George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

by Archibald Henderson

CHAPTER VII

Shaw's career as a critic dates from the period of his first acquaintance with Mr. William Archer, in 1885. After living for nine years, according to his own story, on the six pounds of which he is so fond of speaking, Shaw was at last reduced to quite straitened financial circumstances. He eagerly seized the opportunity to become a critic afforded him by Mr. Archer's ingenious kindness. “Our friend, William Archer,” Shaw relates, “troubled by this state of things, to which the condition of my wardrobe bore convincing testimony, rescued me by a stratagem. Being already famous as the 'W. A.' of the World's drama, he boldly offered to criticize pictures as well. Edmund Yates was only too glad to get so excellent a critic. Archer got me to do the work, resigned the post as soon as I had got firm hold of it, and left me in possession.” The years from 1885 to 1889, during which he lived at 29, Fitzroy Square, Shaw devoted in part to criticism of art, contemporary English art in particular; during this period, he once told me, he criticized every picture show in London. He also published many unsigned literary reviews and sallies in the Pall Mall Gazette; whilst a number of his criticisms of pictures appeared in unsigned paragraphs, both in the World, 1885 to 1888, and in Truth, 1889. A few of his critiques also appeared in a magazine called Our Corner.

Shaw's Second Home in London.

Alvin Langdon Coburn. Fitzroy Square (No. 29)

I recently read Shaw's critical reviews of this period, especially the complete file of his articles in the Pall Mall Gazette from May 16th, 1885, to August 31st, 1888, placed at my disposal by Mr. Shaw. The articles are pertinent and shrewd, but only comparatively few are marked by that peculiar and fantastic humour which has come to be known as Shavian. They embrace every sort of subject from Ouida's novels to the Life of Madame Blavatsky, from Grant Allen to W. Stanley Jevons, from Cairo to the Surrey Hills—art, fiction, music, drama, science, theology. Occasionally Shaw took delight in adding to the gaiety and curiosity of his readers by putting forth some Shavian frivolity, under an assumed name. Such, for example, was his letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on The Taming of the Shrew, dated June 8th, 1888, the earliest instance I have of his so-called “Shakspearean Bull-baiting”—a letter copied innumerable times and in almost every paper in the United Kingdom. It ran as follows:

“To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

“Sir,—They say that the American woman is the most advanced woman to be found at present on this planet. I am an Englishwoman, just come up, frivolously enough, from Devon to enjoy a few weeks of the season in London, and at the very first theatre I visit I find an American woman playing Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew—a piece which is one vile insult to womanhood and manhood from the first word to the last. I think no woman should enter a theatre where that play is performed; and I should not have stayed to witness it myself, but that, having been told that the Daly Company has restored Shakspeare's version to the stage, I desired to see with my own eyes whether any civilized audience would stand its brutality. Of course, it was not Shakspeare: it was only Garrick adulterated by Shakspeare. Instead of Shakspeare's coarse, thick-skinned money hunter, who sets to work to tame his wife exactly as brutal people tame animals or children—that is, by breaking their spirit by domineering cruelty—we had Garrick's fop who tries to 'shut up' his wife by behaving worse than she—a plan which is often tried by foolish and ill-mannered young husbands in real life, and one which invariably fails ignominiously, as it deserves to. The gentleman who plays Petruchio at Daly's—I neither know nor desire to know his name—does what he can to persuade the audience that he is not in earnest, and that the whole play is a farce, just as Garrick before him found it necessary to do; but in spite of his fine clothes, even at the wedding, and his winks and smirks when Katharine is not looking, he cannot make the spectacle of a man cracking a heavy whip at a starving woman otherwise than disgusting and unmanly. In an age when a woman was a mere chattel, Katharine's degrading speech about

“'Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign: one that cares for thee (with a whip),
And for thy maintainance; commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land,' etc.

might have passed with an audience of bullies. But imagine a parcel of gentlemen in the stalls at the Gaiety Theatre, half of them perhaps living idly on their wives' incomes, grinning complacently through it as if it were true or even honourably romantic. I am sorry that I did not come to town earlier that I might have made a more timely protest. In the future I hope all men and women who respect one another will boycott The Taming of the Shrew until it is driven off the boards.

“Yours truly,
“Horatia Ribbonson.

“St. James's Hotel, and Fairheugh Rectory, North Devon, June 7th.”

In his capacity as art critic, when time was priceless and hundreds of pictures had to be examined critically, Shaw found his knowledge of phonography invaluable. I recently looked over a collection of his art catalogues during a single year, and his phonographic notes give a miniature forecast of the art criticism he is presently to write. Beside the titles of certain pictures often appears a single adjective: “gaudy,” “brilliant,” “stupid,” and the like; beside others, “Wilkie,” “Reynolds,” and the names of other artists, indicating his detection of resemblance to or imitation of the works of the masters. Beside the mention of a “Lighthouse” picture is pencilled the explanatory note, a mixture of praise and blame: “Too green. Has a lamp lighted. Good subject.” One recognizes the Shavian timbre in such laconic notes as “Fluffy style”; “What does he mean?” “Very dreadful!” and “Same old game.” And we feel sure that Shaw will “gore and trample” the unfortunate wretches who called forth the damning comments—“wheels awful,” “idiotic,” and “green blush and pasty face.”

During these years, however, from 1885 to 1888 in especial, Socialism was the living centre of all Shaw's interests. His time was principally devoted to the most active form of Socialist propagandism. The literary articles of this period do not possess the piquant interest of the “C. di B.” or the “G. B. S.” criticisms, which are quite remarkable for epigram, satire, and paradox. Most of them are almost unintelligible now that they can no longer be read with the context of the events of the week in which they appeared. Shaw has always been a leader of forlorn hopes; at this time, willy-nilly, he was on the side of the majority. I remember one day quoting Clarence Rook's remark to the effect that Shaw is like the kite, and can rise only when the popularis aura is against him. “No, that is a radical mistake,” Mr. Shaw said forcibly. “I have never worked with the sense that everybody is against me. On the contrary, my inspiration springs from a sense of sympathy with my views.” Still, one might say that it has always been as a defiant and vexatious personality that Shaw has best succeeded in arousing and challenging clamorous protest. Hermann Bahr insists that Bernard Shaw possesses in rich measure the remarkable and exceptional talent of the great artist-critic: the ability to arouse the whole state, the whole nation, against him. Not only was that opposition, which is the very breath of his nostrils, non-existent: there was no great battle on in the world of art in London comparable to those that were yet to be waged. It is true that the Impressionist movement was struggling for life in London, and while Shaw defended it vigorously, neither its day nor his day was yet come. As an almost totally unknown, comparatively unskilled critic of literature and art, he could scarcely be expected to create the unparalleled sensations which he subsequently achieved as a Shakespearean image-breaker, a champion of Wagner and Ibsen, and the most radical exponent of the newest forms of the New Drama.

