these ruffianly pedants (the Elizabethans); and since there was no other shop than theirs to serve his apprenticeship in, he had perforce to become an Elizabethan too.
“In such a school of falsehood, bloody-mindedness, bombast, and intellectual cheapness, his natural standard was inevitably dragged down, as we know to our cost; but the degree to which he dragged their standard up has saved them from oblivion.” Indeed, Shakespeare, enthused by his interest in the art of acting and by his desire to “educate the public,” tried to make that public accept genuine studies of life and character in, for instance, Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well. But the public would have none of them (traditionary evidence, be it noted), “preferring a fantastic sugar doll like Rosalind to such serious and dignified studies of women as Isabella and Helena.”
Shakespeare had discovered that “the only thing that paid in the theatre was romantic nonsense, and that when he was forced by this to produce one of the most effective samples of romantic nonsense in existence—a feat which he performed easily and well—he publicly disclaimed any responsibility for its pleasant and cheap falsehood by borrowing the story and throwing it in the face of the public with the phrase 'As You Like It.'” Despite Mr. Chesterton's assertion that Shaw has read an ironic snub into the title, and that after all it was only a sort of hilarious bosh, Shaw still maintains, as he did fifteen years ago, that when Shakespeare used that phrase he meant exactly what he said, and that the phrase: “What You Will,” which he applied to Twelfth Night, meaning “Call it what you please,” is not, in Shakespearean or any other English, the equivalent of the perfectly unambiguous and penetratingly simple phrase: “As You Like It.”
Shakespeare's popularity, Shaw would have us believe, was due to a deliberate pandering to the public taste for “romantic nonsense.” Shaw holds that Shakespeare's supreme power lies in his “enormous command of word-music, which gives fascination to his most blackguardly repartees and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes, besides raising to the highest force all his gifts as an observer, an imitator of personal mannerisms and characteristics, a humorist and a story-teller.” No matter how poor, coarse, cheap and obvious may be the thought in Much Ado about Nothing, for example, the mood is charming and the music of the words expresses the mood, transporting you into another, an enchanted world.
“When a flower-girl tells a coster to hold his jaw, for nobody is listening to him, and he retorts: 'Oh, you're there, are you, you beauty?' they reproduce the wit of Beatrice and Benedick exactly. But put it this way: 'I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick: nobody marks you.' 'What! my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?' You are miles away from costerland at once.” In other words, Shaw insists that a nightingale's love is no higher than a cat's, except that the nightingale is the better musician!
“It is not easy to knock this into the public head, because comparatively few of Shakespeare's admirers are at all conscious that they are listening to music as they hear his phrases turn and his lines fall so fascinatingly and memorably; whilst we all, no matter how stupid we are, can understand his jokes and platitudes, and are flattered when we are told of the subtlety of the wit we have relished, and the profundity of the thought we have fathomed. Englishmen are specially susceptible to this sort of flattery, because intellectual subtlety is not their strong point. In dealing with them you must make them believe that you are appealing to their brains, when you are really appealing to their senses and feelings. With Frenchmen the case is reversed: you must make them believe that you are appealing to their senses and feelings when you are really appealing to their brains. The Englishman, slave to every sentimental ideal and dupe of every sensuous art, will have it that his great national poet is a thinker. The Frenchman, enslaved and duped only by systems and calculations, insists on his hero being a sentimentalist and artist. That is why Shakespeare is esteemed a master-mind in England, and wondered at as a clumsy barbarian in France.”[119]
Shaw is as far from Taine on the one side as he is from Swinburne on the other—“as far this side bardolatry as Johnson or Mr. Frank Harris.” To the idolatrous and insensate worship of Shakespeare which got on Ben Jonson's nerves, which Lamb brought back into fashion, and which has gone to blasphemy and sacrilege in the mouth of Swinburne, Shaw, like Byron before him, declined to subscribe. And for the very good reason that, being primarily an ideologue, he has examined Shakespeare as a man of thought only to find him wanting. Lop away all beauty of form, all grace of mood—in a word, reduce Shakespeare to his lowest terms—and what is the result? Paraphrase the encounters of Benedick and Beatrice in the style of a Blue-book, carefully preserving every idea they present, and it immediately becomes apparent to Shaw that they contain at best nothing out of the common in thought or wit, and at worst a good deal of vulgar naughtiness. Paraphrasing Goethe, Wagner, or Ibsen in the same way, he finds in them original observation, subtle thought, wide comprehension, far-reaching intuition and psychological study. Even if you paraphrase Shakespeare's best and maturest work, you will still get nothing more, Shaw avers, than the platitudes of proverbial philosophy, with a very occasional curiosity in the shape of a rudiment of some modern idea, not followed up. “Once or twice we scent among them an anticipation of the crudest side of Ibsen's polemics on the Woman Question, as in All's Well that Ends Well, when the man cuts as meanly selfish a figure beside his enlightened lady-doctor wife as Helmer beside Nora; or in Cymbeline, where Posthumus, having, as he believes, killed his wife for inconstancy, speculates for a moment on what his life would have been worth if the same standard of continence had been applied to himself. And certainly no modern study of the voluptuous temperament, and the spurious heroism and heroinism which its ecstasies produce, can add much to Antony and Cleopatra.”
