Every busy man should go to bed for a year when he is forty.
Shaw to Hesketh Pearson (25 October 1918)
The adventure began between Haslemere and Hindhead. After reconnoitring several places in Surrey, Charlotte had taken Pitfold, a rather ‘small, stuffy house’ on the south slope of Hindhead. The air was so fine that ‘our troubles seemed to be over,’ Shaw told Beatrice Webb. Charlotte and Shaw had different ideas about air. It was a convalescent substance, soporific, supportive – that was Charlotte’s opinion. But on Shaw it appeared to act as an intoxicant. Air went to his head. He had emerged from the London smoke into the ventilation of the country on 10 June 1898 and, despite his invalidism, set fiercely to work on his metaphysical study of the Ring cycle, The Perfect Wagnerite. Then, on the morning of 17 June, hurrying downstairs on his crutches, he fell into the hall, breaking his left arm and making ‘a hopeless mess of the Wagner book’. Charlotte rushed forward with some butter pats, fastened them into splints and called the doctor.
This was the first of several accidents over the next eighteen months that were to keep Shaw largely convalescent. On 27 July an illustrious surgeon named Anthony Bowlby, attended by three doctors, came down to perform a double operation. He dug out most of the bad bone from the instep, charged Shaw 60 guineas and instructed him he would be healed in three weeks. Then he went away: but – he had forgot the arm. ‘I am so unspeakably tickled by this triumph over the profession that I cannot resist the temptation to impart it to you,’ Shaw wrote the next day to his vegetarian friend Henry Salt. Charlotte added a postscript: ‘He is doing very well – but must be kept absolutely quiet.’
Shaw was discovering that his wife had a genius for worrying. Her mind ran largely on sickness and travel, diagnosing one, prescribing the other. Shaw represents these smashes as keeping her ‘in a state of exhausting devotion’. His prolonged disablement seemed to emphasize certain elements in their marriage. He felt ‘as helpless as a baby’. Sex was postponed until its absence became part of the habit of their lives. But having scarcely possessed him sexually, Charlotte felt peculiarly insecure.
She dreaded having to act an effusive friendship with his theatrical friends, and wanted to assert her predominance over his past. After a visit in the spring of 1900, Beatrice Webb noted that ‘Charlotte Shaw did not want to have us. Perhaps this is a morbid impression. But it is clear that now that she is happily married we must not presume on her impulsive hospitality and kindly acquiescence in our proposals.’
Work was another subject about which Shaw and Charlotte could not agree. She took dictation and prepared copy for his typist (Ethel Dickens, a granddaughter of the novelist). But, as she later admitted to Nancy Astor, ‘I don’t really like work.’ G.B.S. liked nothing better – especially the sort of ‘creative work,’ Charlotte complained, ‘that pulls him to pieces’. Unfortunately ‘it is the only occupation he really cares for’.
Shaw’s illnesses gave Charlotte an occupation that seemed to unite his needs with her wishes. He did not underrate what she had done: she ‘brought me back to life,’ he told Beatrice Mansfield. But it was dismaying for her to see how tenuously her husband was attached to life. ‘She has an instinctive sense that there is a certain way in which I do not care for myself,’ Shaw wrote to Sidney Webb, ‘and that it follows that I do not care, in that way, for anybody else either; and she is quite right.’ He was going through a change of life, he believed, a little death. Whether it actually killed him, or helped to fortify him for another forty years, ‘I do not greatly care,’ he told Sidney Webb; ‘I am satisfied that, on the whole, I have used myself economically and fired my whole broadside.’
The independence he had fixed upon before marriage had been shattered by his accidents. His income during the first year of marriage came to only £473 and by 1902 it had shrunk to £90 (equivalent to £24,000 and £4,400 in 1997). He lived almost entirely from Charlotte’s money. To safeguard himself from going ‘soft with domesticity and luxury’, he began to separate his work from the experience of his life. These early years of his marriage were marked by a burst of creativity. ‘I no longer sleep: I dream, dream, dream,’ he told Charrington. Once he had confided to Ellen Terry that his childhood had been ‘rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities’. Now he began to manufacture from his dreams another world locked deep in himself and fortified against the encircling love and invalidism of his marriage. This was another reason for Charlotte’s opposition to his work: it gave him a legitimate escape from her loving custody. She always knew where he was, but not what he was thinking. As his existence grew more comfortable, his work became oddly anarchical. ‘He still writes,’ Beatrice Webb noted after a visit to Hindhead, ‘but his work seems to be getting unreal: he leads a hothouse life, he cannot walk or get among his equals.’
After six months, Shaw’s foot was no better – indeed it seemed to Charlotte decidedly worse. At the beginning of November, they went up to London to consult Bowlby, the specialist who that previous summer had predicted a three weeks’ cure. He examined the foot and recommended a further period of disuse – about three weeks. To Charlotte’s horror, Shaw decided that he would prefer to have his toe amputated than to endure a longer spell of inactivity. At the end of the month he returned to Bowlby and demanded an immediate removal of the whole bone and toe. To his surprise, Bowlby observed that if it were his toe, he would stick to it. ‘He declares that my health is improving visibly; that I am pulling up from a breakdown... So I am waiting.’
While Shaw waited and worked, Charlotte acted, moving them both from Pitfold to Blen-Cathra, a larger house with ‘lofty, airy rooms,’ she told Beatrice Webb, on the main Portsmouth-London road between Hindhead and Haslemere. ‘This place beats Pitfold all to fits,’ Shaw told Henry Arthur Jones. ‘I am a new man since I came here.’ A week later, on 9 December, he completed Caesar and Cleopatra.