And yet it was during these very years that he developed those remarkable qualities which have won him the title of the most brilliant of contemporary British journalistic critics. On all sides the younger generation, which included Mr. Shaw as one of its most daring and iconoclastic members, rose up in revolt against academicism in style. The New Journalism came into being. “Lawless young men,” says Shaw, “began to write and print the living English language of their own day instead of the prose style of one of Macaulay's characters named Addison. They split their infinitives and wrote such phrases as 'a man nobody ever heard of,' instead of, 'a man of whom nobody had ever heard'; or, more classical still, 'a writer hitherto unknown.' Musical critics, instead of reading books about their business and elegantly regurgitating their erudition, began to listen to music and to distinguish between sounds; critics of painting began to look at pictures; critics of the drama began to look at something besides the stage; and descriptive writers actually broke into the House of Commons, elbowing the reporters into the background, and writing about political leaders as if they were mere play-actors. The interview, the illustration, and the cross-heading hitherto looked on as American vulgarities impossible to English literary gentlemen, invaded all our papers; and, finally, as the climax and masterpiece of literary Jacobinism, the Saturday Review appeared with a signed article in it. Then Mr. Traill and all his generation covered their faces with their togas and died at the base of Addison's statue, which all the while ran ink.” “Don't misunderstand my position,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me. “It is true that I was opposed to academicism in style, not to style itself. I believe in style. I thought that the academicism we had was not good academicism. I was pedantic enough myself when I first began to write—when I wrote my first novel. Afterwards I came to the conclusion that a phrase meant much only after it had been washed into shape in the mouths of dozens of generations. The fact of the matter is that I am extremely sensitive to the form of art.” Shaw simply repudiated the classical tradition of writing like “a scholar and a gentleman.” As far as his scholarship was concerned, he took the greatest pains to dissemble the little he possessed. Moreover, he doubted if it had ever been worth while being a “gentleman,” and used every means in his power to discredit this antiquated survival of the age of sentimentalism. He always aimed at accuracy, but scoffed consumedly at the notion of achieving “justice” in criticism. “I am not God Almighty,” he said in effect, “and nobody but a fool could expect justice from me, or any other superhuman attribute.” He wrote boldly according to his bent; he said only what he wanted to say, and not what he thought he ought to say, or what was right, or what was just. To Shaw, this affected, manufactured, artificial conscience of morality and justice was of no use in the writing of genuine criticism, or in the making of true works of art. For that, he felt that one must have the real conscience that gives a man courage to fulfil his will by saying what he likes. An epigram I once heard him make: “Accuracy only means discovering the relation of your will to facts instead of cooking the facts to save trouble”—is a note of his entire criticism. Shaw sought simply to write as accurately, as frankly, as vividly, and as lightly as possible. He hesitated neither at violating taste, nor at being vexatious, even positively disagreeable. “If I meet an American tourist who is greatly impressed with the works of Raphael, Kaulbach, Delaroche and Barry,” he once said, “and I, with Titian and Velásquez in my mind, tell him that not one of his four heroes was a real painter, I am no doubt putting my case absurdly; but I am not talking nonsense, for all that: indeed, to the adept seer of pictures I am only formulating a commonplace in an irritatingly ill-considered way. But in this world if you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as well not say it at all, since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them.”

Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the great English Socialist, once told me that he was really the first person in England to discover Shaw. “In 1883,” he explained, “I wrote a letter of recommendation for Shaw to Frederick Greenwood, at that time editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. The letter led to nothing, it is true; but that is not material. The point is, that in that letter I compared Shaw to Heine—a comparison for which I have been unmercifully chaffed many times since. Of course, Shaw does not possess Heine's wonderful gift of lyrism; but as iconoclastic critics, they have many qualities in common. In his power to turn up for our inspection the seamy side of the robe of modern life, and make us recoil at the sight, Bernard Shaw is without a peer.

“I have always been inclined to class Bernard Shaw and my dear friend George Meredith together. In enigmatic character and faculty of mystification as to their real opinion, they are remarkably alike.”

Of Shaw, in all his criticism, might be quoted his own words descriptive of George Henry Lewes as a critic of the drama: “He expressed his most laboured criticisms with a levity which gave them the air of being the unpremeditated whimsicalities of a man who had perversely taken to writing about the theatre for the sake of the jest latent in his own outrageous unfitness for it.”

If the world is convinced that Shaw is only a gay deceiver, he himself has felt from the very beginning that the rôle he plays is that of the candid friend of society. “Waggery as a medium is invaluable,” he once explained. “My case is really the case of Rabelais over again. When I first began to promulgate my opinions, I found that they appeared extravagant, and even insane. In order to get a hearing, it was necessary for me to attain the footing of a privileged lunatic, with the licence of a jester. Fortunately the matter was very easy. I found that I had only to say with perfect simplicity what I seriously meant just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh. My method, you will have noticed, is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity. And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest.” It is Shaw's supreme distinction that he refuses to view life through the confining, beclouding medium of convention. His primal claim to serious attention is based upon the assertion of his freedom from illusion. If he appears grotesque and eccentric, it is not so much because he expresses himself grotesquely and eccentrically: it is primarily because he scrutinizes life with a more aquiline eyesight than that of the illuded majority. His levity has saved him from martyrdom; for, although it is a very difficult thing to speak disagreeable truths, it is a still more difficult thing to listen to them. Recall the treatment the British public gave to George Moore for his advocacy of realism, to Vizetelly for his championing of Zola, even to Shaw himself for his defence of Ibsen! Shaw has based all his brilliancy and solidity, Mr. Chesterton acutely observes, upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction. And Shaw himself has cleverly put the case in his own paradoxical way. “There is an indescribable levity—not triviality mind, but levity—something spritelike about the final truth of a matter; and this exquisite levity communicates itself to the style of a writer who will face the labour of digging down to it. It is the half-truth which is congruous, heavy, serious, and suggestive of a middle-aged or elderly philosopher. The whole truth is often the first thing that comes into the head of a fool or a child; and when a wise man forces his way to it through the many strata of his sophistications, its wanton, perverse air reassures him instead of frightening him.”[93]

This spritelike quality, this indescribable levity inherent in the final truth of a matter, has communicated itself to Shaw's style in the most intimate way. With the not unnatural result that it is difficult for the average man to believe that opinions advanced with such light-hearted levity carry any of the weight of final truth. It is for this reason that all of Shaw's attempts to write genuine autobiography have been greeted with the most amiable scepticism. Shaw himself is able to speak with more confidence on the folly of writing scientific natural history, because he has tried the experiment, within certain timid limits, of being candidly autobiographical.

“I have produced no permanent impression,” he declares, “because nobody has ever believed me. I once told a brilliant London journalist[94] some facts about my family, running to forty-first cousins and to innumerable seconds and thirds. Like most large families, it did not consist exclusively of teetotallers, nor did all its members remain until death up to the very moderate legal standard of sanity. One of them discovered an absolutely original method of committing suicide. It was simple to the verge of triteness, yet no human being had ever thought of it before. It was also amusing. But in the act of carrying it out, my relative jammed the mechanism of his heart—possibly in the paroxysm of laughter which the mere narration of his suicidal method has never since failed to provoke—and if I may be allowed to state the result in my Irish way, he died a second before he succeeded in killing himself. The coroner's jury found that he died 'from natural causes'; and the secret of the suicide was kept not only from the public, but from most of the family.

“I revealed the secret in private conversation to the brilliant journalist aforesaid. He shrieked with laughter and printed the whole story in his next causerie. It never for a moment occurred to him that it was true. To this day he regards me as the most reckless liar in London.”

