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.”