Last of all, Shaw goes a step further with the declaration that Shakespeare's weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality, and the bearing of these on communities, which is sociology. “Search for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the Commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank-verse.” All the truly heroic which came so naturally to Bunyan is missing in Shakespeare. In the words of Whitman, Shaw regards Shakespeare as “the æsthetic-heroic among poets, lacking both in the democratic and spiritual,” but never as “the heroic-heroic, which is the greatest development of the spirit.” In Shaw's eyes, Shakespeare's “test of the worth of life is the vulgar hedonic test, and since life cannot be justified by this or any other external test, Shakespeare comes out of his reflective period a vulgar pessimist, oppressed with a logical demonstration that life is not worth living, and only surpassing Thackeray in respect of being fertile enough, instead of repeating 'Vanitas vanitatum' at second-hand, to word the futile doctrine differently and better.... This does not mean that Shakespeare lacked the enormous fund of joyousness which is the secret of genius, but simply that, like most middle-class Englishmen bred in private houses, he was a very incompetent thinker, and took it for granted that all inquiry into life began and ended with the question: 'Does it pay?'.... Having worked out his balance-sheet and gravely concluded that life's but a poor player, etc., and thereby deeply impressed a public which, after a due consumption of beer and spirits, is ready to believe that everything maudlin is tragic, and everything senseless sublime, Shakespeare found himself laughing and writing plays and getting drunk at the 'Mermaid' much as usual, with Ben Jonson finding it necessary to reprove him for a too extravagant sense of humour.” Like Ernest Crosby, Shaw regards Shakespeare as the poet of courts, of lords and ladies. His fundamental assent is accorded to Tolstoy in his declaration that Shakespeare's quintessential deficiency was his failure to face, fairly and squarely, the eternal question of life: “What are we alive for?”[120]
It is a task of the merest supererogation to go into the details of Shaw's admiration of Shakespeare's plays, to quote his praise of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream as “crown jewels of dramatic poetry”; of Romeo and Juliet with its “lines that tighten the heart or catch you up into the heights”; of Richard III., as the best of all the “Punch and Judy” plays, in which the hero delights man by provoking God, and dies unrepentant and game to the last; of Julius Cæsar, in which the “dramatist's art can be carried no higher on the plane chosen”; of Othello, which “remains magnificent by the volume of its passion and the splendour of its word-music”; of the “great achievement” of Hamlet; and of Macbeth, than which “no greater tragedy will ever be written.” Not only is Shaw unaffectedly fond of Shakespeare: he pities the man who cannot enjoy him:
“He has outlived hundreds of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more. His gift of telling a story (provided someone else told it to him first); his enormous power over language, as conspicuous in his senseless and silly abuse of it as in his miracles of expression; his humour; his sense of idiosyncratic character; and his prodigious fund of that vital energy which is, it seems, the true differentiating property behind the faculties, good, bad, or indifferent, of the man of genius, enable him to entertain us so effectively that the imaginary scenes and people he has created become more real to us than our actual life—at least, until our knowledge and grip of actual life begins to deepen and glow beyond the common. When I was twenty I knew everybody in Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Abhorson, much more intimately than I knew my living contemporaries.”[121]
John Bull's Other Playwright.
A new design for a statue in Leicester Square.
Reproduced by the special permission of the proprietors of Punch.
E. T. Reed
Courtesy of the Artist.
The literary side of the mission of Ibsen in England, as Shaw conceived it, was the rescue of that unhappy country from its centuries of slavery to Shakespeare. The moral side of Ibsen's mission was the breaking of the shackles of slavery to conventional ideals of virtue. And Shaw's iconoclastic cry in the Saturday Review was “Down with Shakespeare. Great is Ibsen; and Shaw is his prophet.”[122] Interrogated in 1892 as to whether Shakespeare was not his model in writing Widowers' Houses, Shaw replied with quizzical disdain: “Shakespeare! stuff! Shakespeare—a disillusioned idealist! a rationalist! a capitalist! If the fellow had not been a great poet, his rubbish would have been forgotten long ago. Molière, as a thinker, was worth a thousand Shakespeares. If my play is not better than Shakespeare, let it be damned promptly.” And in reviewing his work as a dramatic critic, he said: “After all, I have accomplished something. I have made Shakespeare popular by knocking him off his pedestal and kicking him round the place, and making people realize that he's not a demi-god, but a dramatist.”[123] When he came to judge the works of the two dramatists by the tests of intellectual force and dramatic insight, quite apart from beauty of expression, he found that “Ibsen comes out with a double first-class, whereas Shakespeare comes out hardly anywhere.” Shaw recognized only the splendour of Shakespeare's literary gift; whereas, in Ibsen, he hailed the very antithesis of Shakespeare, i.e., a thinker of extraordinary penetration, a moralist of international influence, and a philosopher going to the root of those very questions to the solution of which Shaw's own life has been largely devoted. In the dramas of Ibsen, he found epitomized the modern realistic struggle for intellectual and spiritual emancipation, the revolt against the machine-made morality of our sordid, flabby, and hypocritical age. Shaw had begun his career in the strife and turmoil of the Zetetical and Dialectical Societies, debating the questions of Women's Rights, Emancipation, and Married Women's Property Acts. Before he had ever read a line of Ibsen or heard of A Doll's House, he had already reached the conclusion, always consistently maintained by him, that Man is not a species superior to Woman, but that mankind is male and female, like other kinds, and that the inequality of the sexes is literally nothing more than a cock-and-bull story, invented by the “lords of creation” for supremely selfish motives. When Ibsen wrote Ghosts, his name was unknown to Shaw. But it is undeniable that, in the eighties, Shaw was forging towards precisely similar conclusions. He had felt in his inmost being the loathing of the nineteenth century for itself, and had marked with exultation the ferocity with which Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx, Ruskin and Carlyle, Morris and Wagner had rent the bosom that bore them. Smouldering within his own breast was that same detestation of all the orthodoxies, and respectabilities, and ideals railed at by these political, social and moral anarchs. Fired by their inspiring example, he had espoused the cause of Socialism, and zealously fought the battle for equality of opportunity, for social justice, for woman's freedom, for liberty of thought, of action, and of conscience. His conscious revolt against a sentimental, theatrical and senselessly romantic age, chivalrously and blindly “holding aloft the banner of the ideal,” preceded his acquaintance with The Pillars of Society and The Wild Duck. A Fabian, almost universally regarded in England as a crack-brained fanatic and doctrinaire, he found years afterwards in An Enemy of the People the final expression of his experience that all human progress involves as its fundamental condition a recognition by the pioneer that to be right is to be in the minority. The very keynote of Shaw's own convictions was struck in Ibsen's declaration that the really effective progressive forces of the moment were the revolt of the working-classes against economic, and of the women against idealistic, slavery.