Had Shaw ever attempted to write the Rougon-Macquart history of his family in twenty volumes, along the candid lines of the above narrative, it is not improbable that he would thereafter have been permanently and forcibly deprived of his privileges as a lunatic. “I have not yet ascertained the truth about myself,” he wrote some years ago. “For instance, am I mad or sane? I really do not know. Doubtless, I am clever in certain directions; my talent has enabled me to cut a figure in my profession in London. But a man may, like Don Quixote, be clever enough to cut a figure and yet be stark mad. A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid. I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat. In the late war, the Americans burnt the Spanish fleet, and finally had to drag men out of hulls that had become furnaces. The effect of this on one of the American commanders was to make him assemble his men and tell them that he believed in God Almighty. No lion would have done that. On reading it and observing that the newspapers, representing normal public opinion, seemed to consider it a very creditable, natural and impressively pious incident, I came to the conclusion that I must be mad. At all events, if I am sane, the rest of the world ought not to be at large. We cannot both see things as they really are.”

It was at a somewhat later time that the critics came to treat Shaw as a reckless liar and a privileged lunatic. At this period, he impressed the self-conscious literary clique as a witty, but frivolous, ignoramus, totally incompetent to discuss the high subjects of which he professed such penetrating comprehension. I once had an interesting discussion with Mr. Shaw about the subject of his flippancy. “Do you accept as just the criticism, made in some quarters,” I asked Mr. Shaw, “that you and Whistler were very much alike in your attitude towards the general public?”

“Not at all, that is a crude error,” replied Mr. Shaw earnestly. “Whistler came to grief because he gave himself up to clever smartness, which is abhorrent to the average Englishman. As for me, I have never for a moment lost sight of my serious relation to a serious public. You see, I had an advantage over Whistler in any case, for at least three times every week I could escape from artistic and literary stuff, and talk seriously on serious subjects to serious people. For this reason—because I persisted in Socialist propagandism—I never once lost touch with the real world.”

Shaw's critiques, sallies, and reviews were the combination of a laborious criticism with a recklessly flippant manner. Into literature he carried the methods he adopted on the platform, where he tossed off the most diligently acquired, studiously pondered information with all the insouciance of omniscience. As a critic, Shaw has ever laboured for the scanty wages of the “intolerable fatigue of thought.” In characteristic style, he has gone so far as to declare that good journalism is much rarer and more important than good literature; he has no sympathy with Disraeli's view of a critic as an author who has failed. “I know as one who has practised both crafts,” wrote Shaw in 1892, “that authorship is child's play compared to criticism; and I have, you may depend upon it, my full share of the professional instinct which regards the romancer as a mere adventurer in literature and the critic as a highly skilled workman. Ask any novelist or dramatist whether he can write a better novel or play than I; and he will blithely say 'Yes.' Ask him to take my place as critic for one week; and he will blench from the test. The truth is that the critic stands between popular authorship, for which he is not silly enough, and great authorship, for which he is not genius enough.”[95]

While Mr. Shaw was laboriously striving to impart lightness and insouciance to his literary style, and to acquire careless sang-froid as a platform speaker, he was likewise making the acquaintance of certain distinguished men of his day. His relation and association with William Morris, for example, exercised no noteworthy influence upon his art; but it certainly did no less than accentuate certain distinct traits of his character. Unmistakably, in this way, does this association serve to give us a clearer insight into the rationale of Shaw's—popularly-called—idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, it furnishes us a new aspect of Morris from the Shavian point of view.

Readers of the authorized edition of Cashel Byron's Profession will recall that William Morris, who, like Shaw, had thrown himself into the Socialist revival of the early eighties, first became curious about Shaw through reading the monthly instalments of An Unsocial Socialist as they appeared in the Socialist magazine To-Day. Shaw had heard of Morris, to be sure; and had even, years before, once seen him—of all places in the world!—in the Doré Gallery. Yet his notions about Morris were, in reality, of the vaguest. He knew nothing beyond the meagre facts that he was a poet, that he belonged to the Rossetti circle, and that he was associated with Burne-Jones and with what was then called Æstheticism. He had never read a line of Morris's, and, in fact, had taken no definite measure of his calibre. This was the situation when Shaw found himself one evening in Gatti's big restaurant in the Strand at the table with Morris and H. M. Hyndman. Morris belonged to Mr. Hyndman's society, the Democratic Federation, now the Social-Democratic Federation, while Mr. Hyndman himself was the head centre of London Socialism. With naïve simplicity, Morris humbly announced that he was prepared to do whatever he was told and go wherever he was led: that was all he could say. In a letter to me describing the interview, written many years afterwards, Mr. Shaw said that, while it was only snap-judgment—a personal impression across the table—he could not help being “privately tickled by this announcement from an obviously ungovernable man who was too big to be led by any of us.”

In ignorance concerning Morris, Shaw was not alone: the other Socialists were in precisely the same predicament. Morris himself said afterwards that it was among his Socialist confrères that he first realized he was an elderly duffer. His old Rossettian associates used to call him Topsy; but, as readers of Lady Burne-Jones's Memorials will recall, Burne-Jones used to be angry when she applied this embarrassing nickname to Morris before strangers. If Morris was affectionately regarded as a young man by his associates of the “P. R. B.,” to his Socialist allies he looked older than he was—sixty at fifty, though a magnificent sixty—a sort of “sixty-years-young” patriarch. Morris and Shaw, after they settled down to the routine of Socialist agitation, were at the opposite poles of the movement. Shaw headed the Fabian Society, while Morris, after his secession from the S. D. F., organized the Socialist League, which shortly went to pieces—because, as Shaw says, there was only one William Morris; he was afterwards the leading spirit in the Hammersmith Socialist Society. Despite this fundamental difference in view-point—for Morris's fundamental conceptions were “Equality, Communism, and the rediscovery under Communism of Art as 'work-pleasure,'” whereas Shaw, as a Fabian, aimed simply at the reduction of Socialism to a constitutional political policy—there was never any personal friction between the two. Indeed, they did a great deal of speaking together in the early days, most of it at the street corner, and often thought themselves lucky if they had an audience of twenty. In after years, we find Morris with the broadest of views endeavouring to settle the differences which arose between the various Socialist sects. By 1893, when he gave his well-known address entitled Communism before the Hammersmith Socialist Society, Morris had acquired an intimate knowledge of the attempt to organize Socialism in England which began in the early eighties. “He had himself undertaken and conducted,” writes Shaw, “that part of the experiment which nobody else would face: namely, the discovery and combination, without distinction of class, of all those who were capable of understanding Equality and Communism as he understood it, and their organization as an effective force for the overthrow of the existing order of property and privilege. In doing so he had been brought into contact, and often into conflict, with every other section of the movement. He knew all his men and knew all their methods. He knew that the agitation was exhausted, and that the time had come to deal with the new policy which the agitation had shaken into existence. Accordingly, we find him in this (the above-mentioned) paper, doing what he could to economize the strength of the movement by making peace between its jarring sections, and recalling them from their disputes over tactics and programs to the essentials of their cause.”[96]

