THE ART CRITIC
“Produce me your best critic, and I will criticize his head off.”—On Diabolonian Ethics. In Three Plays for Puritans. Preface, p. xxi.
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