During the entire period of his career as a dramatic critic, Shaw stood forth as an unabashed champion of Ibsen. For many years prior to this period, he had borne the odium of Philistine objurgation; never, even in the blackest hour of British intolerance and insult, did he once flinch from adherence to the Wizard of the North. Much that he wrote in the Saturday Review concerning Ibsen and his plays, he had already said—and said better—in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, written in the spring of 1890.[124] Still, the articles in the Saturday Review completed Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism, as exhibited in the remaining plays of Ibsen published after 1890; and, in addition, they possessed the advantage of being criticisms of the acted dramas themselves. The brilliant brochure, entitled The Quintessence of Ibsenism, contains the heart of Shaw's Ibsen criticism, and is undoubtedly the most notable tour de force its author has ever achieved in any line. It is a distinct contribution to that fertile field of modern philosophy farcically and superficially imaged by Gilbert, mordantly dramatized by Ibsen, and rhapsodically concretized by Nietzsche. Let us disabuse our minds at once of the idea that this book is either mere literary criticism or a supernally clever jeu d'esprit. Not a critical essay on the poetical beauties of Ibsen, but simply an exposition of Ibsenism, it may be described as an ideological distillation of Ibsen in the rôle of ethical and moral critic of contemporary civilization. To call The Quintessence of Ibsenism one-sided is not simply a futile condemnation: it is a perfectly obvious truth.
To Ibsen, according to Shaw, the pioneer of civilization is the man or woman bold enough to seek the fulfilment of the individual will, hardy enough to prefer the naked facts of life to the comforting illusions of the imagination. Society is composed, in the main, of Philistines who accept the established social order without demur or misgiving; and of a few Idealists, temperamentally dissatisfied with their lot, yet seeking refuge from the spectacle of their own failure in an imaginary world of romantic ideals, and in the self-delusion that to see the world thus is noble and spiritual, whilst to see it as it is is vulgar, brutal and cynical. But sometimes there arises the solitary pioneer, the realist, if you will—a Blake, a Shelley, a Bashkirtseff, a Shaw—who dares to face the truth the idealists are shirking, to chip off the masks of romance and idealism, and to say fearlessly that life needs no justification and submits to no test; that it must be lived for its own sake as an end in itself, and that all institutions, all ideals, and all romances must be brought to its test and stand or fall by their furtherance of and loyalty to it.
Thus to Ibsen: “The Ideal is dead; long live the ideal!” epitomizes the history of human progress. Brand, the heroic idealist, daring to live largely, to will unreservedly, fails because of his inability to realize the unattainability of his ideals in this present life. As Cervantes in Don Quixote reduced the old ideal of chivalry to absurdity, so Ibsen in Peer Gynt reduces to absurdity the ideal of self-realization when it takes the form of self-gratification unhampered by sense of responsibility. Shaw found it unnecessary to translate the scheme of Emperor and Galilean in terms of the antithesis between idealism and realism, since Julian, in this respect, is only a reincarnation of Peer Gynt. After constructing imaginative projections of himself in Brand, Peer Gynt and Julian, Ibsen next turns to the real life around him, to the creatures of tous les jours, to continue his detailed attack upon idealism. In The Pillars of Society, the Rörlund ideals go down before the realities of truth and freedom; in A Doll's House, Helmer's unstable card-house of ideals falls to the ground; and in Ghosts, Mrs. Alving offers herself up as a living sacrifice on the altar of the ideal, only to discover the futility of the sacrifice. An Enemy of the People exposes the fallacy of the majority ideal, and posits the striking doctrine that to be right is to be in the minority. The Wild Duck appears as a wholesale condemnation of the ideal of truth for truth's sake alone. Rosmersholm embodies Rebekka's tragic protest against the Rosmersholm ideal “that denied her right to live and be happy from the first, and at the end, even in denying its God, exacts her life as a vain blood-offering for its own blindness.” The Lady from the Sea presents a fanciful image of the triumph of responsible freedom over romantic idealism grounded in unhappiness, while in Hedda Gabler the woman rises from life's feast because she has neither the vision for ideals nor the passion for reality—“a pure sceptic, a typical nineteenth-century figure, falling into the abyss between the ideals which do not impose on her and the realities which she has not yet discovered.”
It is needless to follow Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism further, although it might readily be applied to Ibsen's remaining plays. Suffice it to say, that Shaw nowhere denies that Ibsen is an idealist, or that ideals are indispensable to human progress. He has been forced to call Ibsen a realist; in fact, almost to invent new terms, a new phraseology, in order to distinguish between the ideals which have become pernicious through senescence, and the ideals which remain valid through conformity to reality. Out of Ibsen's very longing for the ideal grew that mood of ideal suspiciousness which Brandes, like Shaw, affirmed to be one of his dominant characteristics. Ibsen opposes current political and moral values, strong in the conviction that every end should be challenged to justify the means. Acceptance of Ibsen's philosophy to will greatly, to dare nobly, to be always prepared to violate the code of conventional morality, to find fulfilment of the will as much in voluntary submission to reality as in affirmation of life the eternal—must at once, Shaw rightly indicates, greatly deepen the sense of moral responsibility. “What Ibsen insists on is that there is no golden rule—that conduct must justify itself by its effect upon happiness and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal.”[125]
Shaw's analysis of Ibsenism holds out a large, sane, tolerant standard of life as the inevitable lesson of Ibsen's plays. Lies, pretences, and hypocrisies avail not against the strong man, fortified in the resolution to find himself, to attain self-realization, through fulfilment of the will. However much one may regret that Shaw, by preserving his postulata in concrete terms, has to some extent diverted our attention from the whole formidable significance of the Ibsenic drama, it is idle to deny that the book is at once caustically powerful and unflaggingly brilliant. Certainly Shaw has seen Ibsen clearly, even if he has not seen him whole. Ibsen cannot be summed up in a thesis; the curve of his art, as Mr. Huneker says, reaches across the edge of the human soul. “The quintessence of Ibsenism is that there is no formula”—this is Shaw's last assurance to us that he has not reduced Ibsen to a formula. It is impossible for anyone, with greater assurance, to assure us that there is nothing assured.
