I attack the current morality because it has come to mean a system of strict observance of certain fixed rules of conduct... intensified by the addition to the ten commandments of sentimental obligations to act up to ideal standards of heroism. Now what Ibsen has done is to call attention to the fact that the moment we begin to worship these commandments and ideals for their own sakes, we actually place them in opposition to the very purpose they were instituted to serve, i.e. human happiness.
Shaw to Jules Magny (16 December 1890)
On 7 February 1887, their landlord having gone bankrupt, the Shaws had received notice to leave their flat at 36 Osnaburgh Street. ‘Looking for lodgings in Marylebone and Gray’s Inn,’ Shaw noted in his diary on 26 February, ‘where my feelings were somewhat hurt by the brusqueness with which the steward received my question as to whether ladies were permitted to reside within the precincts.’
Towards the end of March he joined his mother on the third and fourth floors of 29 Fitzroy Square. A big room overlooking the square became his bedroom, and he turned one of the rooms on the top floor into a study. Here, in grand disorder he was to write his first seven plays, his literary, music and theatre criticism, and carry on his most active political campaigning.
Number 29 Fitzroy Square had a handsome façade, but was in poor condition. Shaw, who later bought the lease for his mother, described it as ‘a most repulsive house’. There was no bathroom and ‘the sanitary arrangements had had no place in the original plans,’ he discovered. ‘In impressive architecture it is the outside that matters most; and the servants do not matter at all.’ It was a fine place for the flowering of his socialism. After a series of humiliating interviews, he established himself as being not his mother’s lodger but head of the household, so that in November 1888 he was able to register ‘the first vote I ever gave in my life at an election, though I am over 32 years of age’.
Wherever he spoke his words were ‘straight as a ray of light,’ wrote H. M. Tomlinson, ‘such as we get once or twice in a few centuries, as the result of a passionate morality that happens to be gifted with the complete control of full expression’. Many who heard this ‘tall, thin man with a very pale and gentle face’ speaking with deadly playfulness, and denouncing as robbers those usually regarded as the ornaments of society, were convinced that here was the leader of ‘a revolutionary rising which would upset many of our conventions and bring a new dispensation, political and economic, into the London world’.
In 1887 he delivered sixty-six public lectures; by the end of ten years he had given nearly a thousand. Every Sunday he spoke, sometimes against the blaring of brass bands, often at workmen’s clubs and coffee houses, arguing from squalid platforms in dens full of tobacco smoke, to a little knot of members whom he had pulled away from their beer and billiards. The ‘ubiquitous Mr Shaw’, as The Star called him, was soon well known: ‘a strange and rather startling figure’, erect and agile in his serviceable suit of tweed, red scarf, wide-brimmed felt hat and jauntily swinging umbrella – ‘a tall, lean, icy man,’ reported the Workman’s Times, ‘white-faced, with a hard, clear, fleshless voice, restless grey-blue eyes, neatly-parted fair hair, big feet, and a reddish, untamed beard’.
He preferred speaking in the open air – under lamp-posts, at dock gates, in parks, squares, market places – and in all sorts of weather. He never wrote or read his speeches. By the late 1880s he had laboriously perfected his technique ‘until I could put a candle out with a consonant’.
Whether it was ‘Capitalism’ at the Wolverhampton Trades and Labour Council, ‘Communism’ at the Dulwich Working Men’s Club, ‘Socialism’ at Plumstead, or ‘Food, Death and Civilization’ at the headquarters of the London Vegetarian League, he spoke, stretching his long fingers to reach out to his audience, as if all their lives depended upon it. He packed the halls with crowds of people; he made them listen, made them laugh. It is clear from the text of those lectures he later wrote up for publication that Shaw was passionately serious.
‘Your authorised system of medicine is nothing but a debased survival of witchcraft. Your schools are machines for forcing a spurious literary culture on children in order that your universities may stamp them as educated men when they have fairly got hold of the wrong end of every stick in the faggot of knowledge. The tall silk hats and starched linen fronts which you force me to wear, and without which I cannot successfully practise as a physician, clergyman, schoolmaster, lawyer or merchant, are inconvenient, insanitary, ugly, pompous and offensive... your popular forms of worship are... only redeemed from gross superstition by their obvious insincerity... Under color of protecting my person you forcibly take my money to support an armed force for the execution of barbarous and detestable laws; for the urging of wars I abhor... Your tyranny makes my very individuality a hindrance tome: I am outdone and outbred by the mediocre, the docile, the time-serving. Evolution under such conditions means degeneracy.’
This was the voice of a man who had raised the torch of revolution. No wonder there was sometimes violence – and he had to escape through a window or back door.
‘Your slaves are beyond caring for your cries... In the midst of the riches which their labor piles up for you, their misery rises up too and stifles you. You withdraw in disgust to the other end of the town from them; you appoint special carriages on your railways and special seats in your churches and theatres for them; you set your life apart from theirs by every class barrier you can devise; and yet they swarm about you still... they poison your life as remorselessly as you have sacrificed theirs heartlessly... Then comes the terror of their revolting; the drilling and arming of bodies of them to keep down the rest; the prison, the hospital, paroxysms of frantic coercion, followed by paroxysms of frantic charity. And in the meantime, the population continues to increase!’
Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, who heard him speak at Bath, noted in his diary that the speaker was ‘a live Socialist, redhot “from the Streets”’ who
‘sketched in a really brilliant address the rapid series of steps by which modern society is to pass peacefully into social democracy... It is now urban ground-rent that the municipal governments will have to seize, to meet the ever-growing necessity of providing work and wages for the unemployed... There was a peroration rhetorically effective as well as daring, in which he explained that the bliss of perfected socialism would only come by slow degrees, with lingering step and long delays, and claimed our sympathy for the noble-hearted men whose ardent philanthropy had led them to cut these delays short by immediate revolution... Altogether a noteworthy performance: – the man’s name is Bernard Shaw.’
Shaw’s oratory was like a spur to insurrection, and if he stopped short of calling for the bombardment of the London slums by the new dynamite, it seemed only with reluctance. Gradualness might be inevitable, but it was not welcome: ‘if we feel relieved that the change is to be slow enough to avert personal risk to ourselves; if we feel anything less than acute disappointment and bitter humiliation at the discovery that there is yet between us and the promised land a wilderness in which many must perish miserably of want and despair: then I submit to you that our institutions have corrupted us to the most dastardly degree of selfishness.’
For his thousand lectures over these years Shaw received no payment. ‘He gives up willingly time, labour, the opportunities of self-advancement,’ reported The Star. ‘To such men we can forgive much.’ At the election of 1892, while Shaw was speaking at the Town Hall in Dover, a man rose and warned his audience not to be taken in by someone whose opinions were purchased: ‘I immediately offered to sell him my emoluments for £5,’ Shaw recalled. ‘He hesitated; and I came down to £4. I offered to make it five shillings – half-a-crown – a shilling – sixpence. When he would not deal even at a penny I claimed that he must know perfectly well that I was there at my own expense. If I had not been able to do this, the meeting, which was a difficult and hostile one... would probably have broken up.’
The art of public speaking answered his need for attention, though much of it was ‘terrible tongue work’. He never admired this need in himself. The development of his public manner had forced brashness on to a nature that was ordinarily sensitive. ‘Oratory is a vice,’ he complained to the actress Lena Ashwell. He could not delude himself: the applause that rose through his meetings was an empty sound. ‘My career as a public speaker was not only futile politically,’ he later concluded: ‘It was sometimes disgraceful and degrading... I suffered agonies of disgust at the whole business and shame for my part in it.’
The success of Fabian Essays in 1889 soon led to a train of provincial lectures, particularly in the north of England, and Shaw’s flame-coloured beard and illuminated white face were seen in places that had never before borne witness to socialism. He worked eighteen hours a day and on the seventh day he worked. ‘My hours that make my days, my days that make my years,’ he wrote, ‘follow one another pell mell into the maw of Socialism.’
*
He had hoped to convert some of this lecture-work into book-work: ‘It is quite possible to get into a volume of 200 pages an adequate and bright explanation of the law of rent and the law of value, which really cover the laws of production and of exchange, and so, in a fair sense, cover the whole field of economics,’ he explained to Havelock Ellis. ‘...I could produce such a book before the middle of next year.’ But early in 1889 he wrote to Ellis: ‘I see about as much prospect of having “Production & Exchange” ready by June as of establishing the millennium... I have to keep up my lectures (five this week); and I have to keep myself alive by journalism all the time. This is not “Production & Exchange”.’
In the summer of 1890, the Fabians found themselves committed to a programme of addresses under the heading ‘Socialism in Contemporary Literature’. Between May and July Shaw worked on a paper about Ibsen which he delivered on 18 July at the St James’s Restaurant. The minutes record that ‘the effect on the packed audience was overwhelming’. But not all the Fabians were happy. ‘It is very clever,’ Sidney Webb wrote, ‘and not so bad as I feared... But his glorification of the Individual Will distresses me.’
It was probably the Parnell case that decided Shaw to expand his lecture into a book. This cause célèbre had resulted in November 1891 in Captain O’Shea being granted a decree nisi against his wife, naming Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Party in the House of Commons, as co-respondent. Both in private letters and letters to The Star, Shaw had defended Parnell against the outcry ‘Parnell Must GO!’ following this flouting of domestic ideals by a public figure. On the same day, 16 December, that he wrote to Sydney Olivier, criticizing the opposition to Parnell from within the Fabian Society, he decided to publish The Quintessence of Ibsenism.
The book was a product of Shaw’s friendship with Archer through whom he had first got to know Ibsen’s work. Meeting Ibsen in Denmark in 1887, Archer had observed that he ‘is essentially a kindred spirit with Shaw – a paradoxist, a sort of Devil’s Advocate, who goes about picking holes in every “well-known fact”’. It was this similarity that helped to give Shaw such an instinctive insight into Ibsen’s plays. These plays had the power to move Shaw more than the work of any other living dramatist. Of a performance of The Wild Duck, he was to write:
‘To sit there getting deeper and deeper in that Ekdal home, and getting deeper and deeper into your own life all the time, until you forget you are in a theatre; to look on with horror and pity at a profound tragedy, shaking with laughter all the time at an irresistible comedy; to go out, not from a diversion, but from an experience deeper than real life ever brings to most men, or often brings to any man: that is what The Wild Duck was like last Monday at the Globe.’
The joy of his Quintessence is that of feeling Shaw’s agile and ingenious mind working with such vitality on material so sympathetic to him. He prefaced the book with the warning that he is not concerned here with Ibsen as a dramatist, but as a teacher; that this is not literary criticism but analysis of the philosophy of which Ibsen was an exponent. In seeking a symbolic leader who would unite the contradictory impulses within himself, Shaw leads him into battle against those conventional ideals that he felt formed the chief obstacle to progress.
By the early 1890s, following productions of A Doll’s House and Ghosts, the name of Ibsen (who was sixty-three when the Quintessence appeared) had emerged from obscurity into huge contention in Britain as the playwright who was forcing a whole generation to re-evaluate its ideas. Shaw assumed the generalship of the British campaign.