Shaw’s health improved throughout 1899. By 23 March he reported himself in a doubly accurate phrase as being ‘fed up’ to eleven stone, a gain of five pounds. On 12 April he announced that ‘the vegetables have triumphed over their traducers’, an X-ray having shown a ‘perfectly mended solid bone’. He began in May and completed in July Captain Brassbound’s Conversion – after which Charlotte insisted on an unmitigated holiday.
In the middle of August they arrived at a rented house in Ruan Minor. ‘I am down here, wallowing in the sea twice a day,’ Shaw wrote, ‘swimming being the only exercise I ever take for its own sake.’ Not liking him to float off too far, Charlotte allowed Shaw to teach her to swim ‘with nothing between her and death but a firm grip of my neck’. His publisher Grant Richards came down and Shaw, with his recently broken arm and sprained ankle, swam him out to sea and brought him back in terror of drowning.
So beneficial was the sea air that Charlotte felt justified in having ordered a recuperative cruise round the Mediterranean in an Orient steamer, the SS Lusitania. ‘Anything better calculated to destroy me, body & soul, than a Mediterranean cruise on a pleasure steamer in October & Sept (the sirocco months) it would be hard to devise,’ Shaw told Beatrice Mansfield. Like Lady Cicely in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, Charlotte was in her element coping with these pleasures. She tackled the rigorous sightseeing, digested the rich food, paid their bills and calculated the gratuities in complicated currencies. Trapped on this ‘floating pleasure machine’ as it moved through a sickly sea, the band striking up perpetual polkas and skirt dances, Shaw came to feel that every condition of a healthy life was being violated. He was at the plutocratic centre of capitalism. ‘It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life,’ he cried. Passing through the Greek archipelago he was violently sick; in the overwhelming damp heat between Crete and Malta he sat at sunset in his overcoat, shivering, with the mercury as high as seventy-five Fahrenheit. ‘I wake up in the morning like one in prison,’ he wrote, ‘realizing where I am with a pang.’
They arrived back in London at the end of October. At the time of their marriage they had agreed to retain their separate addresses in town, and Shaw openly speculated as to whether he would ‘revert to my old state of mind & my bachelor existence’. Now, at the beginning of November 1899, he moved some of his belongings at 29 Fitzroy Square into Charlotte’s double-decker apartment at the south corner of Adelphi Terrace. It seemed a pleasant place to live, overlooking the river and Embankment Gardens and, except for the occasional hooting of the boats, undisturbed. Shaw slept in a converted box-room off Charlotte’s bedroom. ‘The dining-room and large drawing-room were on the second floor, with the bedrooms, a study for G.B.S., and the kitchen on the third floor. There was no bathroom; the maids took cans of hot water into the bedrooms and filled a hip bath.’ On the staircase Shaw installed a huge wicker gate with a bell-push on the gatepost, marking the Shavian frontier and reinforced by a hedge of pointed steel spikes attached to the balustrade, making the place, he claimed, look like a private madhouse. He worked in a small plain oblong room, above the river, his desk planted near the window which, summer and winter, remained open. There was a little Bechstein piano; an etching by Whistler, drawings by Sargent and Rothenstein, stuck like stamps on the flowered Morris paper which covered the ceiling as well as the walls, giving the impression of an inside-out box. The drawing-room mantelpiece had been designed by the Adam brothers: over the fireplace was cut the sixteenth-century inscription Thay say. Quhat say thay? Lat Thame say – the morality of which Shaw reckoned to be ‘very questionable’. He was to live here almost thirty years ‘before I realised how uncomfortable I was’. For £150 a year he leased Fitzroy Street for his mother who was joined there by her half-sister Arabella Gillmore and her half-niece Georgina (‘Judy’) Gillmore.
Shaw’s foot was now completely mended following treatment of the sinus by pipe water in place of idoform gauze, and he was ‘diabolically busy’. The new century seemed full of promise and activity. He had two new plays on his hands, a preface to write and text to revise for his second collection; he was beginning to involve himself with the newly formed Stage Society (‘a sort of Sunday night Independent Theatre’) which had chosen You Never Can Tell for its opening performance. The Boer War had started, forcing the Fabian Society ‘to a new birth pang with a foreign policy’ and Shaw to act as midwife with a manifesto, speeches and letters. The honeymoon was over. ‘I spent eighteen months on crutches, unable to put my foot to the ground,’ he summed up. Within that period he had produced The Perfect Wagnerite, Caesar and Cleopatra and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion: and, though he had not married for happiness, ‘I cannot remember that I was in the least less happy than at other times’.
Charlotte and Shaw have settled down into the most devoted married couple, she gentle and refined with happiness added thereto, and he showing no sign of breaking loose from her dominion... It is interesting to watch his fitful struggles.
The Diary of Beatrice Webb (30 October 1899)
When William Archer first noticed Shaw in the Reading Room of the British Museum, he had observed how the young Dubliner was balancing Deville’s French translation of Das Kapital against the orchestral score of Tristan und Isolde. Shavianizing Marx had been a matter of pulling politics off the barricades and into the tract. But Shaw also wanted to pull Wagner out of his antiquated heavens and place him in the contemporary socialist scene. The Perfect Wagnerite is an extraordinarily lucid exposition that uses Wagner as he had previously used Ibsen to work out his own philosophical position.
During the seven years that separated The Quintessence of Ibsenism from The Perfect Wagnerite, Shaw had begun to revise his political philosophy. In the earlier work he had divided human beings into three classes: philistines, idealists and those realists on whom progress depended. In the sequel he again makes a threefold division, representing the Wagnerian dwarfs, giants and gods as ‘dramatizations of the three main orders of men: to wit, the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient, toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer States and Churches’.