William Archer.
From the original pencil sketch.
Jessie Holliday.
Courtesy of the Artist.
Comprehension of Shaw's attitude towards Shakespeare and Ibsen is a prerequisite to an accurate judgment of his attitude towards dramatic art in general, and, more particularly, towards the contemporary British stage. Beneath all his criticism lay the belief that the theatre of to-day is as important an institution as the Church was in the Middle Ages. “The apostolic succession from Eschylus to myself,” he recently said, in speaking of his Saturday Review period, “is as serious and as continuously inspired as that younger institution, the apostolic succession of the Christian Church. Unfortunately this Christian Church, founded gaily with a pun, has been so largely corrupted by rank Satanism that it has become the Church where you must not laugh; and so it is giving way to that older and greater Church to which I belong: the Church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice, and affirm good-fellowship without mawkishness. When I wrote, I was well aware of what an unofficial census of Sunday worshippers presently proved, that church-going in London has been largely replaced by play-going. This would be a very good thing if the theatre took itself seriously as a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armoury against despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man. I took it seriously in that way, and preached about it instead of merely chronicling its news and alternately petting and snubbing it as a licentious but privileged form of public entertainment. And this, I believe, is why my sermons gave so little offence, and created so much interest.”[126] Although plays have neither political constitutions nor established churches, they must all, if they are to be anything more than the merest tissue of stage effects, have a philosophy even if it be no more than an unconscious expression of the author's temperament. Just as nowadays all the philosophers maintain intimate relations with the fine arts, so conversely the great dramatists have at all times maintained intimate relations with philosophy. William Archer used often to tell Shaw that he (Shaw) had no real love of art, no enjoyment of it, only a faculty for observing performances, and an interest in the intellectual tendency of plays. One may retort in Shaw's own words: “In all the life that has energy enough to be interesting to me, subjective volition, passion, will, make intellect the merest tool.” It is significant of much that, to Shaw, the play is not the thing, but its thought, its purpose, its feeling, its execution. Indeed, he regarded the theatre as a response to our need for a “sensable expression of our ideals and illusions and approvals and resentments.” In comparing the dramatic standards of Archer and himself, Shaw exhibits a passion for feeling little suspected by his critics: “Every element, even though it be an element of artistic force, which interferes with the credibility of the scene, wounds him, and is so much to the bad. To him acting, like scene-painting, is merely a means to an end, that end being to enable him to make-believe. To me the play is only the means, the end being the expression of feeling by the arts of the actor, the poet, the musician. Anything that makes this impression more vivid, whether it be versification, or an orchestra, or a deliberately artificial rendition of the lines, is so much to the good for me, even though it may destroy all the verisimilitude of the scene.”
In a review of the London dramatic season of 1904-5 Mr. Walkley made the following characterization of Shaw:
“After all, we must recall this truth: the primordial function of the artist—whatever his means of artistic expression—is to be a purveyor of pleasure, and the man who can give us a refined intellectual pleasure, or a pleasure of moral nature or of social sympathy, or else a pleasure which arises from being given an unexpected or wider outlook upon life—this man imparts to us a series of delicate and moving sensations which the spectacle simply of technical address, of theatrical talent, can never inspire. And this man is no other than Bernard Shaw.”[127]
In conversation with me, Shaw vehemently repudiated the notion that he was anything so petty as a mere purveyor of pleasure. “The theatre cannot give pleasure,” he went so far as to say. “It defeats its very purpose if it does not take you outside of yourself. It may sometimes—and, indeed, often does—give one sensations which are far from pleasant, which may even be, in the last degree, horrifying and terrible. The function of the theatre is to stir people, to make them think, to make them suffer.
“Why, I have seen people stagger out of the Court Theatre after seeing one of my plays,” he said, laughing, “unspeakably indignant with me because I had made them think, had stirred them to opposition, and had made them heartily ashamed of themselves.”