As a model for his argument Shaw had adapted Matthew Arnold and used a threefold division of mankind into philistine, idealist and (pending the word superman) realist. He proposes a hypothetical community of one thousand people in which seven hundred are easygoing philistines, two hundred and ninety-nine dangerous idealists (‘the idealist is a more dangerous animal than the philistine just as a man is a more dangerous animal than a sheep’), and there is one realistic pioneer essential to the evolution of the species. The philistine, substituting ‘custom for conscience’, is satisfied with the social system as it is. The irony of his position is that, though he sees any interference with the social machinery as highly dangerous, the real danger comes from allowing that machinery to grow outdated. The philistine employs the idealist to think for him and to ‘idealize’ his lack of thought. The idealist, though higher in the ascent of human evolution than the philistine, is a moral coward coerced by the majority into conformity. Ideals, in Shavian terminology, are therefore illusions which have their origin in fear; idealism is life by the rule of precedent, and the idealist a pedlar of fancy pictures which advertise this rule. Shaw likens these pictures to beautiful masks which the idealist puts for us on the unbearable faces of truth: the poetic mask of immortality on that king of terrors, death; the mask of romantic happiness, within the prison-house of marriage, on the sex instinct.
But the realist, bolder than the rest, believing in the ‘unflinching recognition of facts, and the abandonment of the conspiracy to ignore such of them as do not bolster up the ideals’, lays hold of a mask that we have not dared to discard and reveals the disagreeable truth. So he helps to relieve us from sacrifice to the tyranny of ideals: for ‘the destroyer of ideals, though denounced as an enemy to society, is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies’. This was the Ibsen-impulse: ‘to get away from idolatry and get to the truth regardless of shattered ideals’; and it became Shaw’s philosophy of democratic élitism.
In a number of passages added to the 1913 edition Shaw makes clear that he is enshrining individual will only when it works in harmony with the world-will (or Life Force as it would become known). Although society needs to be shocked pretty often, he argues that the ‘need for freedom of evolution is the sole basis of toleration, the valid argument against Inquisitions and Censorships, the sole reason for not burning heretics and sending every eccentric person to the madhouse’. So the heretic of today (Galileo, Darwin, Marx and perhaps Shaw himself), striving to realize future possibilities, becomes the pillar of the community tomorrow. But pillars of the community are idealists. So realism has constantly to be kept up to date.
Some of the confusion surrounding the Quintessence arose from Shaw’s choice of one word. In the same way as ‘superman’, with its Nietzschean associations, was to suggest not a symbol of synthesis but an immature dictatorship, so the word ‘Will’, with its Schopenhauerian associations, indicated not ‘our old friend the soul or spirit’ but an assertion of power. In neither case did Shaw originally intend this, but the ambiguity of these words points to an impulse that was gradually to gain possession of him.
‘Life is an adventure, not the compounding of a prescription.’ Human conduct must ‘justify itself by its effect on happiness’. By ‘happiness’ Shaw meant human welfare and for the 1913 edition he changed ‘happiness’ to ‘life’. In the interval between the first publication and his preparation of the 1913 edition, though he maintained the same apparatus of argument, Shaw’s attitude shifted. In 1891 he had used the word ‘idealist’ pejoratively to cover all those who inhabited too exclusively the world of ideas, whether they were blinded by illusions or held a fixed vision of a better life. Such people, by preferring fantasy to the actual world, risked being made prisoners of abstractions, he argued, since morality was relative and must be continually tested by experience. But his experience as a Fabian would drive him, as a source for optimism, to a metaphysical creed depending on the ideal formula of equality of income.
The 1891 Quintessence, which aims its ingenious attack at the man he was to become, is a paradoxically prophetic work – and nowhere more so than in the pages about Emperor and Galilean, where Shaw begins to explore the synthesis of relations that Ibsen’s Maximus called ‘the third empire’ – ‘the empire of Man asserting the eternal validity of his own will,’ Shaw wrote.
‘He who can see that not on Olympus, not nailed to the cross, but in himself is God: he is the man to build Brand’s bridge between the flesh and the spirit, establishing this third empire in which the spirit shall not be unknown, nor the flesh starved, nor the will tortured and baffled.’
Within Emperor and Galilean Shaw was to find the theme and dialectical pattern of his middle plays. Yet the habit of segregation persisted like a hereditary trait, and finally established itself in the flesh-starved Ancients at the end of Back to Methuselah. In these almost bodiless fantasies the author of the original Quintessence might have seen a dramatic example of the failure of an idealist to accept man as he is.
Some time in the eighties... the New Journalism was introduced. Lawless young men began to write and print the living English language of their own day... Musical critics, instead of reading books about their business and elegantly regurgitating their erudition, began to listen to music and distinguish between sounds... The interview, the illustration and the cross-heading, hitherto looked on as American vulgarities impossible to English literary gentlemen, invaded all our papers.
‘Van Amburgh Revived’, Saturday Review (7 May 1898)
The Quintessence of lbsenism was the most sustained and sophisticated work Shaw wrote before the age of thirty-five. His care in guarding the book against being ‘swept into an eddy of mere literary criticism’ reflects his own experience of criticism up to this time. It was ‘literary criticism’ in the form of readers’ reports that had put a stop to his novels; it was ‘literary criticism’ – over a hundred anonymous notices for the Pall Mall Gazette – on which he had become financially dependent from the spring of 1885 to Christmas 1888.
The Pall Mall Gazette was the centre of what Matthew Arnold called ‘the New Journalism’. It was edited by W. T. Stead who altered the character of daily journalism in Britain during the mid-1880s. Papers became simpler – as he wished the world to be. He popularized interviews, added illustrations, invented picturesque headlines, pursued virtuous crusades.
Shaw was a contributor to the Pall Mall under Stead’s editorship, ‘but as my department was literature and art, and he was an utter Philistine, no contacts between us were possible’. Yet the paper had Oscar Wilde, George Moore and William Archer writing on the arts pages, and it was a sign of Stead’s journalistic flair that he should also employ there this ‘satirical contributor with a turn for prophecy’.
Shaw insisted that literature and the arts must not be segregated from politics. He deplored the editorial habit of the literary department of giving ‘a page and a half of vapid comment to a book destined to be forgotten without having influenced the conduct or opinions of a single human being; whilst pamphlets that circulate by thousands, dealing with vital questions of national economy and private morals, are tossed aside into the waste-paper basket...’ But the publication of the truth about anything or anyone ‘is attended with considerable risk in English society,’ Shaw explained.
‘We have agreed to keep up a national pretence that the black spots in human nature are white; and we enforce the convention by treating any person who even betrays his consciousness of them... as a prurient person and an enemy of public morals... the convention rigorously exacts – under pretence of not speaking evilly of the dead – that biographers should exhibit great men, not as they were, but as ideal figures... That the very worst sort of evil speaking, whether of the living or the dead, is the telling of lies about them... is not taken into account in judging biography... The censors will tolerate no offence against hypocrisy, because... an offence against hypocrisy is an offence against decency, and is punishable as such.’
Shaw’s prescription for biography looks forward to the biographical revolution of Lytton Strachey thirty-five years later, and is most ironically expressed in his review of a Jubilee chronicle of Queen Victoria:
‘With her merits we are familiar... We know that she has been of all wives the best, of all mothers the fondest, of all widows the most faithful. We have often seen her, despite her lofty station, moved by famines, colliery explosions, shipwrecks, and railway accidents; thereby teaching us that a heart beats in her Royal breast as in the humblest of her subjects. She has proved that she can, when she chooses, put off her state and play the pianoforte, write books, and illustrate them like any common lady novelist. We all remember how she repealed the corn laws, invented the steam locomotive, and introduced railways; devised the penny post, developed telegraphy, and laid the Atlantic cable... in short, went through such a programme as no previous potentate ever dreamed of. What we need now is a book entitled “Queen Victoria: by a Personal Acquaintance who dislikes her”.’
But it was through the world of the Victorian novel that his route mainly lay. ‘The most dangerous public house in London is at the corner of Oxford St,’ Shaw told one of his audiences, ‘and is kept by a gentleman named Mudie.’ The books in Mudie’s Library were uniform, and by recommending any novel as ‘very popular at Mudie’s’ Shaw meant that it was another mammoth romance. ‘Such books,’ he concluded, ‘are not fair game for the reviewer: they are addressed to children of all ages who are willing to shut their eyes and open their mouths.’ Second-rate fiction, he concluded, might be good enough for some adults but ‘first rate fiction is needed for children themselves’.
‘Many of our worst habits are acquired in an imaginary world,’ Shaw warned.
‘...we have got the nation corrupting fiction, and fiction reacting on the nation to make it more corrupt... Hence springs up a false morality which seeks to establish dignity, refinement, education, social importance, wealth, power and magnificence, on a hidden foundation of idleness, dishonesty, sensuality, hypocrisy, tyranny, rapacity, cruelty, and scorn. When the novelist comes to build his imaginary castle, he builds on the same foundation, but adds heroism, beauty, romance, and above all, possibility of exquisite happiness to the superstructure, thereby making it more beautiful to the ignorant, and more monstrous to the initiated.’
Looking out from Shaw’s imprisonment in this castle, we may catch a splendid view of popular late Victorian fiction. What journeys its characters make! Their route lay encumbered by avalanches, attacks of consumption, unmuzzled dogs, ghosts, lunatics, Chinese executions, runaway trains, fire engines, daggers and gunpowder. Outside towers a background of crag and fortress, cloud and sea, with green walls of pine and a mountain torrent. Within, aged hounds lie stretched on the carpet, curtains are continually tweaked aside by jewelled fingers and ropes of roses adorn the staircases ascending to the boudoirs. These strongholds, which in the last chapter are all burnt to matchwood, are inhabited by a throng of murderers, bigamists, coquettes and so on. Nearly everything takes place at night (to the cry of owls, nightingales and cat-birds), except for a little cockfighting perhaps and the regular afternoon calls which usually carry on the business of the second volume. There are a few old people past love-making, but they have all had prehistoric turns at it and each carries a sorrow to the grave. The villains, who break out under stress into uncouth scraps of French, are consumed by earthquakes or engulfed in shipwrecks carrying many innocuous travellers down with them. The hero is easily recognized by his faculty for alighting on haystacks when flung from continental expresses, for inheriting fortunes, and for tracking diamond smugglers to their doom. A composite photograph of the heroines at Mudie’s would have shown golden tresses, a pair of blue eyes occasionally changing under degrees of emotion to green or hazel, and a plain white dress with a flower at the throat. For three volumes intransigent relatives and designing reprobates block her way to the altar, only to be arbitrarily removed in the last pages by violent Acts of God or the Devil, the sympathetic reader breathing more and more freely as the slaughter proceeds.
With such caricatures of the love he had once longed for himself, Shaw spent many hours, months, years of his time, first as a book reviewer and subsequently as a theatre critic. In this world of reviewing he needed to fasten his talent to a stimulating purpose: the creation, by use of irresistible ridicule, of a revolution in the habits of the book-reading, theatre-going public in Britain. The bookshop or theatre should no longer be an oubliette with its trap-door sealed against reality. ‘Whilst the slums exist and the sewers are out of order, it is better to force them on the attention even of the polite classes than to engage in the manufacture of eau-de-cologne for sprinkling purposes.’