This change (subdividing the philistines into dwarfs and giants) reflects a shift towards a deeper pessimism arising from his greater experience of national and local politics. He had begun to feel that progress by instalments through the permeation tactics of the Fabians was too slow. A more romantic figure than that of the civil servant and political researcher was needed to fire the imagination of the philistine. The quietist should dress himself in a loud coat – a magical garment, its pockets rattling with the fool’s gold of those idealistic illusions Shaw had derided in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. For most people had to be paid in such coin. Change the appearance of things and you were a long way to changing the reality. Acknowledging this, Shaw appears to accommodate a fourth class of human being into his philosophy: ‘History shews us,’ he writes, ‘only one order higher than the highest of these: namely, the order of Heros.’
In fact Shaw’s heroes are his realists from the Quintessence in disguise; they are Wagner’s blond warriors, raised out of recognition into a higher organization of man ready to do their work in the twentieth century. Wagner’s cycle of music dramas had told a story of love lost and regained; Shaw’s commentary is a retelling of the story as love lost and replaced by something else. His ‘frightful & loveless’ childhood, followed by his years of poverty and social unacceptability in London, made him immediately sympathetic to Wagner’s view of human history. There is no mistaking his personal involvement. Man, he writes, ‘may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you.
‘In that case you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold?’
From Shaw’s reading of the Ring we see human beings in loveless desperation as giant philistines succumbing to the corrupt millions of the Rhinegold. He also portrays them as dwarf philistines exploiting the malign systems of capitalism. These systems displace the need for human love with a love for the machinery of power. They establish their dominion over the world through the majesty and superstition of the Church, and guard them with the terrifying powers of the law. Only one quality can defeat this tyranny of religion and law, and that is the quality of fearlessness. The redemption of mankind therefore depends upon the appearance in the world of a hero or the spirit of heroism.
Wagner’s Siegfried is a symbol of love, the original deprivation of which had been the genesis of man’s tragic story. For Shaw, love was not a romantic solution to social difficulties because it could have little place in the down-to-earth conflict between humanity and its gods and governments. Love belonged to heaven where Wagner transported us once the Ring changed with Götterdämmerung from music drama into opera – which Shaw regarded as a decline, almost a betrayal. Shaw does not seek to lead us from earth to heaven, but to conduct a marriage of heaven and earth, religion and politics. He was to supplant Siegfried as a dramatic symbol with a succession of eccentrically inspired common-sense figures from Julius Caesar to St Joan and to experiment with ways of substituting the Shavian Life Force for Wagnerian resurrection. ‘The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The Ring is not in love,’ he wrote, ‘but in life itself as a tireless power which is continually driving onward and upward.’ From this faith emerged the creed of Creative Evolution Shaw was to explore in the dream sequence of Man and Superman. It is a moral commitment to progress through the Will, answering the need for optimism in someone whose observation of the world was growing more Pessimistic.
Concurrently with The Perfect Wagnerite he had been creating his own Puritan hero. His Caesar was more directly descended from Parsifal than Siegfried, a protagonist conventionally seen less as a hero than a fool: ‘one who, instead of exulting in the slaughter of a dragon, was ashamed of having shot a swan. The change in the conception of the Deliverer could hardly be more complete.’
*
Shaw’s Caesar was born from his longing that such men should exist and be thought great; and that in our better liking of them might lie a seed for our advancement. Caesar is a man of words – an author rather given to preaching – a politician, financier and administrator who, in middle age, has turned his hand to ‘this tedious, brutal life of action’ because public expectation has made it necessary. His battles are like Christ’s miracles: ‘advertisements for an eminence that would never have become popular without them’. At fifty-four he is ‘old and rather thin and stringy’ to Cleopatra’s eyes. But his victories (particularly his paradoxical knack of turning defeat into victory) have given a sheen of heroic idealism to his pragmatic nature. He is plainly dressed, drinks barley water, works hard (‘I always work’) and rules ‘without punishment. Without revenge. Without judgment.’ He is rather vain, wears an oak wreath to conceal his baldness and is ‘easily deceived by women’. Yet he ‘loves no one... has no hatred in him... makes friends with everyone as he does with dogs and children’. This indiscriminate kindness is part of his avuncular superiority – what Shaw called his ‘immense social talents and moral gifts’. Such was the man whom Shaw believed might initiate evolutionary progress for mankind.
He had come initially from Mommsen’s History of Rome, from the fifth volume of which Shaw made extensive notes. ‘I stuck nearly as closely to him,’ he wrote, ‘as Shakespeare did to Plutarch or Holinshed.’ Shakespeare was a contributory influence in the shaping of the play. In his appraisal of Julius Caesar for the Saturday Review Shaw had expressed his indignation ‘at this travestying of a great man as a silly braggart’. Lifting Caesar from Plutarch, Shakespeare had added the qualities of vacillation and conceit from his general knowledge of dictators and his particular observation of Queen Elizabeth. Shaw replaced this Elizabethan stage tyrant by adding to Mommsen’s Caesar something of Christ – a paraphrase, for example, at the climax of the play of the Sermon on the Mount.
The play was composed for Forbes-Robertson, ‘the only actor on the English stage capable of playing a classical part in the grand manner without losing the charm and lightness of heart of an accomplished comedian’. What he looked for, and eventually received from Forbes-Robertson, Shaw was to set out in an article written at the time of the play’s first presentation in London. Caesar and Cleopatra was ‘an attempt of mine to pay an instalment on the debt that all dramatists owe to the art of heroic acting...
‘We want credible heroes. The old demand for the incredible, the impossible, the superhuman, which was supplied by bombast, inflation, and the piling of crimes on catastrophes and factitious raptures on artificial agonies, has fallen off; and the demand now is for heroes in whom we can recognise our own humanity, and who, instead of walking, talking, eating, drinking, sleeping, making love and fighting single combats in a monotonous ecstasy of continuous heroism, are heroic in the true human fashion: that is, touching the summits only at rare moments, and finding the proper level on all occasions.’