None of Morris' Socialist associates were in the least degree hero-worshippers, at least where he was concerned: they never bothered at all about his eminence. “I was not myself conscious of the impression he had made on me,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, in explaining his feeling for Morris, “until one evening, at a debating society organized by Stopford Brooke, when Morris, in a speech on Socialism in the course of a debate, astonished me by saying that he left the economics to me—'in that respect I regard Shaw as my master.' The phrase meant only that he left that side of the case to me, as he always did when we campaigned together, but though I knew this, still it gave me a shock which made me aware that I had unconsciously rated him so highly that his compliment gave me a sort of revulsion.” It was genuine modesty which once prompted Shaw to say that he never liked to call himself Morris's friend, because he was too much his junior and too little necessary or serviceable to him in his private affairs. And yet he enjoyed an unstinted and unreserved intercourse with Morris: one of Shaw's best-known Fabian tracts, The Transition to Social Democracy, for example, was written at Morris's mediæval manor-house, Lechlade, on the Thames, and was heartily approved on its historical side by that erudite student of the Middle Ages. Shaw once said that no man was more liberal in his attempts to improve Morris's mind than he was; “but I always found that, in so far as I was not making a most horrible idiot of myself out of misknowledge (I could forgive myself for pure ignorance), he could afford to listen to me with the patience of a man who had taught my teachers. There were people whom we tried to run him down with—Tennysons, Swinburnes, and so on; but their opinions about things did not make any difference, Morris's did.”[97]

Morris greatly enjoyed a number of Shaw's essays, for the prime reason that in those essays Shaw said certain things which Morris wanted to have said. After Shaw's celebrated reply to Max Nordau, Morris suddenly began to talk to Shaw about Whistler and the Impressionists in a way which showed that he knew all about them and what they were driving at, though before that Shaw had given Morris up as—on that subject—an intolerant and ignorant veteran of the pre-Raphaelite movement. That this was highly characteristic of Morris from Shaw's standpoint is evidenced by some paragraphs in Shaw's obituary notice of Morris in the Saturday Review. “When an enthusiast for some fashionable movement or reaction in art would force it into the conversation, he (Morris) would often behave so as to convey an impression of invincible prejudice and intolerant ignorance, and so get rid of it. But later on, he would let slip something that showed, in a flash, that he had taken in the whole movement at its very first demonstration, and had neither prejudices nor illusions about it. When you knew the subject yourself, and could see beyond it and around it, putting it in its proper place and accepting its limits, he could talk fast enough about it; but it did not amuse him to allow novices to break a lance with him, because he had no special facility for brilliant critical demonstration, and required too much patience for his work to waste any of it on idle discussions. Consequently there was a certain intellectual roguery about him of which his intimate friends were very well aware; so that if a subject were thrust on him, the aggressor was sure to be ridiculously taken in if he did not calculate on Morris's knowing much more about it than he pretended.” He thus often presented himself as imperious and prejudiced, because up to a certain point he would neither agree nor discuss, simply giving you up as walking in darkness. But the moment you had worked your way through the subject and come out on the other side, as Shaw expressed it, Morris would suddenly begin to talk like an expert and show all sorts of knowledge—scientific, political, commercial, intellectual-as-opposed-to-artistic, and so on—that you never suspected him of. “He was fond of quoting Robert Owen's rule: 'Don't argue: repeat your assertion,'” Mr. Shaw recently told me; “and mere debating, which he knew to be an intellectual game and not an essential part of the Will-to-Socialism (so to speak), did not interest him enough to make him good at it. But he highly enjoyed hearing anyone else do it cleverly on his side, and was furious when it was done on the other side. In point of command of modern critical language, he was by no means a ready man; and as I was in great practice just then, he would take a prompt from me (if it was the right one) with as much relief and simplicity as if I had found his spectacles for him.”

Shaw once said that, as far as he was aware, he shared with Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the distinction of being the only modern dramatist, except the author of Charley's Aunt, which bored Morris, whose plays were witnessed by Morris. Shaw did not pretend to claim Morris's visits as a spontaneous act of homage to modern acting and the modern drama, but only as a tribute of personal friendship; for Morris was a “twelfth-twentieth-century artist,” exclusively preoccupied with a vision of beauty unrealized upon the modern stage. In a passage in a letter to me, Mr. Shaw has tersely etched the firm figure of the artist and the man, who could not be induced “to accept ugliness as art, no matter how brilliant, how fashionable, how sentimental, or intellectually interesting you might make it.”

“Morris's artistic integrity was, humanly speaking, perfect. You could not turn him aside from the question of the beauty and the decency of a thing by bringing up its interest, scientific, casuistic, novel, curious, historical, or what not. That was most extraordinary in so clever a man; for he was capable of all the interests. Compared to him Ruskin was not an artist at all: he was only a man whose interest in Nature led him to study Turner, and whose insight into religion gave him a clue to the art of the really religious painters. He would not give twopence for a rarity or a curiosity or a relic; but when he saw a sanely beautiful thing, and it was for sale, he went into the shop; seized it, held it tight under his arm (it was generally a mediæval book); and, after the feeblest and most transparent show of bargaining, bought it for whatever was asked. Once, when he was rebuked for paying eight hundred pounds for something that a dealer would have got for four hundred and fifty pounds, I said, 'If you want a thing, you always get the worst of the bargain.' Morris was delighted with my wisdom, and probably spent many unnecessary pounds on the strength of that poor excuse.

“This artistic integrity of his was what made him unintelligible to the Philistine public. When the Americans set to work to imitate his printing, they showed that they regarded him as a fashionably quaint and foolish person; and the Roycroft Shop and all the rest of the culture-curiosity shops of the States poured forth abominations which missed every one of his lessons and exaggerated every one of the practices he tried to cure printers of. In the same way his houses at Hammersmith and Kelmscott were, though quite homely, as beautiful in their domestic way as St. Sophia's in Stamboul; but other people's 'Morris houses' always went wrong, even when he started them right.”

William Morris.

Photo by Elliot & Fry
Baker Street, London.

One day Mr. Shaw and I were discussing Morris and the influence he exerted upon Shaw. “What Morris taught me,” confessed Mr. Shaw, “was in the main technical—printing, for example.[98] And I soon came to realize that his most characteristic trait was integrity in the artistic sense. By watching Morris, I first learned that Ruskin wasn't strong as a critic of works of art. In a sense, Ruskin was a naturalist because he understood Turner. And the key to his comprehension of the pre-Raphaelites was his religious sense. And yet he could not discover so glaring an error as Bernardino Luini's employment of the same model for the Virgin and the Magdalen. The trouble with Ruskin was that he invariably fell into egregious blunders when he didn't have his religious clue.”

“I learned a great deal from Morris,” he added, “because Morris and I worked together in Socialism—and, as a critic, I was intensely interested in the pre-Raphaelite movement.”

It was always a source of regret to Shaw that he never met Burne-Jones, Morris's greatest friend. When Morris died, Shaw wrote obituary articles in the Daily Chronicle and in the Saturday Review; and when McKail's Life of Morris appeared, he reviewed it in the Daily Chronicle. Burne-Jones was pleased by the Saturday Review article, and wanted to meet Shaw. They made appointment after appointment; but something always occurred—an illness, a journey, or the like—to defeat them. At last they resolved that the meeting must come off; and a firm arrangement was made—for a Sunday lunch, it seems—to be kept at all hazards. But Destiny had a card up its sleeve that they did not reckon with. Burne-Jones died the day before; so Shaw never met him as an acquaintance, and only saw him twice, once at an exhibition where he heard him say that a picture attributed to Morris had been partly painted by Madox Brown, and once at a theatre, where their seats happened to be next one another.