Shaw’s voice in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette was one of exasperated geniality, below which moved a current of resentment at being obliged to spend his time reading trivial books brought out by publishers who had rejected all his own novels. It was particularly galling to see that the other Irishmen on the paper were given major writers to review: George Moore wrote on Huysmans and Zola; Oscar Wilde on Dostoevsky, William Morris, Tolstoy and Turgenev. Occasionally Shaw was allowed a minor work by an interesting writer: J. M. Barrie’s Better Dead; Wilkie Collins’s The Evil Genius; and A Mere Accident by George Moore, whose ‘commendable reticence’ in evading the realities of a rape ‘might have been taken further, even to the point of not writing the book’.
Shaw’s long sojourn in this world of reviewing later enlivened his picture of hell in Man and Superman. He used the stock-in-trade of the novelist and playwright as a block against which to sharpen his prose style. ‘A true original style is never achieved for its own sake,’ he wrote. ‘Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him.’ What he gave up in texture, he gained in pace and authority. His writing is luminous with conviction and humour. He seldom weeds out the clichés: when in love, his heart is as ‘hard as nails’; his longer plays are inevitably ‘cut to the bone’. ‘The more familiar the word, the better,’ he told his translator, Sobieniowski. Elsewhere he announced: ‘I also am a journalist, proud of it, deliberately cutting out of my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing that is not journalism will live long as literature, or be of any use whilst it does live.’ This was part of a cleansing exercise against his long immersion in pretentious literature.
It was a bright smiling instrument, his typewriter, a marvellously efficient machine for turning all the difficulties and despairs of life into an argument – not a bad-tempered argument, but an exchange of point and counterpoint that beats down relentlessly until the rough places are made plane. In his diaries, where Shaw is unprotected by the brilliant shell of this style, we see him several times accidentally coming close to some dreadful event and feeling the shock waves: ‘In Wigmore [Street] we saw a young rough beating a girl and I disturbed myself for the rest of the evening by flying at him.’ ‘Was much upset by having to interfere in an altercation between a young couple and a private watchman who was apparently trying to blackmail them.’ Though he attacked the substitution of literature for life, his own battery of words, eliminating suffering, was in some sense a replacement for action. ‘A writer,’ he advised Norman Clark, ‘must have a gift of intimacy, which is dangerous and offensive without good manners or tact.’ Shaw had outrageously good manners, but in place of intimacy he gives us a whirling informality. The effect of his prose is like alcohol upon the nerves: we are exhilarated, intoxicated, breathless and, before the end, exhausted – and still the talkative spirit, the ascending wit, drive on. For it is a style that is always in top gear: emphatic, industrious, omniscient, studded with surprises, and better-trained for shorter distances than discursiveness.
Shaw’s columns in the Pall Mall Gazette, though without a byline, were soon making his name notorious in the trade. Two or three times an exceptional book fell his way: the Rural Rides of William Cobbett (‘probably more dangerous to corrupt Governments than any single man known to English history, excepting only Jonathan Swift’); A Handbook of the History of Philosophy by Belfort Bax, and Samuel Butler’s Luck or Cunning, both of which (as he indicates in his Preface to Major Barbara) influenced his thought. But for the most part, he was kept to heart-throb fiction. He seemed to fill his reviews from a magic well that never ran dry or lost its sparkle provided he pumped hard enough. But he chafed against the restriction. In the summer of 1887 he sent Stead a long letter in which he tried to palm a socialist programme on to him. Stead read it, kept it, and did nothing: its campaign for social reform was too bleak for him. Besides, as an instrument of persuasion, there was a quality in Shaw’s letter that was to mar so much of his dazzling propaganda: it was too knowing – everything it said was correct and calculated to be flattering to Stead, but the calculations showed. To act on Shaw’s advice so often meant parading one’s inferiority to him. His tact was like a brilliant varnish: one saw straight through it.
However much he wrote, since he could not get what he wanted, he still searched for opportunities elsewhere. Letters editors of To-Day, Justice, The Echo, St James’s Gazette, Truth, were harried with correspondence from George Bunnerd, Shendar Bwra, A. Donis, Redbarn Wash, G. B. S. Larking, Amelia Mackintosh, Horatia Ribbonson and the Reverend C. W. Stiggins Jnr, as well as from the ‘milkman’, an ‘English mistress’, ‘Inveterate Gambler’ and ‘A Novelist’. Under one name or another, or no name at all, he was everywhere, pleading for the retention of the split infinitive and the abolition of Christmas, protesting against the Russian use of Siberian exile for dissidents and the prosecution of Henry Vizetelly for publishing an English translation of Zola’s La Terre. As G. Bernard Shaw he wrote of Jack the Ripper as an ‘independent genius’ who by ‘private enterprise’ had succeeded where socialism failed in getting the press to take some sympathetic interest in the conditions of London’s East End.
The power Shaw felt within him seemed everywhere to be blocked. In the summer of 1888, he accepted a proposal from H. W. Massingham, deputy editor of The Star, that he cover occasional musical events which ‘Musigena’, the paper’s regular music critic E. Belfort Bax, could not attend. Towards Massingham Shaw felt lifelong gratitude and respect – he was ‘the perfect master journalist,’ he wrote. When Bax went on holiday in August, Shaw acted as his substitute; after which he carried on as the anonymous second-string critic until, Bax resigning in February 1889, Shaw took his place at two guineas per week.
Later that year, ‘I did a thing that has been in my mind for some time,’ he noted in his diary, ‘ – wrote to Edmund Yates asking him to give the art-criticship of The World to Lady Colin Campbell, as it is no longer worth my while to do so much work for so little satisfaction, not to mention money.’ Yates replied admitting that Shaw had been ‘cavalierly treated’, but concluding: ‘I have no idea of loosening my hold on you.’
But Shaw had made up his mind to give himself the sack as a reviewer of pictures for The World. Preparing to bow out of the galleries, he told his readers on 23 October 1889: ‘I cannot guarantee my very favourable impression of the Hanover Gallery, as I only saw it by gaslight. This was the fault of Sarasate, who played the Ancient Mariner with me. He fixed me with his violin on my way to Bond Street, and though, like the wedding guest, I tried my best, I could not choose but to hear.’
The pleasure of the senses I can sympathise with and share; but the substitution of sensuous ecstasy for intellectual activity and honesty is the very devil.
Preface to Three Plays for Puritans
Money was one measurement of success. In 1885, his first full year in journalism, Shaw had earned £112. At the end of each year he would note in his diary what he had made from contributions to papers: £150 in 1888; £197 6s. 10d. in 1889; £252 13s. 2d. in 1890; £281 16s. 10d. for 1891. Much of this money he would hand to his mother, ‘asking her for a pound when my pockets were empty’. Ten years later he was earning almost £800 (equivalent to £43,000 in 1997). He trained hard, buying coloured spectacles, a pair of dumb-bells and a pendulum alarm clock. He took regular cold baths; he went on spectacular walks. At night he opened his windows so wide that cats and birds sailed through, interrupting his sleep. He dieted, logged his weight, kept himself at about ten stone ten pounds. To his shelves he added volumes on algebra, Danish and German; on his desk he stood a modern typewriter bought from H. W. Massingham for £13 and, ‘as our rent was reduced and our earnings rather enlarged, we got a new piano on the hire system, and began to live a very little more freely’.
Behind this programme of self-improvement lay a history of backsliding. He sleeps through the alarm clock, or if it wakes him, takes a nap in the British Museum. Despite his diet, he cannot resist a heap of cherries, a few overripe bananas, some indiscreet mushrooms, and sweetmeats from a machine, to which are attributed fits of indigestion, plagues of gumboils and terrific nightmares. However icy his baths he breaks out in sweats and spells of influenza. He increases his walks, but trips and falls; he starts off again, but ends up lame; he bellows out songs ‘rather violently’ at the piano, ‘for the sake of my lungs’, and loses his voice; he covers page after page and sees them all swoop and vanish under the wheels of a train. Despite the grimmest of attempts, he learns no languages, no algebra. His letters to the press are returned, his private correspondence placed in the wrong envelopes. He develops a tendency of ‘clean forgetting’ to turn up at rallies where he is principal speaker and at meetings where he is chairman; of arriving at theatres without his tickets, mistaking matinées for evening performances, and presenting himself at the Steinway Hall instead of the Princes Hall and vice versa; he believes it to be Thursday when it isn’t; he calls on people who by arrangement are calling on him and attends At Homes where everyone is abroad. He recklessly gives away money to drunkards and minor poets, crossing-sweepers and ‘Street Arabs’. Outdoors he watches a squirrel playing in a tree and a huge spider making a web, indoors he dawdles over the piano harmonizing the Marseillaise – all when he should have been forming a committee for the municipalization of land. Suddenly unable ‘to face more political cackle’, he rushes off from an important conference to a performance of Cymbeline – ‘and enjoyed it much more than I should have enjoyed the meeting’.
More unShavian still are the adventures with his typewriter. Within a month he has mastered the brute and declares himself ‘much pleased’ with it. Yet his expertise is oddly hypothetical, having come to him (as with bicycling and photography) by way of accidents. Despite everything, the machine won’t ‘settle’. At last ‘to my great annoyance’ he is obliged to ask for professional advice, but when he tries to put this advice into practice the typewriter breaks down altogether and he is ‘furious over it’.
The diaries become strewn with Johnsonian lamentations over ‘my inveterate laziness and procrastination’. ‘Not up till 10 (curse this laziness),’ he writes and chides himself for doing nothing except utter good resolutions. ‘Very tired and greatly disposed to curse my fate,’ he notes. For Shaw to be off his work has all the pathos of a domestic animal not eating. He loses strength; he loses authority over himself. ‘For weeks now I have been going to bed at 2 and not getting up until 11,’ he admits. Often he starts towards his desk, only to find himself seated at the piano. ‘Restless and full of work in the morning,’ he writes for 9 October 1889; ‘but only sat down at the piano after all and played Parsifal with a very deep sense of it all.’ He is disgusted with this waste of time but goes on playing and singing nonetheless. When he shakes off this idleness and works strictly to timetable, he is overcome by fits of giddiness. Even his mother notices how his hands shake and his nerves are stretched. Is his diet insufficiently austere? he wonders. Perhaps his teeth are at fault. Finally, he admits: ‘Am driving myself too hard,’ and tries, unsuccessfully, to take it easy by means of more exercise.
Anything in the style of a holiday unnerved him. Early in 1888, he experimented with a Sunday on the Surrey Hills.
‘The uneven, ankle-twisting roads; the dusty hedges; the ditch with its dead dogs, rank weeds, and swarms of poisonous flies; the groups of children torturing something; the dull, toil-broken, prematurely old agricultural laborer; the savage tramp; the manure heaps with their horrible odor; the chain of mile-stones from inn to inn, from cemetery to cemetery... From the village street into the railway station is a leap across five centuries from the brutalizing torpor of Nature’s tyranny over Man into the order and alertness of Man’s organized dominion over Nature.’
The following year he went on his first trip to the Continent: a week in April to the Netherlands, reporting on an opera for The Star. ‘My worst forebodings have been realized,’ he assured William Archer. Antwerp was ‘exactly like Limerick, only duller’; and, like the Liffey in Dublin, the ‘smell of the canal disgusted me with the Hague’. On the way back he sat on deck all night and was ingloriously sick. ‘Nature conspires with you in vain to palm off the Continent on me as a success,’ he wrote to Archer.