Shaw was engaging the best Shakespearian actor of the time to help him make obsolete Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and undermine Antony and Cleopatra, His Caesar is a hero for the realists: Shakespeare’s Antony is the idealistic hero created for the philistines. ‘You are a bad hand at a bargain, mistress,’ Rufio tells Cleopatra at the end of the play, ‘if you will swop Caesar for Antony.’
Between the attractions of love and power Antony seems perpetually divided. Caesar is subject to no such struggle. By reducing Cleopatra’s age from twenty-one to sixteen and ignoring Caesarion, the legendary child of Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw is able to write off the threat of sex. ‘It is extremely important that Cleopatra’s charm should be that of a beautiful child, not of sex,’ he wrote years later. ‘The whole play would be disgusting if Caesar were an old man seducing a child.’ Shakespeare’s Cleopatra was a physically mature woman drawn from life, a dramatic portrait of the ‘black’ mistress of the Sonnets from whom he created a role so consummate, Shaw judged, ‘that the part reduced the best actress to absurdity’. Shaw’s Cleopatra is based on his observation of ‘an actress of extraordinary witchery’, Mrs Patrick Campbell. It is a part conceived from the stalls, yet with some faint foreknowledge perhaps of their emotional involvement to come. That involvement, which was to impair the Shavian Will in his mid-fifties, offers an ironic comment on Caesar’s untroubled control of his sexual susceptibility.
Whatever was taken from Mommsen, anticipated as Christ, or dressed up as Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Caesar is Shaw: a figure to promote his way of life and dramatize his philosophy. Caesar is as fearless in life as Shaw was on the page, and becomes a fantasy image of Shaw himself upon the Fabian stage and in the theatre of politics.
The ancient Briton of the play, Britannus, Julius Caesar’s loyal secretary, is like a modern Englishman. Shaw never wrote costume drama for its own sake: his plays were always addressed to the present. The figure of Britannus keeps the audience imaginatively half in the present (which was one of the ways Shaw became a model for Brecht). Since there had been such little progress through generations of sexual reproduction we are left with example as the stimulus for improvement. But Caesar’s example is not followed by anyone in the play and will lead, we know, to ‘his assassination by a conspiracy of moralists’. His schoolmastering of Cleopatra is easily defeated by her egocentricity (‘But me! me!! me!!! what is to become of me?’). At the beginning she is a child full of fear (‘She moans with fear... shivering with dread... almost beside herself with apprehension’). ‘You must feel no fear,’ Caesar instructs her. But when he leaves her at the end she is, he acknowledges, ‘as much a child as ever’. All she has added to herself is the trick of imitating Caesar and this trick (unlike a similar trick learned by Eliza Doolittle) has not altered her.
Caesar is as alone at the end as when, at the beginning of Act I, he confronted the Sphinx:
‘I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as myself. I have found... no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day’s deed, and think my night’s thought... Sphinx, you and I, strangers to the race of men, are no strangers to one another.’
This is Shaw’s own isolation. Caesar’s address to the Sphinx anticipates a passage from the Preface to Immaturity, written over twenty years later, in which Shaw tells of a ‘strangeness which has made me all my life a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it’. That strangeness seemed intensified by his life with Charlotte. For, as his next play would continue to protest, he was unfitted for the institution of marriage.
*
Lady Cicely Waynflete is the female equivalent in Shaw’s world of Caesar. ‘If you can frighten Lady Cicely,’ her brother-in-law Sir Howard Hallam tells Captain Brassbound, ‘you will confer a great obligation on her family. If she had any sense of danger, perhaps she would keep out of it.’
Lady Cicely has walked across Africa with nothing but a little dog and put up with six cannibal chiefs who everyone insisted would kill her. In fact: ‘The kings always wanted to marry me.’ Her power lies partly in the authority of a mother over her children: ‘all men,’ she insists, ‘are children in the nursery.’ Her far-sightedness and tact being so much more effective than their conventional logic, she constantly runs rings round these men. ‘Strong people are always so gentle,’ she announces, but her own air of gentleness is an obvious imposture. Like Caesar she is surrounded by bullies whom she must constantly outwit. She re-educates them by a mixture of shrewdness and an attraction that does not depend on the erotic use of sex. She is Shaw’s ideal of womanhood.
The interest of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion focuses upon the character and performance of Lady Cicely. She is the only woman in the play. Her adventures give Shaw the opportunity of making a statement about the policy of British Imperialism that was increasingly occupying the Fabian Society at this time. Captain Brassbound had served under General Gordon before he was killed by the Mahdi. Britain had then re-annexed the Sudan from the Mahdi and was about to annex the two Boer Republics. It was for this reason that Shaw set his play in Morocco, ‘the very place where Imperialism is most believed to be necessary’.
Shaw wanted to contrast travellers with conquerors, to show Europe’s mission civilisatrice carried forward by the ‘good tempered, sympathetic woman’ who rules by natural authority against ‘physically strong, violent, dangerous, domineering armed men’ who shoot and bully in the name of Imperialism. In a letter to Ellen Terry, he spelled out this opposition between the male and female principles in human nature, telling her to read two books: H. M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa. ‘Compare the brave woman, with her common-sense and good will, with the wild-beast man, with his elephant rifle, and his atmosphere of dread and murder, breaking his way by mad selfish assassination out of the difficulties created by his own cowardice.’
Lady Cicely’s historical model was Mary Kingsley; her literary model Shelley’s ‘The Witch of Atlas’; her actress model Ellen Terry; and her model from life Charlotte whose passion for tourism had persuaded Shaw to read a number of travel books and to pick up, after completing Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, his only first-hand knowledge of Morocco: ‘a morning’s walk through Tangier, and a cursory observation of the coast through a binocular from the deck of an Orient steamer’.