In regard to comedy, the field in which he peculiarly excels, Shaw is equally positive in the statement that unless comedy touches as well as amuses him, he is defrauded of his just due. “When a comedy of mine is performed, it is nothing to me that the spectators laugh—any fool can make an audience laugh. I want to see how many of them, laughing or grave, have tears in their eyes.” More than once he has insisted that people's ideas, however useful they may be for embroidery, especially in passages of comedy, are not the true stuff of drama, which is always “the naïve feeling underlying the ideas.” When Mr. Meredith said, in his Essay on Comedy, “The English public have the basis of the comic in them: an esteem for common sense,” the remark aroused Mr. Shaw's most vigorous opposition. The intellectual virtuosity of the Frenchman, the Irishman, the American, the ancient Greek, leading to a love of intellectual mastery of things, Shaw acutely observes, “produces a positive enjoyment of disillusion (the most dreaded and hated of calamities in England), and consequently a love of comedy (the fine art of disillusion) deep enough to make huge sacrifices of dearly idealized institutions to it. Thus, in France, Molière was allowed to destroy the Marquises. In England he could not have shaken even such titles as the accidental sheriff's knighthood of the late Sir Augustus Harris.” Shaw had realized to his own misfortune that the Englishman's so-called “common sense” always involves a self-satisfied unconsciousness of its own moral and intellectual bluntness, whereas the function of comedy—in particular the comedies written by Shaw himself—is “to dispel such unconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysis right on it.” The following paragraph embodies Shaw's rather limited conception of comedy:
“The function of comedy is nothing less than the destruction of old-established morals. Unfortunately, to-day such iconoclasm can be tolerated by our play-going citizens only as a counsel of despair and pessimism. They can find a dreadful joy in it when it is done seriously, or even grimly and terribly as they understand Ibsen to be doing it; but that it should be done with levity, with silvery laughter like the crackling of thorns under a pot, is too scandalously wicked, too cynical, too heartlessly shocking to be borne. Consequently, our plays must either be exploitations of old-established morals or tragic challengings of the order of Nature. Reductions to absurdity, however logical; banterings, however kind; irony, however delicate; merriment, however silvery, are out of the question in matters of morality, except among men with a natural appetite for comedy which must be satisfied at all costs and hazards: that is to say, not among the English play-going public, which positively dislikes comedy.”[128]
It is perfectly apparent that it was Shaw's distinction—a notorious distinction—to be the leading and almost unique representative of a school which was in violent reaction against that of Pinero, generally regarded as the premier British dramatist. Moreover, he lacked the sympathy of his colleagues in dramatic criticism—Clement Scott, the impassioned champion of British sentimentality and ready-made morals, William Archer, the austere patron of young England in the drama, and Walkley, the Gallic impressionist and dilettante. Shaw endured the virulent attacks of Clement Scott with equanimity, if not with positive enjoyment. By his friend Walkley he was taunted, under the classic name of Euthrypho, with being an impossibilist: “Euthrypho hardly falls into Mr. Grant Allen's category of 'serious intellects,' for none has ever known him to be serious, but about his intellect there is, as the Grand Inquisitor says:
“'No probable possible shadow of doubt,
No possible doubt whatever.'
“A universal genius, a brilliant political economist, a Fabian of the straitest sect of the Fabians, a critic (of other arts than the dramatic) comme il y en a peu, he persists, where the stage is concerned, in crying for the moon, and will not be satisfied, as the rest of us have learned to be, with the only attainable substitute, a good wholesome cheese. His standard is as much too high as Crito's (another critic) is too low. He asks from the theatre more than the theatre can give, and quarrels with the theatre because it is theatrical. He lumps La Tosca and A Man's Shadow together as 'French machine-made plays,' and, because he is not edified by them, refuses to be merely amused. Because The Dead Heart is not on the level of a Greek tragedy, he is blind to its merits as a pantomime. He refuses to recognize the advance made by Mr. Pinero because Mr. Pinero has not yet advanced as far as Henrik Ibsen. Half a loaf, the wise agree, is better than no bread; but because it is only half a loaf, Euthrypho complains that they have given him a stone.”[129] Worse than all, Mr. Archer vigorously charged him with the most aggressive hostility towards the contemporary movement in British drama. In one of his Study and Stage articles, entitled Mr. Shaw and Mr. Pinero, and published August 22d, 1903, Mr. Archer thus condemns Shaw as a dramatic critic: “Just at the time when the English drama began clearly to emerge from the puerility into which it had sunk between the 'fifties and the 'eighties, Mr. Shaw was engaged, week by week, in producing dramatic criticisms. Writing for a six-penny paper, he had but a limited audience; and, therefore, even his wit, energy and unique literary power (I use the epithet deliberately) could do little to influence the course of events. But all that he could do he did, to discredit, crush and stamp out the new movement. Had he been a power at all he would have been a power for evil. There were moments during that period when I sympathized, as never before or since, with the Terrorists of exactly a century ago. I felt that when a new and struggling order of things is persistently assailed with inveterate and inhuman hostility, it is no wonder if it defends itself with equal relentlessness. If a guillotine had been functioning in Trafalgar Square—but do not let us dwell on the horrid fantasy. Those days are over. 'We have marched prospering, not through his presence.' There is still a long fight to be fought before the English theatre becomes anything like the great social institution it ought to be; but even if the movement were now to stop dead (and of that there is not the slightest fear), nothing can alter the fact that the past ten years have given us a new and by no means despicable dramatic literature.”
These severe characterizations by the two leading English dramatic critics deserve more than casual notice. Shaw represented l'école du plein air; his unpardonable crime consisted in daringly throwing open the windows to let in a fresh and vivifying current of ideas. With Shaw, to dramatize was to philosophize; moreover, he sought to discredit the tradition that the drama is never the forerunner, but always the laggard, in interpretation of the Zeitgeist. Far from being the instigator of the crimes and the partner of the guilty joys of the drama, he regarded himself as the policeman of dramatic art; and avowed it his express business to denounce its delinquencies. Firm in the faith that the radicalism of yesterday is the conservatism of to-morrow, he boldly declared: “It is an instinct with me personally to attack every idea which has been full grown for ten years, especially if it claims to be the foundation of all human society. I am prepared to back human society against any idea, positive or negative, that can be brought into the field against it. In this—except as to my definite intellectual consciousness of it—I am, I believe, a much more typical and popular person in England than the conventional man; and I believe that when we begin to produce a genuine national drama, this apparently anarchic force, the mother of higher law and humaner order, will underlie it, and that the public will lose all patience with the conventional collapses which serve for the last acts to the serious dramas of to-day.” He found the contemporary English drama lamentably “dating” in ethics and philosophy; their daily observation kept the English dramatists up-to-date in personal descriptions, but there was “nothing to force them to revise the morality they inherited from their grandmothers.” But Shaw's high and uncompromising ideal for British drama was no justification for Mr. Archer's charge that Shaw as a dramatic critic was only a paralyzing and sterilizing force. “There is more talent now than ever,” wrote Shaw in December, 1895, to take a single example, “more skill now than ever, more artistic culture, better taste, better acting, better theatres, better dramatic literature. Mr. Tree, Mr. Alexander, Mr. Hare have made honourable experiments, Mr. Forbes Robertson's enterprise at the Lyceum is not a sordid one; Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and Mr. Pinero are doing better work than ever before, and doing it without any craven concession to the follies of the British public.”