Three months later The Star’s music critic was sick en route for Bayreuth. ‘Carried out my program successfully,’ he noted in his diary – four articles on Wagner, and such vigorous sight-seeing through Germany that he split his mackintosh ‘like a trick coat in a farce’. Returning from a six-day ordeal in Paris the following spring, Shaw’s admission of having been ‘Very sick crossing... thoroughly wet and cold’ was turned by the music critic into a plea for the Channel Tunnel, but for the want of which The Star ‘would be as great a musical power in Europe as it is in England’.
In August 1890 he attempted a summer holiday with Sidney Webb, the one man whose dislike of all holidaymaking exceeded his own. Their destination was the Passion Play at Oberammergau where, in a downpour of rain, Shaw bounded up the mountainside leaving Webb, seated among trees at its base, apparently ‘writing an article on municipal death duties...’
Though he gradually grew bolder, he quickly regretted it. From Italy, where he went on a tour organized by the Art Workers’ Guild in the autumn of 1891, he wrote complaining to William Morris of ‘the fearful solitude created by these 27 men, most of whom have taken up art as the last refuge of general incompetence’. This was an untypical rebuke from Shaw, indicating the extent of his irritation at having to travel as a devout Catholic in order to obtain vegetarian meals. ‘On reflection,’ he added, ‘I doubt if this remark will bear examination: I suppose it is in the nature of such an expedition that we should all appear fools to one another.’
If there was anything Shaw learnt, it was how travel narrowed the mind. His one weapon, language, broke in his hand and he concluded that the only country you could learn about by going abroad was your own. He also came to recognize how much closer you could feel to those whom you had left behind. There was an increasing number of people for him to feel close to in this way: for example, Grace Gilchrist. ‘I have no doubt Miss Gilchrist fell in love with you,’ another Fabian, Marjorie Davidson, assured him.
It seemed impossible for a young man and woman to have a friendship in Victorian Britain that was not tainted by assumptions of marriage. Shaw’s attentions to Grace Gilchrist were much whispered over. He singled her out for long talks; he addressed letters to her and noted each sighting in his diary; he wrote music to Browning’s ‘I go to find my soul’ for her. But by 1888 they were joined, not in marriage, but in a bond of misunderstanding. On Easter Day, Grace’s friend the novelist Emma Brooke called on Shaw and ‘heaped abuse on me’. It was like a plot from one of his novels: Shaw embodying the new morality; Grace, struggling unhappily through socialism to escape the marriage market; and Miss Brooke valuing her friend’s happiness above Shaw’s principles. ‘Write no more letters,’ Emma Brooke instructed him after he had tried to explain himself. ‘In letters we do not seem able to touch any point of mutual comprehension.’ Eventually she infuriated Shaw by returning his letters unopened. But by then, he had come to realize that there was ‘Great Gossip about Grace Gilchrist’ and even her family had counted on their marriage. It was exasperating.
On Hampstead Heath nine months later, Grace and Shaw hurried past each other without a word. Both felt that injustice had been done, Grace to her genuine feelings, Shaw to his good intentions, and no words had been able to reconcile such feelings and intentions. If Shaw treated Grace’s unhappiness rather easily, this was partly because, compared with the awful poverty which was the chief concern of the Fabians, her romantic disappointment seemed almost an indulgence. He had enjoyed Grace’s company and he seems to have found her good-looking. But he had never proposed marriage; he had never compromised her sexually; and if he had compromised her socially then it was due to absurd mores which she should have been too intelligent to accept.
‘Someday a pair of dark eyes, a fierce temperament and a woman will obtain your body and soul,’ Elinor Huddart had written to him. If he was on the lookout for such a creature, it was in order to avoid her. Even before the Gilchrist excitement was over, Shaw was gazing at ‘a pretty girl named Geraldine Spooner’. He neither pursued the ‘fair and fluffy’ Miss Spooner nor ignored her but, after two years doing neither, decided that he was ‘rather in love with Geraldine’ – after which he saw a good deal less of her. He seemed to her ‘a strange and very wonderful looking man, tall, and thin as a whipping post’. He had walked her to railway stations and they had eaten lunches at an Aerated Bread Shop. Each seemed to be presenting the other with opportunities for taking the initiative and neither of them took it – until, Shaw’s lack of initiative growing excessive, Geraldine married the philosopher Herbert Wildon Carr. As soon as it was too late Shaw plunged into action, advancing on ‘my old love Geraldine’, in spite of the desperate fact of her now living in Surrey.
If I could truly now declare
I love but you alone...
But he couldn’t. The visit had been in the nature of a reconnaissance – to learn whether the Carrs might grow into another of those families where he could act the Sunday husband. When Geraldine drove him off to the station in the horse cart, he made straight for the Salts where his Sunday husbandship was by now well-established.
Shaw was a lifelong admirer of Henry Salt. They shared many tastes – Ruskin and Shelley, vegetarianism and anti-vivisection. But though Shaw described his Old Etonian socialist colleague as ‘a born revolutionist’ he seemed more of a born naturalist, armed only with binoculars and eventually ‘working all day at my profession which is looking for, and at wildflowers’. Salt, who was ‘the mildest-mannered man that ever defied society’, made a centre for his reforming spirit in the Humanitarian League of which he was a co-founder and whose journals, dedicated to the abolition of blood sports, corporal punishment, the death penalty and the commercial vulgarization of the countryside, he edited for a quarter of a century.
At the Salts Shaw bathed, rode on a tandem tricycle, made friends with Cosy, ‘a cat of fearful passions’, put into practice his special theories of bed-making and washing-up, cheated outrageously at an exhibition of table turning, gossiped, sang and played a great quantity of piano duets with Mrs Salt – and that was all he did. There was no need for ‘gallantries’ with Kate Salt since she only fell in love with other women. She treated Shaw as a confidant but she felt an idealized love for Edward Carpenter who was homosexual. This preference sometimes riled Shaw. ‘Attacked Carpenter rather strongly over his lecture – perhaps too strongly,’ he confessed in his diary. In Shaw’s opinion, Carpenter exalted Kate’s lesbianism into a cult (she called herself an Urning, one of the chosen race). Her problems would vanish when she had two or three children to look after. Kate hated this chilling cheeriness of Shaw’s. ‘Mrs Salt complained considerably of me,’ he revealed after a breezy visit in 1896:
‘...said she believed I had been practising scales (an unheard-of accusation); said I was in a destructively electrical condition and made her feel that she wanted to cry; said that if I undressed in the dark when going to bed, sparks would come out of me; and generally made me conscious of a grinding, destroying energy, and a heart transmuted to adamant... I am really only fit for intercourse with sensitive souls when I am broken and weary.’
*
Shaw counted his friendship with the Salts as one of the most successful of his triangular liaisons. More questionable were the appearances he was making in the family life of William Morris’s daughter, May.
For years he had enveloped May Morris in a romantic haze that emanated from his feelings for what she called ‘the father’. ‘Great men are fabulous monsters, like unicorns, griffins, dragons, and heraldic lions,’ Shaw was to write. ‘...William Morris was great not only among little men but among great ones.’ He still saw Morris as a crusader, struggling to make nasty people nice and ugly places beautiful. To go from the barren places of the Fabians to the ‘Morris paradise’ at their house in Hammersmith was wonderfully refreshing. Shaw went there often and sometimes, he owned, ‘to see May Morris’. In what was to become a famous passage Shaw tells of a particular incident between them that took place in 1886.
‘One Sunday evening after lecturing and supping, I was on the threshold of the Hammersmith house when I turned to make my farewell, and at this moment she came from the diningroom into the hall. I looked at her, rejoicing in her lovely dress and lovely self; and she looked at me very carefully and quite deliberately made a gesture of assent with her eyes. I was immediately conscious that a Mystic Betrothal was registered in heaven, to be fulfilled when all the material obstacles should melt away, and my own position rescued from the squalors of my poverty and unsuccess... I made no sign at all: I had no doubt that the thing was written on the skies for both of us.’
Characteristically, this metaphysical episode contains and conceals the truth. When Shaw submitted it fifty years later as part of his Introduction to the second volume of May’s book on her father, she allowed its publication. ‘People who don’t count will view it as an amusing romance in the Shaw manner, and those who count – so few left – will read it understanding.’
The Shaw manner suggests that he treated May as an ornament in her father’s Pre-Raphaelite world. She was a picture, not real; something to look at and never touch. But she had never occupied the jewelled place he ascribed to her in the William Morris world. ‘Yes, well, of course I’m a remarkable woman,’ she later told him, ‘ – always was, though none of you seemed to think so.’ The affair was one of suppers, songs, socialism. He wooed her politically, tried to seduce her from the Socialist League to the Fabians: ‘I shall have to overcome my shyness of the Fabians – they are all so gruesomely respectable,’ she protested. It was Shaw’s respectability that made her shy. It was like a strait-jacket and he an inspired lunatic, tied hand and foot. Sometimes he made her laugh so much she felt enfeebled the next day; and it was beautiful to hear him lecture so passionately. ‘I don’t know if you are aware that our audiences love you very much,’ she told him; ‘their faces broaden with pleasure when we promise them that if they are good Bernard Shaw shall be their next teacher.’ Did he love her? It seemed impossible to tell. ‘You have succeeded in perplexing me. I don’t believe I know you a bit better now than when we were first acquainted,’ she wrote to him, after they had known each other for more than a year. ‘Inscrutable man! I suppose this is your form of vanity.’
He seems to have been terrified of the unhappiness he would risk if she became real. Instinctively he countered fear with fear, making her feel that, although she wanted to be close to him, ‘you keep me in a constant state of terror by your fantastic sarcasms, so I suppose it is impossible’. Sometimes, in her frustration, she was short-tempered: ‘I do not know what possesses me to be always so rude when you are invariably kind and courteous to me,’ she apologized. In another letter she referred to ‘our harmless personal relations’. After a year or more of harmlessness, she turned elsewhere. Early in April 1886, Shaw wrote in his diary: ‘Came back with Sparling, who told me of the love affair between him and May Morris.’ Henry Halliday Sparling was a socialist colleague, ‘a tall slim immature man,’ Shaw decided, ‘with a long thin neck on champagne bottle shoulders’.
Shortly afterwards May wrote Shaw a letter accepting, as it were, his mystic rejection of her the previous year. ‘Your resolution when we became acquainted not to make love was most judicious and worthy of all praise, having, as you say, the most entirely satisfying results. I dont think our intercourse could have caused you more pleasure than it has me.’
Her irony was well-merited. By treating May Morris as a woman-on-a-pedestal, Shaw exhibited all the sentimental idealism he later attacked so vividly in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The insignificance of Sparling amounted almost to an invitation for Shaw to supplant him. But still he could not escape the strait-jacket. ‘So nothing happened,’ he wrote, ‘except that the round of Socialist agitation went on and brought us together from time to time.’ They spent almost a week together at Kelmscott Manor in August 1888, Shaw rowing and sailing on the river, playing hide and seek, shooting bows and arrows, guessing ‘animal, vegetable or mineral’ with various children, and feeling very happy. But on 14 June 1890, May married Sparling.