When Shaw became a critic of music in 1888, he began to consider whether he was making enough money by the very hard work of plodding through all the picture exhibitions. At last he counted his gains, and found, to his amazement, that his remuneration for paragraphs at fivepence per line, worked out at—according to his recollection afterwards—less than forty pounds a year; whereas two hundred pounds would not have been at all excessive for the work. “Edmund Yates, when I resigned and told him why,” Mr. Shaw once told me, “was as much staggered as I was myself, and proposed a much more lucrative arrangement by which I should divide the work with Lady Colin Campbell. But the division would not have been fair to her; and Yates, recognizing this, did what I asked, which was, to hand the whole department over to Lady Colin, and confine my contributions to music alone.”

The period of Shaw's activities as an art critic is memorable less for the quality and value of his criticism than for the revelation of the essential moral integrity of the man so often denounced as the cranky immoralist of this, our time. This, as we shall see, appears most clearly in his relations with W. E. Henley, the story of which, I believe, has never been told in print; yet other crucial instances, equally revelative, are worthy of record. Shaw's experience amply justifies his statement that the public has hardly any suspicion of the rarity of the able editor who is loyal to his profession and to his staff; and that without such an editor even moderately honest criticism is impossible. Take, for example, the case of Shaw and a London paper. Shaw wrote about pictures for the best part of a season until a naïve proposal was made to him that he should oblige certain artist-friends of the editorium by favourable notices, and was assured that he might oblige any friends of his own in the same way. “This proposal was made in perfect good faith and in all innocence,” Shaw candidly avers, “it never having occurred to those responsible that art criticism was a serious pursuit or that any question of morals or conduct could possibly arise over it. Of course I resigned with some vigour, though without any ill humour; but some I know were quite sincerely, pathetically hurt by my eccentric, unfriendly and disobliging conduct.” During his career as a critic Shaw was repeatedly urged by colleagues to call attention to some abuse which they themselves were not sufficiently strongly situated to mention. He had to resign very desirable positions on the critical staff of London papers; in the case above mentioned, because he considered it derogatory to write insincere puffs; and in another case, “because my sense of style revolted against the interpolation in my articles of sentences written by others to express high opinions of artists, unknown to fame and to me.” This second resignation followed the appearance of an Academy notice, written by Shaw in the capacity of art critic to another London paper. This article on an Academy exhibition appeared padded out to an extraordinary length by interpolations praising works which Shaw had never seen—“No. 2,744 is a sweet head of Mrs. —— by that talented young artist, Miss ——,” and so on. It is needless to add that Shaw resigned in a highly explosive manner. And so Shaw vanished from the picture galleries. His comment on the conduct of the management of these papers explains his own attitude, testifying conclusively to the rigour of the moral standard to which he always conformed. “They were no more guilty of corruption,” Mr. Shaw expressed the case to me, “than a man with no notion of property can be guilty of theft; and to this day they probably have not the least idea why I threw up a reasonably well-paid job and assumed an attitude vaguely implying some sort of disapproval of their right to do what they liked with their own paper.”

It was probably at the particular Press view just referred to, some time after 1889, that Henley's meeting with Shaw occurred. To go back a little, James Runciman, the uncle of J. F. Runciman, the musical critic, was a Cashel Byronite, and used to write Shaw letters containing occasional references to Henley, who also admired Cashel Byron's Profession. Between Runciman, who had known Henley and quarrelled with him, and Cashel Byron, Shaw got into correspondence with Henley. Among the various literary and artistic Dulcineas whose championship Henley mistook for criticism, was Mozart. Mr. Shaw thus explained the situation to me:

“As I also knew Mozart's value, Henley induced me to write articles on music for his paper, the Scots Observer, afterwards the National Observer; and I did write some—not more than half a dozen—perhaps not so many. Henley was an impossible editor. He had no idea of criticism except to glorify the masters he liked, and pursue their rivals with quixotic jealousy. To appreciate Mozart without reviling Wagner was to Henley a blank injustice to Mozart. Now, he knew I was what he called a Wagnerite, and that I thought his objections to Wagner vieux jeu, stupid, ignorant and common. Therefore he amused himself by interpolating abuse of Wagner into my articles over my signature. Naturally he lost his contributor; and it was highly characteristic of him that he did not understand why he could not get any more articles from me. At the same time he made the National Observer an organ, politically and socially, of the commonest sort of plutocratic and would-be aristocratic Toryism, and clamoured in the usual forcible-feeble way for the strong hand to 'put down' the distress which then—in the eighties—was threatening insurrection. For this sort of thing I had no mercy. I did not object to tall talk about hanging myself and my friends who were trying to get something done for the condition of the people; but what moved me to utter scorn was the association of the high republican atmosphere of Byron, Shelley and Keats, and the gallantry of Dumas père—another idol of ours—with the most dastardly class selfishness and political vulgarity. When Henley at last pressed me very hard for another article, I wrote him in a perfectly friendly but frankly contemptuous strain, chaffing him rather fiercely as the master of his fate, the captain of his soul, with his head bloody but unbowed, and his hat always off to the police and the upper classes.” Shaw always believed that, even then, Henley was simply puzzled, and thought Shaw was only making a senseless literary display of smartness at his expense.

Clearly Shaw was revolted by the atrocious vulgarity of Henley's politics as contrasted with the pretentiousness of his literary attitude. The defence of Henley after his death, to the effect that he knew nothing of politics, and that he placed himself as to the politics of the paper in the hands of his friend Charles Whibley, disarmed Shaw, as I have good reason to know. For Shaw liked Whibley well enough, regarding him as a clever fellow in literary matters, but quite impossible politically. Opinions similar to those quoted below may be found in the only criticism Shaw ever wrote of Henley—a review of his poems in the old Pall Mall Gazette under Mr. Stead's editorship. The following quotation from a hitherto unpublished letter to me vividly clarifies the whole matter by defining the grounds of Shaw's criticism of Henley:

“Henley interested me as being what I call an Elizabethan, by which I mean a man with an extraordinary and imposing power of saying things, and with nothing whatever to say. The real disappointment about his much discussed article on Stevenson was not that he said spiteful things about his former friend, but that he said nothing at all about him that would not have been true of any man in all the millions then alive. The world very foolishly reproached him because he did not tell the usual epitaph monger's lies about 'Franklin, my loyal friend.' But the real tragedy about the business was that a man who had known Stevenson intimately, and who was either a penetrating critic or nothing, had nothing better worth saying about him than that he was occasionally stingy about money and that when he passed a looking-glass he looked at it. Which Stevenson's parlour-maid could have told as well as Henley if she had been silly enough to suppose that the average man is a generous sailor in a melodrama, and totally incurious and unconscious as to his personal appearance. But it was always thus with Henley. He could appreciate literature and enjoy criticism. He could describe anything that was forced on his observation and experience, from a tom-cat in an area to a hospital operation. Give him the thing to be expressed, and he could find its expression wonderfully either in prose or verse. But beyond that he could not go: the things he said—or the things he wrote (I know nothing of his conversation)—are always conventionalities, all the worse because they are selected from the worst part of the great stock of conventionalities—the conventional unconventionalisms. He could discover and encourage talent, and was thus half a good editor, but he could not keep friends with it; and so his papers finally fell through.”