We may, perhaps, best arrive at a notion of Shaw's relation to the British stage by discovering his attitude towards his colleagues in the drama—say Pinero, Jones, Wilde, Grundy, Stevenson and Henley. Pinero he resolutely refused, in the face of popular clamour, to laud as the “English Ibsen.” He regarded Pinero as an adroit describer of people as the ordinary man sees and judges them, but not as a genuine interpreter of character. “Add to this a clear head, a love of the stage, and a fair talent for fiction, all highly cultivated by hard and honourable work as a writer of effective stage plays for the modern commercial theatre; and you have him on his real level.” The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, hailed as the greatest tragedy of the modern English school, Shaw regarded as not only a stage play in the most technical sense, but even a noticeably old-fashioned one in its sentiment and stage-mechanism; he objected to it on another ground—and quite unreasonably, I think—because it exhibited, not the sexual relations between the principals, but the social reactions set up by this amazing marriage. Shaw was utterly revolted by Pinero's coarseness and unspeakable ignorance in the portrayal of the feminine social agitation in The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith; the noble work of such women as Annie Besant, who had worked at Shaw's side for many years, gave the direct lie to Pinero's characterization. “I once pointed out a method of treatment which might have made The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith bearable,” Mr. Shaw recently remarked to me. “Now I am of the opinion that nothing could have made it a good play.” Shaw had a vast contempt for Pinero as a moralist and a social philosopher. “Archer objected to me as a critic,” he once remarked to me, “because I didn't like The Profligate and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.” But Shaw sincerely admired the Pinero of The Benefit of the Doubt and The Hobby Horse, notable as they were for high dramatic pressure or true comedy, close-knit action or genuine literary workmanship, humour, fresh observation, naturalness, and free development of character. Shaw technically defined a “character actor” as a “clever stage performer who cannot act, and therefore makes an elaborate study of the disguises and stage tricks by which acting can be grossly simulated.” And he pronounced Pinero's performance as a thinker and social philosopher to be “simply character acting in the domain of authorship, which can impose only on those who are taken in by character acting on the stage.”
The hypothetical “guillotine functioning in Trafalgar Square,” of which Mr. Archer speaks, Shaw insists was reserved for him, not at all because he did all that he could do “to discredit, crush, and stamp out the new movement,” but because he would not bow to the fetish of Pinero. One of his chief heresies consisted in unhesitatingly classing Henry Arthur Jones as “first, and eminently first, among the surviving fittest of his own generation of playwrights.” Ever on the side of the minority, he regarded Michael and His Lost Angel as “the best play its school has given to the theatre.” While Pinero, in Shaw's eyes, drew his characters from the outside, Jones developed them from within. Shaw recognized in Jones a kindred spirit; both believed that “in all matters of the modern drama, England is no better than a parish, with 'parochial' judgments, 'parochial' instincts, and 'parochial' ways of looking at things.” And Shaw accorded Jones the warmest praise because he was “the only one of our popular dramatists whose sense of the earnestness of real life has been dug deep enough to bring him into conflict with the limitations and levities of our theatre.”
For Grundy's school of dramatic art, Shaw had absolutely no relish. Indeed, he lamented the vogue of the “well-made piece”—those “mechanical rabbits,” as he called them, with wheels for entrails. Henry James's Guy Domville, which he regarded as distinctly du théâtre, won his sincere praise; and the plays of Henley and Stevenson delighted him with their combination of artistic faculty, pleasant boyishness and romantic imagination, and fine qualities of poetic speech, despite the fact that the authors didn't take the stage seriously—“unless it were the stage of pasteboard scenes and characters and tin lamps.” And to Shaw, Oscar Wilde—“almost as acutely Irish an Irishman as the Iron Duke of Wellington”—was, in a certain sense, “our only playwright,” because he “plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre.”
The most serious and the most well-founded charge that can be urged against Shaw as a dramatic critic was his impatience with everybody who would not “come his way.” It was his habit to damn a play which was not written as he himself would have written it. With characteristic iconoclasm, Shaw expressed his regret that Michael and His Lost Angel is a play without a hero—some captain of the soul, resolute in championing his own faith contra mundum. “Let me rewrite the last three acts,” says the diabolonian author of The Devil's Disciple, “and you shall have your Reverend Michael embracing the answer of his own soul, thundering it from the steps of his altar, and marching out through his shocked and shamed parishioners, with colours flying and head erect and unashamed, to the freedom of faith in his own real conscience. Whether he is right or wrong is nothing to me as a dramatist; he must follow his star, right or wrong, if he is to be a hero.”