‘This was perfectly natural, and entirely my own fault for taking the Mystical Betrothal for granted; but... [Sparling] was even less eligible than I was; for he was no better off financially; and, though he could not be expected to know this, his possibilities of future eminence were more limited.’
Yet Shaw, who had accepted the love affair, could not accept the marriage. In fantasy, he saw May as belonging to her father: William Morris was her man. By marrying her, Sparling had violated the idyllic union between father and daughter that Shaw in ‘my limitless imagination’ had dreamed into existence, with himself understudying the great William Morris.
He continued seeing the Sparlings, playing the piano with May sometimes till past midnight, as if nothing had happened. One evening, in the summer of 1891, after leaving Hammersmith for Jenny Patterson’s house in Brompton Square, he noted: ‘May only appeared as I was leaving... Gloomy evening. Sorry I left Hammersmith.’ But was there any need to leave? That autumn he began staying at Hammersmith odd nights; and then having, as it were, placed one foot in the door, he felt obligated to call on the other foot to follow. Fitzroy Square seemed ‘unbearable’ when, late in 1892, the building was being redecorated. To escape the smell of paint, and of the drains, he moved to Hammersmith Terrace for part of November, December and January 1893. This was the nearest he came to impersonating Vandeleur Lee and reproducing the Dublin ménage à trois. His description of these months, though revealing the satisfaction this arrangement gave him (he even borrowed ‘a change of clothes from Sparling’), is skilfully disingenuous. The ‘young couple... invited me to stay with them awhile. I accepted, and so found myself most blessedly resting and content in their house...
‘Everything went well for a time in that ménage-à-trois... It was probably the happiest passage in our three lives.
But the violated Betrothal was avenging itself. It made me from the first the centre of the household; and when I had quite recovered and there was no longer any excuse for staying unless I proposed to do so permanently and parasitically, her legal marriage had dissolved as all illusions do; and the mystic marriage asserted itself irresistibly. I had to consummate it or vanish.’
Like George Carr Shaw, Sparling had been reduced to nullity in the house. Shaw’s explanation for what happened went naturally back to his childhood. ‘My mother was enabled to bear a disappointing marriage by the addition to our household of a musician of genius,’ he wrote. ‘...I had therefore, to my own great advantage, been brought up in a ménage à trois, and knew that it might be a quite innocent and beneficial arrangement.’ In Shaw’s scheme, the music critic of the 1890s must do nothing that the musician of genius had not done in the 1860s. ‘I was perfectly content to leave all that to Sparling and go on Platonically,’ he added, ‘but May was not.’ So there was no alternative but to leave.
But Shaw left less convincingly than Sparling. For having gone, he often returned to Hammersmith, admiring her embroidery, reading poetry and ‘playing all the evening with May’. Soon she started calling for tea at Fitzroy Square – ‘the worst of it was she always wore her heart on her sleeve,’ Lucy Shaw remembered, ‘and everyone knew about her madness for G[eorge]’. They seemed to go everywhere together – to concerts, theatres; on long walks in the park; for skating and sculling along the river together between Chiswick and Barnes (‘and got abominably blistered’).
Shaw’s conviction that this ménage à trois ‘was probably the happiest passage in our three lives’ has the same Panglossian ring as his description of George Carr Shaw’s last years in Dublin after Bessie and the children had left: ‘the happiest time of his life’. Sparling apparently believed that Shaw and May had slept together. In the summer of 1893 they had even gone to Zurich – with sixty other members of the British delegation to the International Socialist Workers’ Congress. In any event, Shaw captivated May who ‘might have been an iceberg so far as her future relations with her husband went’. Sparling finally went to live in Paris. ‘The ménage which had prospered so pleasantly as a ménage-à-trois proved intolerable as a ménage-à-deux,’ Shaw wrote. ‘Of the particulars of the rupture I know nothing; but in the upshot he fled to the Continent and eventually submitted chivalrously to being divorced as the guilty party, though the alternative was technically arranged for him.’
Shaw made Sparling into a Hardyesque figure pursued by the remorseless Fates, while he himself is an observer of this retribution. But it is difficult to credit that he knew ‘nothing’ of the particulars of the rupture he had caused. How, for example, did he know that Sparling had legal grounds for obtaining a divorce against May – the ‘alternative’ that had been ‘technically arranged for him’ – unless perhaps that technicality had been arranged on one of the nights he slept at her house? But by the time Sparling left, Shaw had entered a new triangular liaison. In his imagination, May had returned to the immortal William Morris and her predestined place for all time. Even Morris’s death in 1896 could not alter this: ‘You can lose a man like that by your own death,’ Shaw wrote, ‘but not by his.’ May’s divorce (decree nisi) from Sparling became law on 18 July 1898. ‘May and I discontent one another extremely,’ Shaw admitted, ‘carefully avoiding the subject we are both thinking of. I mount my bike and fly.’
May reverted to her maiden name, and never remarried. ‘I made a mess of things then,’ she wrote, ‘and always, and [have] only myself to blame for a waste of life.’ But thirty years later she could accept Shaw’s re-creation of their relationship because by then it was ‘a story out of another world’, as it always had been for him.
Only a musician’s appreciation has any gratification for me.
Shaw to Neville Cardus (6 January 1939)
The first duty for ‘The Star’s Own Captious Critic’ was to invent a resounding pseudonym: Corno di Bassetto.
The basset horn had been used by Mozart in his Requiem because of its ‘peculiar watery melancholy’; Shaw’s musical journalism was designed to drive melancholy away, as music itself had driven melancholy from his Dublin home. Lee’s music had not unified Shaw’s mother and father, but under its spell Sonny had been able to forget the divisions in the house. If there was love during those years, it was love conveyed by the play of musical instruments and the coming together of voices. The miraculous world of opera became a necessity in Shaw’s life. What others found in loving relationships, Shaw believed he experienced in music. The years of self-tuition from mastering the classics in piano transcription in Dublin to the study of musical treatises in the British Museum, the lessons in harmony and counterpoint, and the long variety of piano duets with everyone’s wife, amounted to an unsentimental labour of love. For him words were the ‘counters of thinking, not of feeling’, and music ‘the sublimest of the arts’.
Between February 1885 and February 1889 he had written some ninety thousand words of music criticism for the Dramatic Review, the Magazine of Music, the Pall Mall Gazette. In these papers the spirit of ‘Corno di Bassetto’ was conceived. The readership of The Star was ‘the bicycle clubs and the polytechnics’, not ‘the Royal Society of Literature or the Musical Association’. The collaboration he now started between Star-writer and Star-reader, and the changes he imposed on himself to make this collaboration effective, were part of the human engineering behind his development into a public man. What had begun with almost-an-apology was to become almost-a-boast. In a letter to the conductor August Manns two months before the birth of Bassetto, he had written: ‘The writer who ventures to criticize you in a public newspaper is... a person of no consequence whatever... and he was never more astonished and flattered in his life than when he learned that his irresponsible sallies had attracted your attention.’
This, the voice of Shaw’s father, appeared to be drowned in later years by a clamour of self-approval, and was only heard again when he confronted people such as Rodin or Einstein, who had not made the sort of public compromise at which G.B.S. excelled. His attitude to this compromise sometimes betrays the self-disgust that was one side of his nature. ‘I daresay these articles would seem shabby, vulgar, cheap, silly, vapid enough if they were dug up and exposed to the twentieth century light,’ he wrote of his Bassetto pieces in 1906. In his Preface, written in 1935, to the publication of London Music in 1888–89 As Heard by Corno di Bassetto, Shaw’s tone has shifted: ‘Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author’s equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus... I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was then refined and academic to the point of being unreadable and often nonsensical.’
To perform his job of making ‘deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music’ it was vital to convince everyone that he knew nothing.
‘When people hand me a sheet of instrumental music, and ask my opinion of it, I carefully hold it upside down, and pretend to study it in that position with the eye of an expert. When they invite me to try their new grand piano, I attempt to open it at the wrong end; and when the young lady of the house informs me that she is practising the ’cello, I innocently ask her whether the mouthpiece did not cut her lips dreadfully at first.’
This is the voice of the irresistible G.B.S./Bassetto – and Shaw means us not to resist, but to laugh and swallow his words and then discover that what we have assimilated is his burning sense of undervaluation and the resentment he felt at having to overcome it with such imposture. Bassetto’s business ‘is not to be funny, but to be accurate’; he explains that ‘seriousness is only a small man’s affectation of bigness’, but that ‘there is nothing so serious as great humor’. Though spoken of as severe, Bassetto speaks of himself as ‘lenient, almost foolishly goodnatured’. He never indulges in the cruel practice of giving misleading flattery. He has his passions: he hates the banjo (‘If it be true that the Prince of Wales banjoizes, then I protest against his succession to the throne’); he hates the interruptions of encores and the habit of bouquet-throwing (the poor artists having to take the same vast bouquet to performance after performance to have it spontaneously hurled at them); he hates the old (Mendelssohn) when used as an obstacle to the new (Wagner); and he hates audiences, especially the practised coughers who should be removed to Piccadilly where their ailment can be treated ‘by gently passing a warm steam-roller over their chests’. More annoying still were the men who beat time – one actually did it by shooting his ears up and down. ‘Imagine the sensation of looking at a man with his ears pulsating 116 times per minute in a quick movement from one of Verdi’s operas.’
But his chief objection to aristocracy-ridden London audiences was their imposition on music of artificial social standards. A wastefully competitive system obliged managers to convert opera houses and concert halls into fashionable post-prandial resorts. Intervals, which for many were the main events of the evening, were extended so that part of the audience was still chattering at full blast while the music was being played. Bassetto did not lack for a solution. The soldiers at present placed for show purposes in the vestibule should be moved into the stalls where they could turn their rifles on anyone who disturbed a performance. He urged the use of convict labour for the chorus and scene-shifting, and the taxing of private box-holders at twenty shillings in the pound to finance a Public Entertainments Trust under the chairmanship of Corno di Bassetto. After which they could get rid of the sham classical performances that had made the British into a race of cultural humbugs. ‘The hypocrisy of culture, like other cast-off fashions, finds its last asylum among the poor,’ he wrote.
Shaw calculated that the sort of social criticism that the editor T. P. O’Connor had found unendurable on the political pages of The Star would be acceptable when paraded through its musical columns. His objections to the tyranny of evening dress were famous. Bassetto disliked wearing the uniform of an idealist ‘class of gentlemen to which I do not belong, and should be ashamed to belong’. In his eyes, it acted as a false passport. ‘Next season, I shall purchase a stall for the most important evening I can select,’ Shaw threatened Augustus Harris, the cautious manager of Covent Garden Opera House. ‘I shall dress in white flannels.
‘I shall then hire for the evening the most repulsive waiter I can find in the lowest oyster shop in London. I shall rub him with bacon crackling, smooth his hair with fried sausages, shower stale gravy upon him, season him with Worcester sauce, and give him just enough drink to make him self-assertive without making him actually drunk. With him I shall present myself at the stalls; explain that he is my brother; and that we have arranged that I am to see the opera unless evening dress is indispensable, in which case my brother, being in evening dress, will take my place.’