It was to Ellen, he let it be known, that the play owed its existence. Lady Cicely is not a portrait of Ellen Terry but a vehicle that incorporates something of her manner and magnifies it hugely. This is how he wanted her to be; this is how he believed she might become if she grew into the part. For the motive behind Captain Brassbound’s Conversion was similar to that behind The Man of Destiny: to make one last effort to infiltrate the Lyceum with Shavian drama or, in failing, to detach Ellen Terry from Henry Irving.
The Lyceum had in 1898 been turned into a limited liability company. It was a step that, though designed to ease Irving’s financial burdens, precipitated the end by making it more difficult for him to obtain credit. Early in 1899 Shaw approached Max Hecht, the principal investor in the new ‘Lyceum Ltd’ (‘which I understand to be a benevolent society for the relief of distressed authors & actors’), and made the ‘entirely interested suggestion’ that the newly managed theatre should put on his ‘recklessly expensive play’ Caesar and Cleopatra, with Forbes-Robertson and Mrs Patrick Campbell in the title roles. ‘On the whole, Forbes Robertson & Mrs Pat look more like the heir & heiress apparent to Irving & Ellen Terry than any other pair,’ he wrote.
The copyright performance of Caesar and Cleopatra had taken place on 15 March 1899 at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle with Mrs Pat reading Cleopatra. But she ‘was not attracted by her part’ and did not accept Shaw’s invitation to ‘bring Caesar down to lunch’ at Hindhead. Forbes-Robertson by himself could not risk such a production and Shaw’s scheme for entering the Lyceum by the back door while Irving was abroad stuck. It was at this moment that he started ‘Ellen’s play’.
For years Ellen had supported Irving’s romantic one-man dramas; now Shaw was presenting her with a non-romantic drama for one woman. ‘I dont think that Play of yours will do for me at all!’ she answered. Yet it was just the sort of thing she had consistently been helping Irving to produce. There was, in her abasement to him, a curious sense of superiority. She felt he depended on her far more than he could acknowledge; and she had come to rely on his dependence. After she had complicated their relationship by introducing Shaw with his Napoleon play showing how a real Man of Destiny rises above jealousy, Irving had begun to turn to Mrs Aria. He said nothing to Ellen. ‘But who is Mrs A?’ she had asked Shaw.
Eliza Aria was a social journalist and salonnière who had contrived to make herself the perfect companion. Attractive in appearance, generous with her praise, she was able to give Irving an encouraging reflection of himself. Ellen could see how Irving was renewed by Mrs Aria – and she determined to feel pleased for him. She did feel pleased: but she also felt betrayed. For she had the power to help him more than anyone, if only he would let her. But Irving was almost impossible to help – a presence that cocooned itself in silence. She wondered how his other friends and lovers felt. ‘I have contempt and affection and admiration. What a mixture!’ He was curiously tortured: ‘a silly Ass,’ Ellen called him. Sometimes she was frankly impertinent like this: at other times in awe. He still had the power to wound her. Appearing ‘stouter, very grey, sly-looking, and more cautious than ever’, he had informed her early in 1899 that he was ruined. He intended to mend his fortunes by touring the provinces with a small company. As for Ellen she could ‘for the present’ do as she liked. Ellen was furious. She had contemplated leaving him: ‘I simply must do something else.’ But she did not leave.
This was why she wanted something special from Shaw, something to bring back the glorious days of the old Lyceum. She had first wanted Caesar and Cleopatra: Irving, she was convinced, ‘could have done wonders with that Play’. But Shaw had not seen her as his Cleopatra: ‘She is an animal – a bad lot. Yours is a beneficent personality.’ Also Irving made it clear that he would never produce a play by Shaw – in which case, Shaw retaliated, the only feasible alternative would be to produce his next play at the Lyceum when Irving was away.
He sent Ellen Captain Brassbound’s Conversion at the end of July 1899 and she read it with disappointment. ‘I couldnt do this one,’ she told him, ‘...it is surely for Mrs Pat.’ He was dismayed. Captain Brassbound’s Conversion had been conjured out of the last four years of their letter-writing love-affair: and she had not recognized it. ‘Alas! dear Ellen, is it really so?’ he wrote back. ‘Then I can do nothing for you.
‘I honestly thought that Lady Cicely would fit you like a glove... I wont suggest it to Mrs Pat, because I am now quite convinced that she would consider herself born to play it, just as you want to play Cleopatra... And so farewell our project – all fancy, like most projects.’
It was almost the end, a divorce between her acting and his playwriting skills. But he would not let them separate without a protest. ‘Of course you never really meant Lady Cicely for me,’ she had written to him. ‘Oh you lie, Ellen,’ he answered, ‘you lie:
‘never was there a part so deeply written for a woman as this for you... Here then is your portrait painted on a map of the world – and you... want to get back to Cleopatra!... do you think I regard you as a person needing to be arranged with sphinxes & limelights to be relished by a luxurious public? Oh Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, Ellen. This is the end of everything.’
How much of this impassioned letter could Ellen afford to understand? In her autobiography she was to advise her readers that ‘it doesn’t answer to take Bernard Shaw seriously. He is not a man of convictions.’ Here certainly were the methods of Lady Cicely Waynflete, but used for the opposite ends: to keep out the truth. Yet Shaw’s letter unsettled her. She did know what he meant: ‘the horridness of it all is, that all the time I think exactly as you do!’ But to convert his words into her actions would mean emerging from the womb of the Lyceum and becoming independent – and it was too late. ‘Of course I know it’s me all the while... What is the good of words to me?’ But words were all Shaw had to give her: the power of words to change our lives. And she could not change. All Shaw had done was to force her to recognize this fact.
So Captain Brassbound’s Conversion went back on the shelf. As a consolation, Irving allowed Ellen to go through the copyright ceremony with the Lyceum company at the Court Theatre in Liverpool before they sailed for the United States in the autumn of 1899. But nobody liked Lady Cicely. ‘It’s because I read it wrong,’ Ellen reasoned. But her daughter Edy, sitting out in front, remarked that she couldn’t have read the lines differently, and that it seemed Shaw had thought his Lady Cicely one sort of woman but had written another.