Again, in the latter part of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Aubrey says to Paula, “I know what you were at Ellean's age. You hadn't a thought that wasn't a wholesome one; you hadn't an impulse that didn't tend towards good.... And this was a very few years back.” Shaw's comment is highly significant of his attitude. “On the reply to that fatuous but not unnatural speech depended the whole question of Mr. Pinero's rank as a dramatist. One can imagine how, in a play by a master-hand, Paula's reply would have opened Tanqueray's foolish eyes to the fact that a woman of that sort is already the same at three as at thirty-three, and that however she may have found by experience that her nature is in conflict with the ideals of differently-constituted people, she remains perfectly valid to herself, and despises herself, if she sincerely does so at all, for the hypocrisy that the world forces on her instead of being what she is.” That “master-hand,” of which Shaw speaks, is now well known to the English public through the instrumentality of the Court, the Savoy and the Repertory Theatres. But at the time of writing this, and many another intolerant criticism, Shaw was violently battering away at the gates of tradition, and, Joshua-like, blowing his horn for the fall of the walls of the Jericho of the English stage. In The Author's Apology to his Dramatic Opinions and Essays, Shaw frankly says:
“I must warn the reader that what he is about to study is not a series of judgments aiming at impartiality, but a siege laid to the theatre of the nineteenth century by an author who had to cut his own way into it at the point of the pen and throw some of its defenders into the moat.
“Pray do not conclude from this that the things hereinafter written were not true, or not the deepest and best things I know how to say. Only, they must be construed in the light of the fact that all through I was accusing my opponents of failure because they were not doing what I wanted, whereas they were often succeeding very brilliantly in doing what they themselves wanted. I postulated as desirable a certain kind of play in which I was destined ten years later to make my mark as a playwright (as I very well foreknew in the depth of my own unconsciousness); and I brought everybody—authors, actors, managers—to the one test: were they coming my way or staying in the old grooves?”
In private, Shaw laughingly declares that the old criticisms of Pinero and Jones were all fudge, that Pinero and Archer were personal friends, and Shaw and Jones personal friends; so that Archer took on the job of cracking up Pinero and Shaw that of cracking up Jones, who were both “doing their blood best” for the drama. Later on the old criticisms proved no bar to the most cordial personal relations between Shaw and Pinero; and the latter's knighthood, unsought and, indeed, undreamt of by himself, was persistently urged on the Prime Minister by Shaw.
Granting all Shaw's unfairness, his confessed partiality and domination by an idée fixe for the English stage, it is nevertheless astounding to read Mr. Archer's declaration that Shaw's “critical campaign, conducted with magnificent energy and intellectual power, was as nearly as possible barren of result.” On the contrary, it has been remarked that Shaw's dramatic criticisms supply one of the most notable examples of cause and effect modern literary history can show. Far from being barren of result, Shaw's assaults produced an effect little short of remarkable. His theories and principles found free expression in the Court Theatre. Indeed, they may be said in large measure to have created it, controlled it, and achieved its success. To Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker belong the credit for giving London, in the Court Theatre, a school of acting and a repertory—or rather, short-run—theatre such as England had never known before.
It would take me too far afield to attempt to do full justice to the variety and multiplicity of Shaw's functions as a critic of the drama, the stage, and the art of acting. The annoying part of his career, as Mr. W. L. Courtney somewhere says, is that he was more often right than wrong—“right in substance, though often wrong in manner, saying true things with the most ludicrous air in the world, as if he were merely enjoying himself at our expense.” He agitated again and again for a subsidized theatre; and fought the censorship with unabating zeal.[130] He championed Ibsen at all times and in all places, realizing full well, as in the days of his musical criticism, that Sir Augustus Harris's prejudices against Wagner were no whit greater than Sir Henry Irving's prejudices against Ibsen. While he classed Irving as “our ablest exponent of acting as a fine art and serious profession,” he considered all Irving's creations to be creations of his own temperament. Shaw took Irving sternly to task for his mutilations of Shakespeare and his inalienable hostility to Ibsen and the modern school. On the day of Irving's death, Shaw wrote: “He did nothing for the drama of the present, and he mutilated the remains of the dying Shakespeare; but he carried his lifelong fight into victory, and saw the actor recognized as the prince of all other artists is recognized; and that was enough in the life of a single man. Requiescat in pace.”[131] Shaw held Irving responsible for the remorseless waste of the modernity and originality of Ellen Terry's art upon the old drama, despite the fact that she succeeded in climbing to its highest summit. Shaw found consolation in the reflection that “if it was denied Ellen Terry to work with Ibsen to interpret the indignation of a Nora Helmer, it was her happy privilege to work with Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema.”[132] It was only after Irving's death, and after Ellen Terry had reached the age of fifty-eight, that she at last interpreted the Lady Cicely Waynflete of Shaw's own Captain Brassbound's Conversion.
After ten years of continuous criticism of the arts of music and the drama, Shaw gave up, exhausted.[133] The last critical continent was conquered. “The strange Jabberwocky Oracle whom men call Shaw,” began to attain to the eminence of the “interview” and the “celebrity at home” column. In his first feuilleton, Max Beerbohm, Shaw's successor on the Saturday Review, said of him: “With all his faults—grave though they are and not to be counted on the fingers of one hand—he is, I think, by far the most brilliant and remarkable journalist in London.” Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, then just published, were creating unusual interest. Shaw was doubtless influenced thereby to devote himself, as artist, exclusively to the writing of plays. In order to make as much as the stage royalties from The Devil's Disciple alone, for example, he would, as he said, have had “to write his heart out for six years in the Saturday.” The superhuman profession of journalism began to pall upon him: excellence in it he regarded as quite beyond mortal strength and endurance. “I took extraordinary pains—all the pains I was capable of—to get to the bottom of everything I wrote about.... Ten years of such work, at the rate of two thousand words a week or thereabouts—say, roughly, a million words—all genuine journalism, dependent on the context of the week's history for its effect, was an apprenticeship which made me master of my own style.” Shaw's income as a journalist began in 1885 at one hundred and seventeen pounds and threepence; and it ended at five hundred pounds. By this time he had reached the age at which one discovers that “journalism is a young man's standby, not an old man's livelihood.” Shaw had said all that he had to say of Irving and Tree; and concerning Shakespeare he boasted: “When I began to write, William was a divinity and a bore. Now he is a fellow-creature.” But, above all, he had gloriously succeeded in the creation of that most successful of all his fictions—G. B. S. “For ten years past, with an unprecedented pertinacity and obstination, I have been dinning into the public head that I am an extraordinarily witty, brilliant, and clever man. That is now part of the public opinion of England; and no power in heaven or on earth will ever change it. I may dodder and dote; I may pot-boil and platitudinize; I may become the butt and chopping-block of all the bright, original spirits of the rising generation; but my reputation shall not suffer: it is built up fast and solid, like Shakespeare's, on an impregnable basis of dogmatic reiteration.”