Shaw admitted the easy advantages of a compulsory costume that was cheap, simple, durable. It ‘prevents rivalry and extravagance on the part of the male leaders of fashion,’ he wrote, ‘annihilates class distinctions, and gives men who are poor and doubtful of their social position (that is, the majority of men) a sense of security and satisfaction’. Such arguments applied equally to women’s clothes: yet they were free to pursue private enterprise with horrible consequences:
‘At 9 o’clock (the Opera began at 8) a lady came in and sat down very conspicuously in my line of sight. She remained there until the beginning of the last act. I do not complain of her coming late and going early: on the contrary, I wish she had come later and gone earlier. For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly as if someone had killed it by stamping on its breast and then nailed it to the lady’s temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to bear the operation... I presume that if I had presented myself at the doors with a dead snake round my neck, a collection of blackbeetles pinned to my shirtfront, and a grouse in my hair, I should have been refused admission. Why, then, is a woman to be allowed to commit such a public outrage?... I suggest to the Covent Garden authorities that, if they feel bound to protect their subscribers against the danger of my shocking them with a blue tie, they are at least equally bound to protect me against the danger of a woman shocking me with a dead bird.’
Bassetto’s ‘Musical Mems’ were a continual protest against distractions from good musical performance. The worse the music, the more Bassetto diversified. Readers liked to hear of the voice trainer who hit his pupils, declaring that it was the only method to make them produce the vowel o; they liked to discover Bassetto himself, after a visit to the ballet, at dawn the next day with a policeman, a postman and a milkman (‘who unfortunately broke his leg’) attempting pirouettes and entrechats in Fitzroy Square; they liked, as part of a teetotal campaign, his plea for dancing in church, which just stopped short of converting Westminster Abbey into a ballroom; they even accepted his rank socialism: ‘What we want is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves.’
Almost the only person not to be diverted was T. P. O’Connor. Bassetto had fabricated for the public a very pretty relationship between critic and editor. But the reality was unpleasant. ‘I find it impossible to continue as I have been doing lately,’ Shaw told Massingham early in 1890. ‘This week I have had to attend five concerts; have advanced fourteen shillings from my exhausted exchequer; and have written the Bassetto column, all for two guineas.’ But T. P. O’Connor refused to increase Bassetto’s salary. He wanted to be rid of him and of his attempts to turn his Liberal paper into a Socialist one. But to do so would make him one of the most unpopular editors in London. So he starved him out. Bassetto had sometimes made fun of his own resignation – ‘this threat never fails to bring Stonecutter Street to its knees,’ he told readers; ‘though, lest too frequent repetition should blunt it, I am careful not to employ it more than three times in any one week.’ In private, Shaw was driven by destitution to walk to and from many of the concerts and to wait a year for the repayment of some of his expenses.
By the early summer of 1890 their relationship had grown so strained that ‘we came to the very grave point of having to exchange assurances that we esteemed one another beyond all created mortals’. The day O’Connor had been looking forward to arrived in the middle of May 1890, when Bassetto of The Star became G.B.S. of The World. It was William Archer who persuaded Yates to re-employ Shaw. ‘Arranged to take the musical criticship of The World,’ Shaw wrote in his diary on 14 May, ‘if T. P. O’Connor has nothing to say to the contrary.’ In his own style, O’Connor had everything to say in its favour. ‘I am extremely glad to hear you have got the excellent offer of The World,’ he congratulated Shaw the next day. ‘...Take the offer by all means.’ Above Corno di Bassetto’s last column which appeared on 16 May, O’Connor stuck a discordant adieu: ‘The larger salary of a weekly organ of the classes has proved too much for the virtue even of a Fabian.’ ‘After the malediction, the valediction,’ Bassetto countered, and went on to show how all grievance (though not forgotten) could be submerged in humour:
‘A man who, like myself, has to rise regularly at eleven o’clock every morning cannot sit up night after night writing opera notices... I ask some indulgence for my successor, handicapped as he will be for a time by the inevitable comparison... I hope he will never suffer the musical department of the Star to lose that pre-eminence which has distinguished it throughout the administration of “Corno di Bassetto”.’
*
The character adopted by G.B.S. in The World was less dramatic than Bassetto. Anyone who made him laugh melted most of the criticism out of him. By offering the most far-fetched comparisons and analogies as stepping stones to his conclusions – the training of circus horses to compose dance music or the installation on the site of the prompter’s box of a steam crane to hoist despairing critics out of their seats and drop them at the refreshment bar – G.B.S. amused the deaf stockbrokers, but also encouraged them to overlook what lay behind these fantasies, and to dismiss his serious recommendations as more absurdity. For the first time in his writing a note of exasperated despair sounds over the misreading of his careful statements. ‘It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.’
Shaw’s method of judging music, he once stated, was to do with his ears what he did with his eyes when he stared. Some critics imposed on the public by displays of ‘scientific analysis’. G.B.S. resented this fashion for ‘silly little musical parsing exercises to impress the laity’. In one of his most effective debunking feats, he parodied this scholarly pretentiousness with a comparable ‘analysis’ of Hamlet’s soliloquy on death:
‘Shakespear, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop.’
Academic preconceptions, G.B.S. argued, had encouraged a ruck of ‘barren professors of the art of doing what has been done before and need not be done again’. He detected a gentlemanly gang at work in the musical world, and it was with outcast irony that he asked: ‘who am I that I should be believed, to the disparagement of eminent musicians?’ Commenting on Professor Stanford’s Eden, he continued:
‘If you doubt that Eden is a masterpiece, ask Dr Parry and Dr Mackenzie, and they will applaud it to the skies. Surely Dr Mackenzie’s opinion is conclusive: for is he not the composer of Veni Creator, guaranteed as excellent music by Professor Stanford and Dr Parry? You want to know who Dr Parry is? Why, the composer of Blest Pair of Sirens, as to the merits of which you have only to consult Dr Mackenzie and Professor Stanford.’
As early as 1885 Shaw made out his historical case against the persisting influence of these composers. ‘Our really serious music is no longer recognized as religious,’ he wrote, ‘whilst our professedly religious music... is only remarkable as naїve blasphemy, wonderfully elaborated, and convinced of its own piety.
‘It was Mendelssohn who popularized the pious romancing which is now called sacred music; in other words, the Bible with the thought left out. M. Gounod proved his capacity in this direction by giving us Faust with all Goethe’s thought left out, the result having been so successful (and, it must be confessed, so irresistibly charming), it is natural that he should turn his attention to the Bible, which is worshipped in England so devoutly by people who never open it, that a composer has but to pick a subject, or even a name, from it, to ensure a half-gagged criticism and the gravest attention for his work, however trivial.’
G.B.S. was merciless on the ‘flagrant pedantry... and waste of musical funds’ which the oratorio market produced for English festivals. ‘I do not know how it is possible to listen to these works without indignation, especially in circumstances implying a parallel between them and the genuine epic stuff of Handel.’ Had oratorio been invented in Dante’s time, ‘the seventh circle in his Inferno would have been simply a magnified Albert Hall, with millions of British choristers stolidly singing, All that hath life and breath, sing to the Lord, in the galleries, and the condemned, kept awake by demons, in the arena, clothed in evening dress’.
He was obliged to listen to a good deal of work by contemporary composers: Sir Frederick Cowen, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Charles Stanford, Sir Arthur Sullivan, and other knights and bachelors of music, most of whose works he would happily have committed ‘to the nearest County Council “destructor”’. Sullivan, a musician of care and refinement, who had spent over twenty years composing for the drawing-room and the Church, achieved success through a burlesque of the classics he revered. ‘They trained him to make Europe yawn; and he took advantage of their teaching to make London and New York laugh and whistle.’ In Stanford, G.B.S. detected a similar division exposed by the ‘somewhat scandalous’ success of his Irish Symphony, into which Shaw read ‘a record of fearful conflict between the aboriginal Celt and the Professor’.
Here was a beginning in his quest for a formula that, with its symbol of a reconciled England and Ireland, would integrate inherited factors in such deep conflict that they had forced his parents to occupy separate countries and were eventually to neutralize himself as a man without nationality. For who was Shaw to censure Stanford for not displaying his emotions in public? Yet it is partly as self-censure, self-analysis and self-encouragement that we should read such passages:
‘When Professor Stanford is genteel, cultured, classic, pious, and experimentally mixolydian, he is dull beyond belief. His dullness is all the harder to bear because it is the restless, ingenious, trifling, flippant dullness of the Irishman, instead of the stupid, bovine, sleepable-through dullness of the Englishman... Far from being a respectable oratorio-manufacturing talent, it is, when it gets loose, eccentric, violent, romantic, patriotic, and held in check only by a mortal fear of being found deficient in what are called “the manners and tone of good society”. This fear, too, is Irish: it is, possibly, the racial consciousness of having missed that four hundred years of Roman civilization which gave England a sort of university education when Ireland was in the hedge school.
In those periods when nobody questions the superiority of the university to the hedge school, the Irishman, lamed by a sense of inferiority, blusters most intolerably... Then the fashion changes; Ruskin leads young Oxford out into the hedge school to dig roads; there is general disparagement in advanced circles of civilization, the university, respectability, law and order... This reaction is the opportunity of the Irishman in England to rehabilitate his self-respect, since it gives him a standpoint from which he can value himself as a hedge-school man... If he seizes the opportunity, he may end in founding a race of cultivated Irishmen whose mission in England will be to teach Englishmen to play with their brains as well as with their bodies; for it is all work and no play in the brain department that makes John Bull such an uncommonly dull boy.’
His few aberrations in judgement usually arise from treating music historically, that is, with the type of academic measuring-rod he scorns. He placed Hermann Goetz ‘above all other German composers of the last hundred years, save only Mozart and Beethoven, Weber and Wagner’, partly because his Symphony in F was technically and intellectually more symphonic in form than any by Schumann or Schubert. He undervalued Schubert and considered him overplayed because ‘I could not see that Schubert added anything to Mozart & Beethoven except sugar: and though the sugar was extraordinarily rich and sweet, I rather jumped over him to Mendelssohn’. Music composed out of the dramatic instinct (such as Goetz’s Taming of the Shrew) attracted him far more than anything intimate. He was sometimes a poor judge of chamber music because it tended to conflict with his commitment to twenty-four-hours-a-day cheerfulness.
He sniped at Brahms, insisting that with all his great powers of utterance he had nothing to say (‘Brahms’ enormous gift of music is paralleled by nothing on earth but Mr Gladstone’s gift of words’). Shaw’s hostility to Brahms focused on his Requiem (‘patiently borne only by the corpse’). In 1947 he explained that ‘the first performances of Brahms’s Requiem in London were dreadfully and insincerely mock-solemn and dull. Now that I know the work, its fugal bits and march music amuse me; and its one Mendelssohnic chorus is a favourite of mine.’ But this explanation cannot conceal Shaw’s antipathy to all near-contemporary religious music, especially when connected with death. He empties these works of poetry and makes them colossal monuments to boredom. He literally cannot listen to them.
