“'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.”