FOOTNOTES:
[119] Shakespeare's 'Merry Gentlemen,' in the Saturday Review, February 26th, 1898.
[120] Concerning Shaw's general attitude towards Shakespeare, compare the Letter from Mr. G. Bernard Shaw appended to Tolstoy on Shakespeare. Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1906.
[121] Blaming the Bard, in the Saturday Review, September 26th, 1896.
[122] As Mr. Will Irwin has it in his Crankidoxology: Being a Mental Attitude from Bernard Pshaw:
I'm bored by mere Shakespere and Milton,
Tho' Hubbard compels me to rave;
If I should lay laurels to wilt on
That foggy Shakesperean grave,
How William would squirm in his grave!
[123] One day at a reception at the Playgoers' Club, in London, Mr. Osmon Edwards delivered an address on “The superiority of Shaw to Shakespeare.” He showed that Shakespeare was a bad dramatist, because he was a great poet; he asserted that his humour was vulgar and his tragedy puerile; and he endeavoured to prove that Shaw was far superior to Shakespeare in his realism, in his critical sense of life, in the depth of his thought, in his stage technique.
At this point, Shaw himself, who was among the audience, rose to his feet and begged to say a few words in favour of his famous rival. What a delicious situation—and one not unworthy of Bernard Shaw!
Compare The English Stage of To-Day, by Mario Borsa, pp. 152-3. John Lane, London and New York, 1908.
[124] Cf. preface to The Quintessence of Ibsenism for its history and the causes which led to its publication. In July, 1890, Mr. Shaw read his Quintessence of Ibsenism in its original form, a study of the socialistic aspect of Ibsen's writings, before the Fabian Society. It is interesting to record what appears to be a reference to this lecture, made by Henrik Ibsen. In a letter to Hans Lien Braekstad (Letters of Henrik Ibsen, translated by John Nilsen Laurvik and Mary Morison, pp. 430-1), a Norwegian-English man of letters (since 1887 resident in London), who has done much for the spread of Norwegian and Danish literature in England, Ibsen wrote from Munich, August, 1890, referring to a garbled report of a newspaper interview with him:
“What I really said was that I was surprised that I, who had made it my chief life-task to depict human character and human doctrines, should, without conscious or direct intention, have arrived in several matters at the same conclusions as the social-democratic philosophers had arrived at by scientific processes.
“What led me to express this surprise (and, I may here add, satisfaction), was a statement made by the correspondent to the effect that one or more lectures had lately been given in London, dealing, according to him, chiefly with A Doll's House.”
The latter statement appears to be in error; although the correspondent may possibly have had in mind some lectures, delivered by Eleanor Marx, I believe, on A Doll's House.
[125] This seems to me a very superficial judgment, and one which Shaw himself would doubtless repudiate to-day. How thoroughly inappropriate and erroneous is the use of the word “happiness” in this connection!
[126] The Author's Apology—preface to the first English edition of Dramatic Opinions and Essays, by Bernard Shaw.
[127] Le Temps, August 28th, 1905.
[128] Meredith on Comedy, in the Saturday Review, March 27th, 1897.
[129] Playhouse Impressions, article The Dramatic Critic as Pariah, pp. 5-6.
[130] Compare, for example, his ablest and most exhaustive essays on the subject: The Author's Apology to the Stage Society edition of Mrs. Warren's Profession; Censorship of the Stage in England, in the North American Review, Vol. CLXIX., pages 251 et seq.; The Solution of the Censorship Problem, in the Academy, June 29th, 1907; The Censorship of Plays, in the Nation (London), November 16th, 1907.
[131] Owing partially to mistakes in re-translation into English, partially to certain statements made therein, Shaw's article in the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna (Feuilleton: Sir Henry Irving, von Bernhard Shaw, October 20th, 1905, written shortly after Irving's death) aroused a heated discussion and controversy, which raged even in America until the Boston Transcript let the disputants down heavily by reprinting the article, which was found to be quite reasonable and absolutely void of the innuendo of which Shaw was accused, namely, that Irving had played the sycophant to obtain a knighthood. It is noteworthy that certain matters as to which Shaw was erroneously supposed to have misrepresented Irving, were solemnly and publicly denied in letters to the Times, yet when the time came for biographies of Irving to appear, they contained ample proof that Shaw might have made all the denied allegations had he chosen to do so. For the facts in the case, compare the essay in the Neue Freie Presse with the true text of the essay, in the original English, with Shaw's own notes, in the Morning Post, London, December 5th, 1905.
[132] Shaw's fine essay on the art of Ellen Terry also appeared in the Neue Freie Presse late in 1905. For the English version of the article, cf. the Boston Transcript, January 20th, 1906.
[133] His Valedictory appeared in the Saturday Review, May 21st, 1898.
THE PLAYWRIGHT—I
“In all my plays my economic studies have played as important a part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the works of Michelangelo.”—Letter to the author, of date June 30th, 1904.
“Plays which, dealing less with the crimes of society, and more with its romantic follies, and with the struggles of individuals against those follies, may be called, by contrast, Pleasant.”--Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. I., Preface.