But when he listens to other music it is with acute attentiveness. Whenever possible before a performance he studied the score and would expose cuts, interpolations and other textual deviations, as well as derivations from the work of other composers. His descriptions of performers have an exactness that enables us to differentiate one from another precisely: the exuberant hammer-play of Paderewski, the cool muscular strength of another musical gymnast, Slivinski, a prodigiously rapid pianist of the Leschetizky school, and the hugely energetic Rubinstein, a player of marvellous manual dexterity limited by his narrowness of intellectual sympathy. Among violinists he discriminates so finely between the judgement of Reményi, the sensitive hand of Sarasate, Joachim’s peculiarly thoughtful style and the self-assertiveness of Ysaÿe that we can almost hear their playing. He analyses the varying styles of the conductors from Richard Wagner and Richter to Henschel’s London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Hallé’s Manchester concerts, and the Saturday concerts led by August Manns at the Crystal Palace. He brings in reports from music halls and from amateur events in the country such as the brass band of shoemakers playing on a racecourse at Northampton – the sort of place where the music of the country was kept alive. He argues that public opera houses are as essential to people as public museums and public galleries, and a powerful competition to public houses. He wants to transform this brainless country ‘where you cannot have even a cheap piano provided for the children to march to in a Board School without some mean millionaire or other crying out that the rates will ruin him’. Among his targets for criticism are charity concerts that promoted bad music for well-meaning ends, as if a good orchestra was not as ‘important to a town as a good hospital’.
The critic who amused stockbrokers in the 1880s and 1890s was to become one of our best guides to the history of music performed in England during the late nineteenth century. He had perfected the Shavian note – assertive, audacious, fantastic, expertly wrapped round with the illusion of intimacy – until he became his own description of the confident journalist-critic: ‘magnificently endowed with the superb quality which we dishonor by the ignoble name of Cheek – a quality which has enabled men from time immemorial to fly without wings, and to live sumptuously without incomes’.
‘The critic who is modest is lost,’ Shaw wrote. But he also knew the damage that could be done to those who, to gain the popular ear, force ‘vulgarity upon a talent that is naturally quiet and sympathetic’.
Very few people in the world have ever had a love affair.
‘Beethoven’s “Unsterbliche Geliebte”’, The World (1 November 1893)
Florence Farr was ‘an amiable woman, with semicircular eyebrows’ whom Shaw describes in his portrait of Grace Tranfield from The Philanderer: ‘slight of build, delicate of feature, and sensitive in expression... but her well closed mouth, proudly set brows, firm chin, and elegant carriage shew plenty of determination and self-respect’. She was four years younger than Shaw and unlike any woman he had met. She seemed to resemble some of the New Women he had optimistically invented in his novels. It was partly her feminism that had brought her to William Morris’s house in Hammersmith where she was learning embroidery with May through whom, in about 1890, she met Shaw.
He had seen her act in John Todhunter’s A Sicilian Idyll, remarking on her ‘striking and appropriate good looks’. Then, on 4 October 1890, he ‘had a long talk’ with her at the private view of an Arts and Crafts exhibition, after which they went ‘gadding about’ to plays and recitals together, to the Pine Apple and Orange Grove restaurants and, for long teas, to ABC shops where he ‘chatted and chatted’ and she ‘laughed and laughed’. He would turn up out of the night at her lodgings in 123 Dalling Road, only half a mile from May Morris, play a little, sing a little, and take her for walks round Ravenscourt Park. ‘First really intimate conversation,’ Shaw recorded after an evening with her on 15 November. As the daughter of a sanitary reformer who had tried to persuade his countrymen that England was dying of dirt, her Shavian provenance was impeccable. She had been schooled in Shakespeare and tap-dancing, then married a handsome actor, Edward Emery, who spent much of his time resting. Florence was not an observant woman: it was almost four years later, in 1888, that she noticed that Edward was no longer there. He had gone to America, leaving her an independent married woman.
Like Jenny Patterson Florence took the initiative over Shaw. ‘As she was clever, goodnatured, and very goodlooking, all her men friends fell in love with her,’ he recalled. Before the end of the year they had become lovers. Shaw made no secret of his love for Florence. ‘Went over to FE in the evening,’ he wrote in his diary on 30 December 1890: and added uncharacteristically, ‘ – a happy evening.’ He told his friends he was in love with her; he told Florence herself she was ‘my other self – no, not my other self, but my very self’, and ‘the happiest of all my great happinesses, the deepest and restfullest of all my tranquillities, the very inmost of all my loves’.
Whenever he felt incapable of further work and craved for exercise, he would leap away from his desk and usually find himself six miles off at Florence’s lodgings, where he ‘let time slip and lost my train back’. One night he arrived to ‘find the place in darkness’. He ‘wandered about disappointed for a time’, then returned to Fitzroy Square, put down the feelings released in him by her absence, and sent them to her as a letter: ‘I have fallen in with my boyhood’s mistress, Solitude, and wandered aimlessly with her once more... reminding me of the days when disappointment seemed my inevitable & constant lot.’
Florence promised him a future he had believed to be impossible. ‘Women tend to regard love as a fusion of body, spirit and mind,’ he later told one of his biographers. ‘It has never been so with me.’ Yet for a time, perhaps a year, it seemed as if it could be so. Florence had, according to W. B. Yeats, ‘three great gifts, a tranquil beauty... an incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice’. For Shaw, her attractiveness lay partly in her beauty and partly in her attitude. Though unpuritanical she was fastidious, ‘claimed 14 lovers’, but retained her independence. ‘When a man begins to make love to me,’ she admitted, ‘I instantly see it as a stage performance.’
Almost before they knew themselves that they were in love, Jenny Patterson knew it. Towards the end of 1890 she had gone abroad, and for almost four months Shaw and Florence saw each other freely. But then, on 27 April 1891, Shaw ‘went in to JP’s. Fearful scene about FE, this being our first meeting since her return from the East. Did not get home until about 3.’ These scenes grew fiercer, but each time she won a battle she won less. ‘Not for forty thousand such relations will I forgo one forty thousandth part of my relation with you,’ Shaw promised Florence. ‘...The silly triumph with which she [Jenny Patterson] takes, with the air of a conqueror, that which I have torn out of my own entrails for her, almost brings the lightning down on her... Damnation! triple damnation! You must give me back my peace.’
Once Jenny Patterson too had given him peace, but it had been a peace of the body only, as she well understood: ‘Any other woman would have brough[t] you the sleep I did.’ After the Annie Besant rumpus, she expected their sexual relationship to go on as before: and to some extent it had. Shaw was neglectful, long-suffering, and passionate by turns. ‘You are beginning again the old games,’ she had warned him in January 1888. But the next month she wrote: ‘Be as ardent as you were last week, it is your place to be so – I adore to be made love to like that. It takes my breath away...’
Yet she could not conceal from herself that his feelings for her were not what they had been ‘when I was dear Mrs Patterson & worth seeing... oh les beaux jours’. Her expectations of him seemed to fade. ‘How my lover is becoming less my lover every month... just thinking of me as a sucking baby does of its mar when it is hungry!’ she had complained on 20 October 1888. ‘Adieu most disappointing of men.’ She could say goodbye, she could not leave him; and the next month she is begging him to ‘write me again so that I may have something to live on until I see you’.
But their relationship had become stale to Shaw. He tried not to hurt her – ‘You are gentle and good nearly always to me,’ she allowed – but increasingly recoiled from the physical centre of their liaison. Nevertheless, though he flirted with Fabian girls and other men’s wives he had made love only to Mrs Patterson and perhaps May Morris until he fell in love with Florence. His love affair with Jenny Patterson had separated sex from other interests. She repeatedly writes of it as if it were a commodity like some bargain at a shop. ‘My boy you got all for nothing – it was not to be bought at any price.’ Sex was everything she had to bargain with, and through it she gave her whole self. She loved him in a way he could not love her. Hers is a small world and her feeling for him so fills it that there is no place for interests or enthusiasms beyond her infatuation. ‘You are my love, my life & all the world to me,’ she writes.
This love was Shaw’s small private hell. Jenny may have been going through the change of life. She weeps, rages, flings a book at his head, provokes quarrels over imaginary offences, breaks off their relationship, arranges a luxurious reconciliation. In his chapter called ‘The Womanly Woman’ from The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw was obviously using his experiences with Jenny Patterson when he describes ‘the infatuation of passionate sexual desire’.
‘Everyone who becomes the object of that infatuation shrinks from it instinctively. Love loses its charm when it is not free... it becomes valueless and even abhorrent, like the caresses of a maniac. The desire to give inspires no affection unless there is also the power to withhold; and the successful wooer, in both sexes alike, is the one who can stand out for honorable conditions, and, failing them, go without.’
Only with his New Woman could he achieve these honourable conditions. Shaw never explained that Florence was infertile. This may help to account for her list of lovers, and why Shaw entered his name on it so prominently. By implication it may also elucidate a mysterious passage from a letter he wrote in 1930 to Frank Harris and later published in Sixteen Self Sketches: ‘If you have any doubts as to my normal virility, dismiss them from your mind. I was not impotent; I was not sterile; I was not homosexual; and I was extremely susceptible, though not promiscuously.’ How then did he know that he was not sterile? The evidence, though meagre, suggests that in the first half of 1886 Jenny Patterson may have had a miscarriage. She had gone to see Shaw’s medical friend Kingston Barton early in February. ‘I have seen “the” Barton,’ she told him and followed this with an enigmatic row of dots. On 10 May, in the first of her desperate pleas to him not to abandon her, she writes of having to hide her predicament from ‘Lucy’s sharp eyes’ and play at being her ‘old self’ to Shaw’s mother: ‘I dread being ill it will all come out I fear then.’ But it is clear from Shaw’s diary that his mother and sister knew of Mrs Patterson’s attachment to him. So there must have been something more to come out. During the spring Jenny Patterson had complained of illness, and her letter of 11 May contains a definite allusion to pregnancy. ‘You cant help wronging me. I trusted you entirely. Had there been results I should have had to bear that also alone.’ So by the second week of May two things were established: that there was now no pregnancy and that they would henceforward experiment with a platonic relationship. The fear of pregnancy and the revulsion caused by a miscarriage could only have been extra brakes to Shaw enjoying sexual intercourse with other women until he met one who was herself sterile. It would also deepen the sexual guilt with which, despite all his freethinking morality, Jenny Patterson had encircled him.
With Florence there was no tyranny or guilt; and from his gratitude arose a dazzling overestimation of ‘the magnetic Miss Farr’. There were times when she could make him feel ‘more deeply moved than I could have imagined’. But she also brought him something deeper than the ‘revulsion’ he had noted against Jenny Patterson’s name, and this, as he put in his diary, was ‘Disillusion’.
After her husband’s disappearance Florence had turned simultaneously towards two writers: W. B. Yeats and Shaw.
Great minds have sought you – lacking someone else
You have been second always...
Ezra Pound assured her:
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up: some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere: and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves...
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that’s quite your own.
Yet this is you.
Both Shaw and Yeats fashioned castles in the air with Florence, their amiable Princess, waving airily from them. While Shaw beckoned her towards a bright future, Yeats serenaded her back to the magical past. To Yeats she could ‘tell everything’; from Shaw she heard everything. Like him she had sent herself to school in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and absorbed a fine store of facts that led nowhere. ‘It is impossible to mention anything she does not know,’ Shaw exclaimed in astonishment. He felt a tremendous challenge to discover some purpose within the debris of her knowledge. She had flirted professionally with the stage before her marriage, and was now preparing to float back to it by way of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. But Shaw ‘delivered to her so powerful a discourse on Rosmersholm that she presently told me that she was resolved to create Rebecca or die’.