The other woman was Charlotte. When she commanded him to go travelling, he went as obediently and unwillingly as Sir Howard Hallam and Captain Brassbound and his crew followed Lady Cicely into the Atlas Mountains. Robbed of his Old Testament religion of revenge for what he imagined had been done to his mother, the idealistic Brassbound proposes to fill this emptiness with love. ‘I want to take service under you,’ he tells Lady Cicely. ‘And theres no way in which that can be done except marrying you. Will you let me do it?’ But love is rejected as the solution as it had been earlier by Caesar and by Shaw himself in The Perfect Wagnerite. It is not Ellen Terry or Charlotte or any other woman who gives Lady Cicely’s answer to Brassbound: ‘I have never been in love with any real person; and I never shall. How could I manage people if I had that mad little bit of self left in me? Thats my secret.’ By forestalling their marriage with warning gunfire (‘Rescue for you – safety, freedom!’), Shaw is asserting his own ‘mad little bit of self, and his intellectual isolation from Charlotte.
In Brassbound’s saturnine features, grimly set mouth, dark eyebrows, his wordless but significant presence, we may also see something of Henry Irving – and the imaginary conversion of Irving to Shavianism. Ellen had pretty well decided to leave Irving – but not quite. She was frightened of poverty – and then Henry could always weaken her resolve when she was most determined to go by appealing for her help. ‘I appear to be of strange use to H, and I have always thought to be useful, really useful to any one person is rather fine and satisfactory.’ So Shaw was persuaded to give up the struggle.
‘Now for one of my celebrated volte-faces. I hold on pretty hard until the stars declare themselves against me, and then I always give up and try something else... now I recognize that you and I can never be associated as author and player – that you will remain Olivia, and that Lady Cicely is some young creature in short skirts at a High School at this moment. I have pitched so many dreams out of the window that one more or less makes little difference – in fact, by this time I take a certain Satanic delight in doing it and noting how little it hurts me. So out of the window you go, my dear Ellen; and off goes my play to my agents as in the market for the highest bidder.’
This letter reveals in what depth of disappointment Shaw lit his candle of optimism and converted its spectral shadows into a world of solid reality. In the open market only Charrington’s Stage Society was interested in presenting his play with (the final shuddering irony) Ellen’s role given to Janet Achurch. Ellen had had to choose: and she had chosen Henry. Was it loyalty or lack of courage? ‘Ah, I feel so certain Henry just hates me!’ she wrote to Shaw.
Here was Shaw’s consolation. Into his love for Ellen had been poured a hatred of Irving. Like two stage monsters, Dracula and Svengali, they had fought with all their magical powers over the leading lady, both claiming victory at the final curtain. ‘Of course he hates you when you talk to him about me,’ Shaw burst out. ‘Talk to him about himself: then he will love you – to your great alarm.’
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion was first presented by the Stage Society at the Strand Theatre on 16 December 1900. Ellen came, and after the performance, on her way to the dressing-room of Laurence Irving (who played Brassbound), passing under the stage, she spoke to Shaw for the first time. They had been corresponding with each other for more than five years, and had feared that a meeting would rub the bloom off their romance. And now, having met briefly and parted, they apparently did not send each other a loving letter for almost a year and a half. ‘They say you could not bear me, when we met, that one time, under the stage,’ Ellen went on to explain in December 1902. Her self-esteem, undermined and exploited (with her own co-operation) by Irving, had to be fed by the persistent reassurance of her usefulness. What Shaw had said that could have reached her in this form and who carried such words to her is unknown. But it is difficult not to suspect that her daughter Edy was involved: Edy who had watched their long-running romance while two of her own had been ended by Ellen; Edy whose jealous gossip (Ellen went on to warn Shaw that same December) needed a ‘little salt’.
It was at the end of this silent period that Ellen began to separate from Irving. ‘She broke loose from the Ogre’s castle,’ Shaw wrote, ‘...only to find that she had waited too long for his sake, and that her withdrawal was rather a last service to him than a first to herself.’
Ellen’s last service to Shaw was to play Lady Cicely at the Royal Court Theatre in 1906, eighteen months after Irving’s death. ‘Sooner or later I know I’ll play Lady C.,’ she had promised him. It had been a hope: and finally it was a fact. She was fifty-eight, could not remember her lines, felt easily demoralized. Shaw made certain that the producer treated her with gentleness and to Ellen herself he wrote: ‘Behave as if you were more precious than many plays, which is the truth... The only other point of importance is that you look 25; and I love you.’
When the play opened on 20 March, The Times drama critic noted that ‘Miss Terry is, as always, a little slow, the victim of a treacherous memory’; and Desmond MacCarthy in The Speaker observed that ‘there was a hesitation in her acting sometimes, which robbed it of effect’. She recognized this herself. ‘You try to keep up your illusions about me,’ she wrote to Shaw, ‘about my acting, altho’ you know all the while – ’ But Shaw refused to know. He had no time for this ‘saintly humility’. The marriage of her acting with his playwriting had at last taken place and its beauty was manifest. ‘She is immense, though she is 58, and cant remember half my words,’ he wrote. ‘...now that she has at last actually become Lady C, and lives the part, saying just what comes into her head without bothering about my lines, she is very successful.’
