[158] The text of this dainty little interlude is to be found in the Daily Mail, January 29th, 1907. Mr. and Mrs. Maude were playing in Toddles at the time.
[159] The figure of Lady Cicely Waynflete possesses an unique interest in view of the fact conveyed in the following record of Ellen Terry's: “At this time (1897), Mr. Shaw and I frequently corresponded. It began by my writing to ask him, as musical critic of the Saturday Review (!), to tell me frankly what he thought of the chances of a composer-singer friend of mine. He answered 'characteristically,' and we developed a perfect fury for writing to each other. Sometimes the letters were on business, sometimes they were not, but always his were entertaining, and mine were, I suppose, 'good copy,' as he drew the character of Lady Cicely Waynflete in Brassbound entirely from my letters. He never met me until after the play was written.” From Lewis Carroll to Bernard Shaw, in McClure's Magazine, September, 1908.
THE PLAYWRIGHT—II
“I have, I think, always been a Puritan in my attitude towards Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome buildings as Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they were becoming the instruments of a systematic idolatry of sensuousness, I would hold it good statesmanship to blow every cathedral in the world to pieces with dynamite, organ and all, without the least heed to the screams of the art critics and cultured voluptuaries.”—Why for Puritans? Preface to Three Plays for Puritans, p. xix.
“I do not satirize types. I draw individuals as they are. When I describe a tub, Archer and Walkley say it is a satire on a tub.”—Conversation with the author.
CHAPTER XI
Cæsar and Cleopatra, unique in Bernard Shaw's theatre, alike in subject matter and genre, warrants individual consideration. To an interviewer, on April 30th, 1898, Shaw related that he was just in the middle of the first act of a new play, in which he was going “to give Shakespeare a lead.” Unlike Oscar Wilde, who once said that the writing of plays for a particular actor or actress was work for the artisan in literature, not for the artist, Shaw freely confessed that he wrote Cæsar and Cleopatra for Forbes Robertson, “because he is the classic actor of our day, and had a right to require such a service from me.”[160] Asked if he had not been reading up “Mommsen and people like that,” Shaw replied, “Not a bit of it. History is only a dramatization of events. And if I start telling lies about Cæsar, it's a hundred to one that they will be just the same lies that other people have told about him.... Given Cæsar and a certain set of circumstances, I know what would happen, and when I have finished the play you will find I have written history.”[161]
In an opening scene of rare beauty and mystery, Cæsar discovers the child-truant Cleopatra reclining between the paws of her “baby-sphinx.” What possibilities, what previsions are packed in this prophetic hour, which witnesses the meeting of these two supreme representatives of two alien worlds, two diverse civilizations! From the sublime we are hurled down to the ridiculous. Cæsar, dreamer and world-conquerer, apostrophizing the sphinx in the immemorial moonlight of Egypt, is suddenly feazed out of countenance by a childish voice: “Old gentleman!—don't run away, old gentleman.” It is the voice of Shaw to his public: “I may take unpardonable liberties with you; but—don't run away.”
In Consultation.