Below are a club, offices, and other odds and ends, above and beyond the gate the great G. B. S. is to be found. “Bring your man to lunch here,” was the amusing reply I received to a note asking the Shaws to dine and meet “George Birmingham” (the Rev. James Hannay), the famous Irish novelist.
Accordingly, to lunch “my man” and I repaired. Everything about George Bernard Shaw is new. The large drawing-room overlooking the Thames is furnished in new art—a modern carpet, hard, straight-lined, white enamelled bookcases, a greeny yellow wall—a few old prints, ’tis true—and over the writing-table, his own bust by Rodin, so thin and aristocratic in conception, that it far more closely resembles our mutual friend Robert Cunninghame Graham. No curtains; open windows; sanitation; hygiene; vegetarianism; modernism on every side. Bernard Shaw has no reverence for age or custom, antiquity or habit—a modern man, his is a modern home, only rendered homelike by the touch of a charming woman. It is wonderful how loud-talking Socialism succumbs to calm, peaceful, respectable comfort. Since his marriage the Socialist has given up much of the practice of his theories, and is accepting the daily use of fine linen and silver, the pleasures of flowers and dainty things; he politely owns himself the happier for them; but then Mrs. Bernard Shaw is a refined and delightful woman.
George Bernard Shaw comes from Dublin, his wife from far-away Cork. She is well-connected, clever, and tactful, and the sheet-anchor of G. B. S.
Shaw was at his best. He ate nuts and grapes while we enjoyed the pleasures of the table. I told him I had first heard of him in Berlin, in 1892, long before he had been talked of here. I had seen Arms and the Man in the German capital—that, eight years later, I was haunted by Candida in America, and then came back to find him creeping into fame in England. That delighted him.
“Yes, I insist on rehearsing every line of my own plays whenever it is possible—if I can’t, well, they do as they like.”
I told him I had seen Ibsen’s slow, deliberate way of rehearsing, and W. S. Gilbert’s determined persuasion. What did he do?
“I like them to read their parts the first time. Then I can stop them, and give them my interpretations, and when they are learning them at home, my suggestions soak in. If they learn their words first, they also get interpretations of their own, which I may have to make them unlearn. I hate rehearsals; they bore me to death; sometimes I have forty winks from sheer ennui; but still I stick there, and, like the judge, wake up when wanted.”
“Do you get cross?”
“No. I don’t think so. I correct, explain why, and go ahead. I never let them repeat; much better to give the correction, and let them think it out at home; if one redoes the passage they merely become more and more dazed, I find.”
“Speaking of Ibsen, do you think his influence was so great?” I asked.