As in the case of his obituary notices of Sir Augustus Harris and Sir Henry Irving, Shaw was accused of nothing short of brutality in his attitude towards Henley, the Cashel Byronite who had wished to see Shaw's novel dramatized. In the first place, Henley admired Shaw, and it seemed ungenerous for Shaw to repay him by a denial of the sort of talent he desired to excel in. And in the second place, it seemed to Shaw's detractors that it was doubly ungenerous of a man sound in wind and limb to disparage a man who was physically a wreck, fighting bravely against infirmity and pain. I was not surprised to find, on inquiring of Mr. Shaw his real feelings and attitude in the matter, that he regarded both these reasons as absurd, sentimental and pointless.

“People have a strong feeling,” Mr. Shaw explained, “that if a man has lost his hearing or sight bravely in a noble cause the world is thereby bound in decency to assume for ever after that he had the eye of an eagle and the ear of a hare.” He continued, impressively: “I have never belittled a misfortune in that way. Long ago, when a blind poet died, and certain maudlin speeches of his were repeated in print as expressions of the pathos of his darkened existence, I said, also in print, that he always said these things when he was drunk, and that the fact that he was blind may have added to the pity of them, but did not give them any sort of validity.

“In the same way when, in the European revolutionary movement, men came with horrible experiences of prison and Siberian wanderings on them, and women whose husbands had been hanged or committed suicide, I have always had to stand out against the notion that they were the better instead of the worse for their misfortunes, or that they derived any credit or authority whatever from them. Give them the indulgence due to enforced weakness or the help due to unavoidable distress; but don't make them heroes and leaders ex-officio because they have been unlucky enough to be lamed.

“And so, I have often conveyed to sentimental people an impression of revolting callousness simply because I know that suffering is suffering, and not merely the acquisition of a romantic halo. Henley's infirmities were to me trifles compared to those which I had encountered in other cases; and in any case, I was trained to look in the face the fact that infirmities disable people instead of reinforcing them. People who learn in suffering what they teach in song usually give very dangerous lessons; and I admire Henley for having no doctrine of that sort. Besides, I have always abhorred the petty disloyalties which men call sparing one another's feelings.

“To make an end of the matter,” Mr. Shaw concluded, “Henley, though a barren critic and poet, had enough talent and character to command plenty of consideration. A man cannot be everything. I am as fond of music as Henley was of literature,” he added, his grey-blue eyes twinkling brightly; “but I am the worst of players, and have a very poor voice.”

The opinion that Shaw's art during this period is less interesting than his life does not necessarily involve any reflection upon the value of his experience as an art critic in giving direction and tendency to the subsequent course of his development. Indeed Shaw has been mainly influenced by works of art in his artificial culture: he has always been more consciously susceptible to music and painting than to literature. It is no idle assertion—one that Shaw is fond of repeating—that Mozart and Michelangelo count for a great deal in the making of his mind. And, however paradoxical it may sound, the English dramatists after Shakespeare are practically negligible as concerning their influence in the development of his peculiar and highly specialized dramatic genius. His close and familiar daily intercourse with the music masters of the past; his instant recognition of Wagner's overwhelming greatness; his rapturous delight in that king of music-dramatists, Mozart; his dogged attempts, alone and unaided, to master the difficulties of pianoforte playing, which eventuated in his becoming a congenial, sympathetic accompanist—all early marked him as a natural and undiscouragedly persistent lover of music. His individual studies of Italian art, in its history and its expression, while he was still in his teens, his frequent visits to the Dublin Gallery, the many hours passed in London at the priceless picture galleries in Trafalgar Square and Hampton Court, testify with equal force to his spontaneous preoccupation with the best that has been thought and done in the world of art. It would carry one too far afield to pursue the inquiry as to what influence Michelangelo might possibly have exerted upon the dramas of Bernard Shaw. But there can be little doubt that what Shaw found to wonder at and glorify in Michelangelo was his passion for anatomy, his devotion to the studiously realistic, and his unlimited mastery of form acquired through “profound and patient interrogation of reality.” Shaw, the close, searching student of life, found untold inspiration in the discovery of the genuinely naturalistic spirit in which Michael Angelo worked! Words he once used in speaking to me of the influence of Michelangelo upon his art are very illuminative. “I never shall forget climbing an enormously high, rickety framework, in company with Anatole France,” he remarked, “in order to get a closer look at the Delphic Sibyl. We were close enough to touch it with our hands; and I was surprised to discover that, instead of losing, it gained impressiveness on nearer view. The grand, set face made a tremendous impression upon me. For the first time, I fully realized that Michael Angelo was a great artist, and a great man as well—because his every subject is a person of genius. He never had a commonplace subject. His models are extraordinary people. They are all Supermen and Superwomen.

“Michelangelo, you see,” he continued, “taught me this—always to put people of genius into my works. I am always setting a genius over against a commonplace person.”

In the same spirit, Shaw praised Madox Brown as a realist, “because he had vitality enough to find intense enjoyment in the world as it really is, unbeautified, unidealized, untitivated in any way for artistic consumption.” The sad, sensuous daydreams of Rossetti, the gentlemanly draughtsmanship of Leighton, the whole romantic trend of English art, with its delicacy of sentiment, its beauty-fancying, its reality-shirking philosophy, found Shaw coldly, cruelly condemnatory. “Take the young lady painted by Ingres as 'La Source,' for example. Imagine having to make conversation for her for a couple of hours.” This gives the tone of his criticism. His deepest scorn was aroused by that form of art which sets up “decorative moral systems contrasting roseate and rapturous vice with lilied and languorous virtue, making 'Love' face both ways as the universal softener and redeemer.” The artist who sought to depict life with perfect integrity—in Browning's phrase, “to paint man man, whatever the issue”—the artist who sought to express the veracity and reality of life rather than its imagined beauty and poetry, found in Shaw an unhesitating champion. This passion for unidealized reality was the outcome of long and deliberate study of art works, concerning each of which Shaw deliberately forced himself to form an intelligent and conscious estimate. This was the solid residuum of his studies, rescued from a ruck of sophistication. “I remember once when I was an art critic,” wrote Shaw in 1897, “and when Madox Brown's work was only known to me by a few drawings, treating Mr. Frederick Shields to a critical demonstration of Madox Brown's deficiencies, pointing out in one of the drawings the lack of 'beauty' in some pair of elbows that had more of the wash-tub than of 'The Toilet of Venus' about them. Mr. Shields contrived without any breach of good manners to make it quite clear to me that he considered Madox Brown a great painter and me a fool. I respected both convictions at the time; and now I share them. Only, I plead in extenuation of my folly that I had become so accustomed to take it for granted that what every English painter was driving at was the sexual beautification and moral idealization of life into something as unlike itself as possible, that it did not at first occur to me that a painter could draw a plain woman for any other reason than that he could not draw a pretty one.”[99]