The following year Ellen took Captain Brassbound’s Conversion on her farewell tour of the United States. On 22 March, in Pittsburgh ‘of all places in the world’ she married James Carew, the American actor who played Captain Kearney in the play. Though Dame Ellen would never become Lady Cicely, ‘her history has become your history,’ Shaw acknowledged. ‘...Why could you not have been content with my adoration?’ But most people preferred conventional romance to Shavian adoration and would attempt to infiltrate it into his plays. When in 1912 Gertrude Kingston acted the role of Lady Cicely, she replaced in rehearsal Shaw’s final line – ‘How glorious! And what an escape!’ – with her own: ‘How glorious! And what a disappointment!’ But the disappointment, brilliantly concealed, was Shaw’s. ‘Lady Cecilys [sic] no longer exist,’ he conceded in a letter to Gertrude Kingston, ‘ – if they ever did.’
*
Shaw was developing into an ingenious ‘Ladies’ Tailor’. But what was the use of this if no lady would wear his clothes? The late Victorian theatre was so different from any living world, that he could see ‘no real women in the plays except heavily caricatured low comedy ones,’ he later wrote to Edy Craig; ‘and what the leading actresses had to do was to provide an embodiment of romantic charm... without having a single touch of nature in the lines and gestures dictated by the author’s script... unless they could smuggle in something of their own between the lines.’
Shaw had been at this smuggling game now for ten plays and was almost always caught, either by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, or by the male actor-manager’s régime of the West End. Together, they policed a theatre-going public that was not yet ready for the New Drama as a vehicle for the New Woman. Shaw’s huntresses and persons ‘exactly like myself peopled the army he had called up to invade the fin de siècle theatre, topple the womanly women from their stage pedestals, then march down from the boards to the stalls and out into the world. But finding the doors of the theatre heavily barricaded, his regiment veered off instead to the offices of Grant Richards. Having failed as a novelist and, it seemed, also as a dramatist, from these two failures Shaw proposed to manufacture success with a literary genre composed of essay, play and novel.
By November 1900 Three Plays for Puritans had been passed for the press and in January 1901 an edition of 2,500 copies was published. ‘The effort has almost slain me,’ Shaw admitted. He had not done it for money; he had not worked sixteen hours a day with Charlotte’s approval; and he had gone directly against the advice of William Archer who predicted popularity for at least one of these plays leading to an inevitable Shaw boom if he would give it ‘a chance, by waiting at least two years for somebody to produce it before publishing it’. Why then had he done this?
Shaw was acutely aware of the continuous current of sex in the Victorian theatre because, like the sex in his own life, it was suppressed. He argued that the sensuous conventionality of Victorian stage sex was pornographic in that it was not frank. This lack of frankness, he added, had been what ‘finally disgusted me’. With such passages – and there are many of them in his Preface – he disclaims being a prude and identifies himself as a proponent of the realistic treatment of sex in contemporary drama. But for Shaw realistic sex meant less sex. He passes in his preface almost unnoticeably from demolishing the genteel assumptions of the sex instinct as shown on the stage, to a demolition of the sex instinct itself.
Before marriage, in his three-cornered affairs with women, Shaw’s part had been an impersonation of George Vandeleur Lee, the interloper in his parents’ marriage. In marriage he had taken on a double role, that of George Carr Shaw and George Vandeleur Lee together. He was legitimately married but it was a mariage blanc. The dominant role was that of Lee whose ‘potency’ arose from his public life – as did Shaw’s. Casting off the ambiguous skin of ‘George’, Shaw had literally ‘made a name for himself as a writer, the magnificently impersonal G.B.S. (his equivalent of Lee’s ‘Vandeleur’). His frustration at not getting the work of G.B.S. performed manifested itself as an impotence. From this impotence came his impatience – his inability to take Archer’s advice to wait – and his confusing paradoxes in the Preface between celibacy and pornography. He had already waited too long. His only channel for reaching the public was the book world. But this outlet was unsatisfactory since he could not put his potent words into the mouths of actresses, could not direct them on a stage, could not witness their effect on audiences, could only, with the aid of his written narrative, transport them into his imagination. It gave him only temporary relief.
‘No: it is clear that I have nothing to do with the theatre of today,’ he had written to Ellen Terry. To create a family of plays for future generations was still Shaw’s ultimate aim. In the short term, however, there was another theatre where he could perform: the theatre of politics. ‘It is time to do something more in Shaw-philosophy, in politics & sociology. Your author, dear Ellen, must be more than a common dramatist.’
If I were not a politician I would be a Fabian.
R. B. Haldane to Bernard Shaw (15 October 1900)
Shaw was with Charlotte on board the ‘floating pleasure machine’ SS Lusitania when on 11 October 1899 the war in the Transvaal broke out. When he arrived back in England he found the country in a state of civil war over South Africa. The prosperity of the Empire, the longevity of the widowed Queen herself, seemed to have sunk Britain in the doldrums of peace and the public was more than ready to take off for some foreign adventuring. The novels of Trollope, with their solid domestic themes, were beginning to lose popularity and were being replaced in the public imagination by Kipling’s Indian stories, the adventures of R. L. Stevenson and the historical romances of Conan Doyle. Doyle shared with thousands of ‘men in the street’ an attitude that converted warfare into sport, ‘If ever England gets into a hole,’ he had declared, ‘you may depend on it that her sporting men will pull her out of it.’
Shaw had wanted to have nothing to do with it. But the eruption of hostilities was of such violence, shifting the landscape of British politics, that non-involvement became impossible. The atmosphere in Britain of conflicting imperialist and pro-Boer passions, gathering up the vague discontents of years, was considerably less sportsmanlike than on the smoke-filled battlefields of South Africa. John Burns, ‘the Man with the Red Flag’ who ten years earlier had led the Dock Strike, was obliged to take up his cricket bat one night to defend himself against a crowd attempting to break into his home.
The Conservative Party, saw Englishmen riding ‘the white steed of destiny’ all over South Africa. Most socialists joined in opposition to the war – Keir Hardie, for example, picturing the Boers as pure-living, God-fearing farmers grazing peacefully under the Christ-like guardianship of President Kruger. Between the romanticism of the right and the sentimentality of the left floundered the Liberal Party with its cautious new leader Campbell-Bannerman. It was the middle ground of British politics that was torn apart by the South African war; and since the Fabian Society, with its policy of permeation, had been cultivating this middle ground, it now found itself at the centre of a crisis.