Shaw’s fascination with the stage had been intensifying during his fifteen years in London. He had taken part in the copyright performances of one or two plays, acted in various amateur theatricals produced by the Socialist League and a ‘3rd rate comedy’ with May Morris. He had been able to express his feelings for May more accurately on the stage than in real life: ‘I do not love her – I have too much sense for such follies; but I hate and envy the detestable villain who plays her lover with all my soul.’
The stage appealed to Shaw as a place where actions were governed by words. His interest in Florence rapidly concentrated on her acting. ‘I have an extraordinary desire to make the most of you – to make effective & visible all your artistic potentialities,’ he told her. During February 1891 they went through Rosmersholm and from Shaw’s diary come whispers of their excitement.
6 February Went over Rosmersholm (first few scenes) with FE. Found it hard to leave...
11 February... to FE’s. She gave up her intention of going out to dinner and I stayed all the evening. We were playing, singing, trying on Rosmersholm dresses, going over the part etc.
The success of Rosmersholm was moderate and Shaw redoubled his efforts to make Florence’s originality blaze forth. He became her tutor, calling round at Dalling Road to ‘work on her dramatic elocution’ and prepare her during the summer of 1892 for playing Beatrice in The Cenci. The scenes where Owen Jack coaches Madge Brailsford for the stage in Love Among the Artists had invaded life and were to return to fiction in Pygmalion (later Shaw was to advise Florence to study phonetics with Beerbohm Tree, the first Professor Higgins, at his school of drama). The name Doolittle irresistibly suggests Florence. She did not lack intelligence or feeling or beauty; she did not lack voice. But there seemed a ‘frightful vacuity’ at the centre of her life. Shaw strove to plant in this void the seeds of a vigorous and improving energy. She needed will-power, and it was his role to supply this power vicariously from the batteries of his own will.
During rehearsals at the Bedford Park Club on 30 June, Florence fainted but stood up bravely at the opening a fortnight later when ‘the white robe and striking beauty of Beatrice’ were favourably noticed by the anonymous critic of the Daily Chronicle, G. Bernard Shaw. But there were still Himalayas to cross before she could pass as an important leading lady. Behind the beating of Shaw’s optimism emerges a bathos whenever he insists too much on the success of their collaboration: ‘She actually realized greater possibilities than she had (what a sentence!).’
At the same time he had prudently invested his hopes in another actress. ‘Interesting young woman,’ he observed on 16 June 1889, after sitting next to Janet Achurch at a dinner in the Novelty Theatre celebrating the English première of A Doll’s House. Shaw’s mother, who accompanied him to this production, had also been struck by Janet, remarking with conviction: ‘That one’s a divìl.’ But Shaw found himself ‘suddenly magnetized, irradiated, transported, fired, rejuvenated, bewitched’, and sat up till 2 a.m. the following night writing to his ‘wild and glorious young woman’.
Janet was married to another actor, Charles Charrington Martin. Together they had played in a company managed by F. R. Benson, a splendidly incomprehensible actor whose mission to spread Shakespeare through the country was aided by the widespread belief that he was related to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
There was no conventional prettiness to Janet. She was Amazonian. Shaw could never think of her noble outline ‘without imagining myself lost at sea in the night, and turning for refuge toward a distant lighthouse, which, somehow, is you’. Others contemplating her voluptuous appearance thought of Helen and Guinevere and ‘those Northern beauties who strangled the souls and bodies of heroes in the meshes of their golden tresses’.
She and Charles Charrington had signed an agreement to tour Australia and New Zealand for two years. It was with money borrowed in advance of their salary that they had financed one week’s performance of A Doll’s House at the Novelty Theatre.
That Janet was to leave for the other side of the world in less than three weeks stirred Shaw’s feeling magnificently. He saw A Doll’s House five times, and sent her two of his novels. On the morning of 5 July he went to Charing Cross to see them both off on their Australian tour. He had pledged himself to work in Janet’s absence but would find himself wasting time with a long letter to her. She sent him her photograph and asked for his news. He replied, telling her of all the ‘nibblings at Ibsen’ in London and of his own Quintessence. William Archer’s criticism was gaining wonderfully in its recklessness, he added, while ‘I am getting middle-aged and uninteresting. Political drudgery has swamped my literary career altogether. Still, as all the follies of love and ambition fall off from me, my soul burns with a brighter flame.’ Then there was the music criticism: Corno di Bassetto of The Star was dead – long live (on five pounds a week) G.B.S. of The World! ‘Since I began to write for the World, revising my work with great labor and going to great numbers of performances, I have become more and more a slave to art, and can by no means be satisfied with intellectual interest,’ he divulged.
‘...Consequently, my last word tonight shall be said to you, with whom I have no ignoble or unlovely associations... I see you quite distinctly – on the stage of the Novelty... Take courage then; for if you can cast these magic spells on a man thousands of miles away, after years – centuries – of absence, what can you not do to those only separated from you by a row of footlights, with Ibsen to help you?’
The music, his preoccupation with Ibsen and the spell exercised on his imagination by Janet Achurch and Florence Farr, were combining to move him towards the theatre. But when ‘the fearsome Charringtons’, as Henry James called them, returned to England early in 1892 and revived A Doll’s House at the Avenue Theatre, something had changed. Janet exploded into fortissimo and tightened her lower lip ‘like an India rubber band’. But ‘my admiration is in nowise abated,’ G.B.S. reassured her. Admiration was the form Shaw’s love for Janet was now taking. ‘I am actually less enamoured than before,’ he wrote, ‘because my admiration elbows out the commoner sentiment. I speak as a critic, not merely as a miserable two legged man.’
To move his emotions on to the stage was a new experiment for Shaw. But in 1893, turning down an opportunity of producing Rosmersholm, Janet and Charrington mounted their own season of plays in London: Richard Voss’s Alexandra; Brandon Thomas’s Clever Alice; and Scribe and Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur. Shaw was appalled. ‘Those old stalking horses are no use: the better you do them the more hopeless do they appear,’ he reprimanded them.
Part of the trouble had to be Charrington. As Helmer in A Doll’s House his failure had been complete. But he was more dangerous off the stage where, in addition to being Janet’s husband, he played the more serious role – one obviously intended for Shaw – of her business manager. A man with a considerable knowledge of pawnbrokers, he developed a talent for converting other people’s investments into thin air. Shaw, who often insisted that he was ‘not fit to be trusted with money’, handed him a good deal of his own over the years.
Charrington’s debt-collecting was obviously an ‘incurable neurosis’; Janet’s neurosis took Shaw longer to identify. On their long way back from Australia she had fallen ill, getting through her parts only with the help of morphia which the doctors had prescribed after she nearly died in childbirth. Previously she had had a tendency to alcoholism; now she added an addiction to morphia. As her condition became clear to Shaw, a method of driving out her disabling addiction by means of a more ingenious drug, distilled upon the stage, began to form in his mind.
The Charringtons appealed to his instinct for turning failure into success. Janet’s happy prior attachment obliged Shaw to direct almost all his emotional energy towards her stage life. ‘I had to be sensible about Janet,’ he explained.
‘I have two sorts of feeling for you... one is an ordinary man-and-woman hankering after you... you are very handsome and clever, and rich in a fine sort of passionate ardor which I enjoy, in an entirely selfish way, like any other man. But I have another feeling for you. As an artist and trained critic, I have a very strong sense of artistic faculty and its value. I have as you know, a high opinion of your power as an actress; and just as I want to have my own powers in action and to preserve them from waste or coarsening, so I have sympathetically a strong desire to see your powers in action... This is the side on which you may find me useful.’
Charrington’s impracticalities opened the way for Shaw’s most romantic role – that of the expert businessman, crackling with exasperated energy. ‘Mind you do exactly what I tell you,’ he instructed Charrington. But the Charringtons, while valuing his financial help, tested his instinct for success to its limits. ‘Why were you ever born?’ he burst out. ‘Why did you get married?’ And, echoing his mother: ‘Oh Charles and Janet, what a devil of a pair you are!’
The Charringtons did not rest at dissipating Janet’s genius: they conspired to tip the frailer talent of Florence Farr over the precipice, having persuaded her to play the Princess in their production of Adrienne Lecouvreur. ‘The unspeakable absurdity of that performance is only surpassed by the unparalleled blastedness of the play,’ Shaw admonished.
At the same time Shaw felt committed to Florence and still hoped to produce from that commitment a miraculous transformation. His loyalty to her was intensified by his final break with Jenny Patterson. Between the spring of 1891 and of 1893 the scenes with Jenny had grown worse until both of them looked like caricatures of themselves – he stonily refusing to ‘sentimentalize’ while Jenny, pretending to open none of his letters to her, scrutinized as many of other people’s letters to him as she could put her hands on. In the intervals of remorse they behaved with studied kindness to each other. They got on best while she was away in Australia, Egypt and Ireland – and Shaw could spend more evenings with Florence. ‘We read a lot of Walt Whitman and were very happy,’ he noted simply in his diary on 26 January 1893. But when Jenny came back all her jealousy revived. She besieged him in his room so that he had to make his way out by physical force, take up asylum in the British Museum and telegraph his mother to clear the house before he returned. But ‘the scene upset me,’ he admitted.
Jenny’s hounding of him at Fitzroy Square had probably been an inducement for Shaw to go and stay with the Sparlings, so near to Florence’s lodgings. Nevertheless her emotional influence over him was waning. Something spectacular was needed.
Something spectacular happened on 4 February 1893. ‘In the evening,’ Shaw wrote in his diary:
‘I went to FE; and JP burst in on us very late in the evening. There was a most shocking scene, JP being violent and using atrocious language. At last I sent FE out of the room, having to restrain JP by force from attacking her. I was two hours getting her out of the house and I did not get her home to Brompton Square until near 1, nor could I get away myself until 3. I was horribly tired and shocked and upset; but I kept patience and did not behave badly nor ungently. Did not get to bed until 4; and had but a disturbed night of it. I made JP write a letter to me expressing her regret and promising not to annoy FE again. This was sent to FE to reassure her.’
Next day he wrote letters to both Florence (which he got May Morris to deliver) and to Jenny. There was an embattled pause. Then on 22 February ‘Got a letter from JP, which I burnt at the first glance. Wrote to tell her so, feeling the uselessness of doing anything else.’ It was the end. Jenny never forgave him; and he never forgot her – he even remembered her in his will by leaving her one hundred pounds, though she successfully avoided this by dying first.
They corresponded once more – in The Star about the case of a police constable condemned to be hanged for the murder of his mistress. This tragedy ‘will recur tomorrow or the next day with some other pair,’ Shaw predicted. ‘We shall never be rid of these butcheries until we make up our minds as to what a woman’s claims exactly are upon a man who, having formerly loved her, now wishes to get free from her society. If we find that she has some claims, let us enforce them and protect the man from any molestation that goes beyond them.’ In a letter signed E four days later, Jenny Patterson replied: ‘I know too well the feeling when a girl knows she is no more loved by the one she has given her all to, but is only a thing to be cast aside like a toy which has been tired of.’ Shaw concluded the correspondence by describing this as showing precisely the ‘unreason that has got the woman killed and the man hanged. At the bottom of all the unreason, however, will be found the old theory that an act of sexual intercourse gives the parties a lifelong claim on one another for better or worse.’