Shaw stood forth as a champion of all forms of art—pictorial, fictive and dramatic—which aim at realistic exposure of the sheer facts of life without idealistic falsification and romantic sublimation. He lauded Madox Brown, for example, as he lauded Ibsen, and for the same reason: they both took for their themes “not youth, beauty, morality, gentility and prosperity as conceived by Mr. Smith of Brixton and Bayswater, but real life taken as it is, with no more regard for poor Smith's dreams and hypocrisies than the weather has for his shiny silk hat when he forgets his umbrella.” It is no matter for surprise that the unshirking student of sociological conditions should have chosen to write Widowers' Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession; it would have been astounding had he not done so. And yet the catholicity of his taste in art enabled him to realize, not simply one aspect of English art, but the real English art-culture of to-day. To Shaw, indeed, the significance of the modern movement in England had its germ in the growing sense of the “naïve dignity and charm” of thirteenth-century work, in a passionate affection for the exquisite beauty of fifteenth-century art. “The whole rhetorical school in English literature, from Shakespeare to Byron,” he once wrote, “appears to us in our present mood only another side of the terrible dégringolade from Michelangelo to Canova and Thorwaldsen, all of whose works would not now tempt us to part with a single fragment by Donatello, or even a pretty foundling baby by Delia Robbia.” He maintained that William Morris made himself the greatest living master of the English language, both in prose and verse, by picking up the tradition of the literary art where Chaucer left it; that Burne-Jones made himself the greatest among English decorative painters by picking up the tradition of his art where Lippi left it, and utterly ignoring “their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff”; and that Morris and Burne-Jones, close friends and co-operators in many a masterpiece, form the highest aristocracy of English art of our day.[100]

The only controversial question that came up during Shaw's period as an art critic was raised by the Impressionists; and his reputation, with the select few, for consistency is sustained by the course he adopted. He recognized Impressionism as a new birth of energy in art, a movement in painting which was wholly beneficial and progressive, and in no sense insane and decadent. Despite the fact that the movement, like all new movements in art, was accompanied by many absurdities—exhibition of countless daubs, the practice of optical distortion, the substitution of “canvases which looked like enlargements of obscure photographs for the familiar portraits of masters of the hounds in cheerfully unmistakable pink coats, mounted on bright chestnut horses”—Shaw supported it vigorously because, “being the outcome of heightened attention and quickened consciousness on the part of its disciples, it was evidently destined to improve pictures greatly by substituting a natural, observant, real style for a conventional, taken-for-granted, ideal one.” It is needless to say that Shaw did not fall into the Philistine trap and talk “greenery yallery” nonsense about Burne-Jones and the pre-Raphaelite school: his admiration was checked by the sternest critical reservations. He applauded the Impressionists for their busy study of the atmosphere, and of the relation of light and dark between the various objects depicted, i.e., of “values.” Like Zola in his championship of Monet, Shaw led a miniature crusade in behalf of Whistler, whose pictures at first quite naturally amazed people accustomed to see the “good north light” of a St. John's Wood studio represented at exhibitions as sunlight in the open air—for example, Bouguereau's “Girl in a Cornfield.” More than this need not be said: that Shaw never joined the ranks of the moqueurs who called Mr. Whistler “Jimmy.”

It is worthy of record that Shaw vigorously and ably championed the Dutch school, earnestly advocating the claims of James Maris as a great painter; and he stood up for Van Uhde, not only in defence of his pictures of Christ surrounded by people in tall hats and frock coats, but also in favour of his excellent painting of light in a dry, crisp, diffused way then quite unfashionable. But his most signal art criticism of the last decade, beyond question, has had to do with photography. In 1901, he announced that “the conquest by photography of the whole field of monochromatic representative art may be regarded as completed by the work of this year.” His position is based on the dictum that “in photography, the drawing counts for nothing, the thought and judgment count for everything; whereas in the etching and daubing processes where great manual skill is needed to produce anything that the eye can endure, the execution counts for more than the thought.” This is no new or sudden notion, derived from the study of some photographic exhibition, but the mature statement of a judgment arrived at over a quarter of a century ago. In An Unsocial Socialist, Trefusis astounds Erskine and Sir Charles Brandon with those same remarkable views on photography which to-day, in the mouth of Bernard Shaw, so delight the patrons of the Photographic Salon.[101]

“It is more than twenty years since I first said in print that nine-tenths (or ninety-nine hundredths, I forget which) of what was then done by brush and pencil would presently be done, and far better done, by the camera. But it needed some imagination, as well as some hardihood, to say this at that time ... because the photographers of that day were not artists.... Let us admit handsomely that some of the elder men had the root of the matter in them as the younger men of to-day; but the process did not then attract artists.... On the whole, the process was not quite ready for the ordinary artist, because (1) it could not touch colour or even give colours their proper light values; (2) the Impressionist movement had not then rediscovered and popularized the great range of art that lies outside colour; (3) the eyes of artists had been so long educated to accept the most grossly fictitious conventions as truths of representation that many of the truths of the focussing screen were at first repudiated as grotesque falsehoods; (4) the wide-angled lens did in effect lie almost as outrageously as a Royal Academician, whilst the anastigmat was revoltingly prosaic, and the silver print, though so exquisite that the best will, if they last, be one day prized by collectors, was cloying, and only suitable to a narrow range of subjects; (5) above all, the vestries would cheerfully pay fifty pounds for a villainous oil-painting of a hospitable chairman, whilst they considered a guinea a first-rate price for a dozen cabinets, and two-pound-ten a noble bid for an enlargement, even when the said enlargement had been manipulated so as to be as nearly as possible as bad as the fifty pound painting. But all that is changed nowadays. Mr. Whistler, in the teeth of a storm of ignorant and silly ridicule, has forced us to acquire a sense of tone, and has produced portraits of almost photographic excellence; the camera has taught us what we really saw as against what the draughtsman used to show us; and the telephoto lens and its adaptations, with the isochromatic plate and screen, and the variety and manageableness of modern printing processes, have converted the intelligent artists, smashed the picture-fancying critics, and produced exhibitions such as those now open at the Dudley and New Galleries, which may be visited by people who, like myself, have long since given up as unendurable the follies and falsehoods, the tricks, fakes, happy accidents, and desolating conventions of the picture galleries. The artists have still left to them invention, didactics, and (for a little while longer) colour. But selection and representation, covering ninety-nine-hundredths of our annual output of art, belong henceforth to photography. Someday the camera will do the work of Velásquez and Peter de Hooghe, colour and all; and then the draughtsmen and painters will be left to cultivate the pious edifications of Raphael, Kaulbach, Delaroche, and the designers of the S. P. C. K. But even then they will photograph their models instead of drawing them.”[102]

In a paper Maurice Maeterlinck wrote for Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, who kindly gave me a copy, he charges art with having held itself aloof from “the great movement which for half a century has engrossed all forms of human activity in profitably exploiting the natural forces that fill heaven and earth.” Maeterlinck lauds the camera as an instrument of thought, proclaiming it the best of mediums, because it serves “to portray objects and beings more quickly and more accurately than can pencil or crayon.” Just as Maeterlinck concludes that thought has at last found a fissure through which to penetrate the mystery of this anonymous force (the sun), “invade it, subjugate it, animate it, and compel it to say such things as have not yet been said in all the realm of chiaroscuro, of grace, of beauty and of truth,” so Shaw expresses his belief that “the old game is up,” and that “the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation.”