The Webbs’ attitude to South Africa was simple. They did their best to ignore it. Beatrice, who described the war as an ‘underbred business’, was determined that the Fabians should be ‘so far removed from political influence that it is not necessary for Sidney to express any opinion’.
It was Sidney’s lack of interest in foreign politics – despite his years at the Colonial Office – that had dictated the Fabian silence over Imperialism. But since it was impossible any longer to smother things in silence, he handed over the ‘show’ to the Fabian literary expert. Shaw’s brief was complicated. He had to discover some honourable method by which, while the war issue dominated British politics, the Fabians could legitimately continue to produce tracts on municipal bakeries, fire insurance and the milk supply.
His attitude had begun to change over this year until, with the publication of Fabianism and the Empire, it seemed to invert the traditional socialist standpoint, supporting pacifist permeation tactics at home while tolerating a good deal of bloodshed overseas. He urged all Fabians to stick together. No party or society could entirely discharge the soul’s message of every member; and no member, he added, ‘can find a Society 800 strong which is an extension of his own self – even the society of 2 called marriage is a failure from that point of view’.
Shaw tried to suffocate the moral issue of the war by spreading over it his theory of pragmatism. In its most negative phase Shaw’s pragmatism meant that socialism should not touch any problem that it did not have a reasonable chance of solving; more positively it meant in this case waiting for the inevitable annexation of the Transvaal, and then introducing there the social organization on which the Fabians had been working. In a letter to Ramsay MacDonald he explained, ‘I have done my best to avert the fight for which the democratic spirit and the large grasp of human ideas is always spoiling, and for which the jingo spirit is no doubt equally ready. If you wont take my way, and wont find a better way, then punch one another’s heads and be damned.’
Of what use, he asked, were ethics that were taken out of the cupboard from time to time and that led to conclusions no one could act on? ‘I am a revolutionist in ethics as much as in economics,’ he told Walter Crane;
‘and the moment you demand virtuous indignation from me, I give you up... the Fabian ought to be warproof; and yet Capitalism has only to fire a gun, and split a great shaving off us.’
In fact Shaw was extraordinarily successful in keeping the Fabian peace. By the time the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in 1902 (leaving the enfranchisement of the native population to be settled in due course) 22,000 British soldiers had been killed and £223,000,000 spent – but no great shaving had been split off the Fabian Society. In steering them out of war-range, Shaw had removed the Fabians from the rest of the socialist fleet, taken them, it seemed, out of politics and stranded them on the high ground of political philosophy. He had also plucked from politics the ‘heroic’ quality he had so recently inserted into his plays.
Shaw hated war; he hated the human beings who were attracted by war; and he felt that every human being, whatever his moral stance, was implicated. His revulsion at the Boer War, and the policy he formed based on this revulsion, is most succinctly expressed in a letter to a fellow-Fabian, George Samuel. ‘The Boer and the Britisher are both fighting animals, like all animals who live in a chronic panic of death and defeat,’ he wrote.
‘...Do you expect me solemnly to inform a listening nation that the solution of the South African problem is that the lion shall lie down with highly-armed lamb in mutual raptures of quakerism, vegetarianism, and teetotalism?... Let us face the facts. Two hordes of predatory animals are fighting, after their manner, for the possession of South Africa, where neither of them has, or ever had, any business to be from the abstractly-moral, virtuously indignant Radical, or (probably) the native point of view... The moral position of the Boers and the British is precisely identical in every respect; that is, it does not exist. Two dogs are fighting for a bone thrown before them by Mrs Nature, an old-established butcher with a branch establishment in South Africa. The Socialist has only to consider which dog to back; that is, which dog will do most for Socialism if it wins.’
Fabianism and the Empire was produced as a Fabian foreign policy document, one hundred pages long, published at one shilling by Grant Richards and directed at the ‘Khaki’ election in the autumn of 1900. The first draft, which took Shaw three months to complete, was sent to every member of the Fabian Society, 134 of whom returned comments which, with extraordinary ingenuity, he attempted to stitch into his text. The final version was such a ‘masterpiece’ of literary craft that no more than fourteen Fabians voted against its publication. ‘By this time the controversy over the war had reached an intensity which those who cannot recollect it will find difficult to believe,’ Pease remembered, ‘and nobody but the author could have written an effective document on the war so skilfully as to satisfy the great majority of the supporters of both parties in the Society.’
He recommends reforms for the army, the Consular Service and the administration and social justice of Imperialism, drafting what Beatrice Webb called ‘the most prescient and permanently instructive public document of its date’. But on the General Election, the Treaty of Vereeniging and the subsequent social conditions in South Africa, Fabianism and the Empire had no influence at all, and 1,500 copies were remaindered the following year.
In the new Parliament the Tories had won 402 seats, the Liberals 186 and the Nationalists 82. Keir Hardie was the only independent Labour politician to survive the election, but it was not through him that the Fabians sought to operate. As Beatrice noted, ‘a Conservative Government is as good for us as a Liberal Government’. The Fabians were ascending in society, becoming friendly with Bishops and Tory Cabinet Ministers, while among the Liberals they chose Lord Rosebery as their man – partly on account of his admiration for Shaw’s manifesto. ‘Our policy is clearly to back him for all we are worth,’ Shaw urged Beatrice who noted in her diary: ‘We have succumbed to his flattery.’ A few weeks later, in the autumn of 1901, Sidney published ‘Lord Rosebery’s Escape from Houndsditch’ – an invitation for him to lead the progressive Liberals in their campaign to raise each department of national life to its maximum efficiency.