Shaw is a vigorous champion of the photographic art in its integrity; attempts at imitation of etching or painting draw his hottest fire. The idea of sensitive photographers allowing themselves to be bull-dozed into treating painting, not as an obsolete makeshift which they have surpassed and superseded, but as a glorious ideal to which they have to live up!!! One day Mr. Shaw was showing me some striking examples of his own photographic work—a remarkable picture of Sidney Webb, I recall in especial, an effect got by omitting to do something in taking the photograph. Mr. Shaw remarked that some of the most unique and fantastic pictures he had ever taken were the results of accidents. One day, for instance, he spilled some boiling water over a photograph of himself, which immediately converted it into so capital an imitation of the damaged parts of Mantegna's frescoes in Mantua that the print delighted him more in its ruin than it had in its original sanity. And, in view of his violently-expressed detestation of photographic imitation of painting, it is very refreshing to hear him confess that his own experience as a critic and picture fancier had sophisticated him so thoroughly, that “those accidental imitations of the products of the old butter-fingered methods of picture-making often fascinate me so that I have to put forth all my strength of mind to resist the temptation to become a systematic forger of damaged frescoes and Gothic caricatures.”

Mr. Shaw was harshly ridiculed and sharply censured for permitting the exhibition in 1906 of a nude photograph of himself by Alvin Langdon Coburn. In this connection, I recall a conversation with Éduard J. Steichen, who was showing me a collection of his masterly prints, including several nudes. The faces of the nude figures were averted; and Steichen told me, with a laugh, that Shaw had ridiculed him unmercifully for permitting his subjects to call attention to their embarrassment and shame by averting their faces. And in 1901, Mr. Shaw wrote:

“The camera will not build up the human figure into a monumental fiction as Michelangelo did, or coil it cunningly into a decorative one, as Burne-Jones did. But it will draw it as it is, in the clearest purity or the softest mystery, as no draughtsman can or ever could. And by the seriousness of its veracity it will make the slightest lubricity intolerable. 'Nudes from the Paris Salon' pass the moral octroi because they justify their rank as 'high art' by the acute boredom into which they plunge the spectator. Their cheap and vulgar appeal is nullified by the vapid unreality of their representation. Photography is so truthful—its subjects are so obviously realities, and not idle fancies—that dignity is imposed on it as effectually as it is on a church congregation. Unfortunately, so is that false decency, rightly detested by artists, which teaches people to be ashamed of their bodies; and I am sorry to see that the photographic life school still shirks the faces of its sitters, and thus gives them a disagreeable air of doing something they are ashamed of.”[103]

One morning in Paris, during the period that Shaw was sitting to Rodin, Coburn, with his camera, caught Shaw coming out of his morning bath; whereupon he laughingly bade Shaw to “be still and look pleasant.” “I casually assumed, as near as I could recall it,” Mr. Shaw told me, “the pose of Rodin's 'Le Penseur.' It was all done in a moment, and although I am not like 'Le Penseur,' at least my pose is not unlike his.” Mr. Shaw permitted the photograph to be put on exhibition as an object-lesson, so to speak, to the photographic life school; as Steichen expressed it to me: “I believe Mr. Shaw wanted to show the courage of his convictions, by publicly taking the medicine he so unhesitatingly prescribed for others.”

It is needless to point out that Bernard Shaw, the analytic critic and clear thinker par excellence, would naturally prefer photography to painting. When away from London he is seldom to be seen without a camera slung over his shoulders; and he has been taking pictures, and dabbling away at interesting photographic experiments, for many years. Without talent as an artist himself, but with almost a passion for photography, we need not be surprised to hear him praise the photographer because he is free of “that clumsy tool—the human hand—which will always go its own single way, and no other.”

Steichen and Coburn, he has told me and he has told them, are the two greatest photographers in the world; and he once said to me of Coburn: “Whenever his work does not please you, watch and pray for a while and you will find that your opinion will change.”[104]

To Shaw the true conquest of colour no longer seems far off in the light of Lumière's discoveries, and the day will soon come, he surmises, when work like that of Hals and Velásquez may be done by men who have never painted anything except their own nails with pyro. “As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort defiance at them; their day of daubs is over.” He once declared for two photographs of himself against anything of Holbein, Rembrandt, or Velásquez. “When I compare their subtle diversity with the monotonous inaccuracy and infirmity of drawings, I marvel at the gross absence of analytic power and of imagination which still sets up the works of the great painters, defects and all, as standard, instead of picking out the qualities they achieved and the possibilities they revealed, in spite of the barbarous crudity of their methods.” There are certain quite definite things the photographer has not yet achieved: Shaw's imagination as a creative dramatist teaches him this, even though he insists that the decisive quality in a photographer is the “faculty of seeing certain things and being tempted by them.” Oscar Wilde acutely remarked that in certain modern portraits—Sargent's, notably, I should say—there is often as much of the artist as of the subject. Bernard Shaw insists that in the pictorial and dramatic phases of the photographic art of the future, both the artist and the subject must be imaginative artists, working in conjunction. “As to the creative, dramatic, story-telling painters—Carpaccio, and Mantegna, and the miraculous Hogarth, for example—it is clear that photography can do their work only through a co-operation of sitter and camerist which assimilates the relations of artist and model to those at present existing between playwright and actor. Indeed, just as the playwright is sometimes only a very humble employee of the actor or actress manager, it is conceivable that in dramatic and didactic photography the predominant partner will not be necessarily either the photographer or the model, but simply whichever of the twain contributes the rarest art to the co-operation. Already that instinctive animal, the public, goes into a shop and says: 'Have you any photographs of Mrs. Patrick Campbell?' and not 'Have you any photographs by Elliott and Fry, Downey, etc., etc.?' The Salon is altering this, and photographs are becoming known as Demachys, Holland Days, Horsley Hintons, and so forth, as who should say Greuzes, Hoppners and Linnells. But, then, the Salon has not yet touched the art of Hogarth. When it does, 'The Rake's Progress' will evidently depend as much on the genius of the rake as of the moralist who squeezes the bulb, and then we shall see what we shall see.”

FOOTNOTES:

[93] Who I Am, and What I Think. Part II., in the Candid Friend, May 18th, 1901.

[94] Mr. A. B. Walkley, Mr. Shaw lately told me.

[95] The Author to the Dramatic Critics, Appendix I. to the first edition of Widowers' Houses. London, Henry and Co., Bouverie Street, E.C., 1893.

[96] Note of the Editor, G. B. Shaw, of Fabian Tract No. 113: Communism—a lecture by William Morris, published by the Fabian Society.

[97] Obituary essay: Morris as Actor and Dramatist, in the Saturday Review, October 10th, 1896. Reproduced in Dramatic Opinions and Essays, Vol. II.

[98] In this connection, compare The Author's View. A Criticism of Modern Book Printing. By Bernard Shaw. In the Caxton Magazine, January, 1902.

[99] Madox Brown, Watts, and Ibsen. In the Saturday Review, March 13th, 1897.

[100] Cf. King Arthur. In the Saturday Review, January 19th, 1895.

[101] Compare Photography, October 26th, 1909.

[102] The Exhibitions—I., by G. Bernard Shaw. In the Amateur Photographer, October 1st, 1901.

[103] The Exhibitions—II., in the Amateur Photographer, October 18th, 1901.

[104] Compare Shaw's article, Coburn the Camerist, in the Metropolitan Magazine, May, 1906.

THE MUSIC CRITIC

“CORNO DI BASSETTO” AND “G. B. S.”

“Don't be in a hurry to contradict G. B. S., as he never commits himself on a musical subject until he knows at least six times as much about it as you do.”—Music. In the World, January 18th, 1893.