I stand just now at a point where a failure would put me quite out of court, and a success would ‘chair me ever’.
Shaw to William Archer (26 March 1902)
After six years’ ‘Borough Councilling’, Shaw concluded in 1903, ‘I am convinced that the Borough Councils must be abolished’. His method of quitting local politics was characteristically ‘Shavian’. In the spring of 1904 he stood as a Progressive candidate for one of the two London County Council seats in South St Pancras. ‘The Shaws have been good friends to us,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary, ‘and we would not like them to have a humiliating defeat.’ The party organizers however had long ago given up the seat as lost and even Beatrice admitted ‘he is not likely to get in’. But this was not good enough for G.B.S. He needed, while campaigning with tremendous gusto and geniality, to make absolutely certain of not getting in. Every day of the campaign he showed himself as ‘hopelessly intractable’ – except to his enemies, to whom he was ‘the most accommodating candidate that was ever known’. He insisted that he was an atheist; that, though a teetotaller, he would ‘force every citizen to imbibe a quartern of rum to cure any tendency to intoxication... chaffed the Catholics about transubstantiation; abused the Liberals, and contemptuously patronized the Conservatives – until every section was equally disgruntled’. As a result, he was triumphantly beaten into third place. And so, with honour high, Shaw paraded out of party politics. ‘We are not wholly grieved,’ Beatrice wrote. ‘His... quixotic chivalry to his opponents and cold drawn truth, ruthlessly administered, to possible supporters, are magnificent but not war.’
Shaw’s election defeat was probably more disappointing to Charlotte than to the Webbs. She wanted to find him a respectable career in politics. Though she believed in his gifts as a playwright she could not blink the facts. In the summer of 1903, he was in his forty-eighth year and still almost wholly unknown to British audiences. From such facts and her conflicting reactions to them, Charlotte hit on a curious programme of nudging him into professional politics at home while furthering his reputation as a dramatist abroad.
Her opportunity to help Shaw’s plays on to the European stage came with a visit early in 1902 of a young Austrian writer, Siegfried Trebitsch. Trebitsch was a sentimentalist of wonderful persistence – the sort of person Shaw had been sent into the world to quell but who in practice so often got the better of him. ‘I held forth for quite a while about his plays,’ Trebitsch remembered.
‘What do you mean to do with me?’ Shaw interrupted.
Trebitsch knew the answer to this. He meant to become Shaw’s ‘apostle in Central Europe’ and conquer the German stage for him. In short he allowed himself to ‘speake straight forward’ and give his ‘dear adored Shaw’ what he called ‘a piece of my mind’. The result was that Shaw jumped up and ran out of the room, crying out for Charlotte to ‘try to calm’ this ‘young lunatic’.
Obediently Charlotte appeared and Trebitsch ‘expounded my intentions to her’. The grandeur of these intentions, contrasted with the inadequacy of the language in which they were expressed, did not strike Charlotte as funny. She summoned her husband back into the room and Shaw spoke forbiddingly about the ‘extremely important matter of copyright’ of which Trebitsch knew nothing. Trebitsch left soon afterwards and a few days later received a letter from Charlotte inviting him to lunch. It became clear to him during this meal that, though she took no part in the conversation, Charlotte approved of him and that this approval had been responsible for a change in her husband’s manner.
For Trebitsch to translate his plays into German involved Shaw in mastering the German language – or at least buying ‘a devil of a big dictionary, also a grammar’. He teased and tutored Trebitsch terrifically. His translation of Caesar and Cleopatra was stuffed with misunderstandings; Arms and the Man ‘full of hideous and devastating errors’; and Candida, Trebitsch’s favourite, was worst of all. ‘You didnt understand the play: you only wallowed in it... I tore out large handfuls of my hair and uttered screams of rage... I plucked up my beard by the roots and threw it after my hair.’
From such comments, over several years, Trebitsch began to sense that something was not quite right. ‘I have just met the most beautiful Shavian I have ever seen,’ Trebitsch deciphered at the end of one of Shaw’s letters to him. ‘She is the wife of one of our diplomatic staff, who is joining the British Embassy in Vienna very soon. I think I will ask her to correct your translations: you can make mistakes on purpose.’ What could this mean? ‘You must learn to laugh,’ Shaw suggested. Was it all some joke? Perhaps not, since Shaw had also advised him: ‘I have no objection to being taken seriously. What ruins me in England is that people think I am always joking.’
To be the perfect translator of Shaw’s plays Trebitsch needed to be resolved into a German edition of G.B.S. Shaw spelled out the prescription minutely. Trebitsch must use the same menu as Shaw himself. ‘Never eat meat or drink tea, coffee, or wine again as long as you live,’ he warned. ‘...If you are very very very bad, become religious, and go... round all the Stations of the Cross on your knees, and pray incessantly. When you begin to feel sceptical you will be getting well.’
It was agreed that Trebitsch should translate three plays and hold exclusive rights in them for one year. He chose The Devil’s Disciple, Candida and Arms and the Man, and kept them ‘ceaselessly circulating among publishers, theatrical people, producers’. The proprietor of the Entsch theatrical publishing firm in Berlin refused ‘to have anything to do with this crazy Irishman’ whom he described as ‘a lost cause’. Trebitsch was advised to ‘stop being so obstinate’ or he would endanger his own career. ‘I was somewhat desperate,’ he wrote. ‘But I did not lose heart.’ He continued working ‘feverishly, usually the whole day, and often half the night as well, for, after all, I had a time limit’.
Within the year Trebitsch began to accomplish what Shaw had been failing to achieve in Britain over more than a decade. He persuaded the director of the Raimund Theatre in Vienna to stage The Devil’s Disciple in February 1903, and the Stuttgart publishers Cotta to bring out all three plays, Drei Dramen, in the same year. In 1904 the Deutsches Volkstheater produced Candida and Arms and the Man; and within the next three years there were productions by leading directors of You Never Can Tell, Mrs Warren’s Profession and Man and Superman, all in Trebitsch’s translations. Germany came to recognize Shaw’s ‘importance to the modern stage,’ Thomas Mann wrote, ‘indeed to modern intellectual life as a whole, earlier than the English-speaking world.
‘His fame actually reached England only by way of Germany, just as Ibsen and Hamsun conquered Norway, and Strindberg Sweden, by the same roundabout route, for London’s independent theatre fell short of doing for Shaw’s reputation – soon to grow to world-wide dimensions – what men like Otto Brahm and Max Reinhardt... were able to accomplish, for the simple reason that at that time the German stage was ahead of its British counterpart.’
Trebitsch recorded that it ‘made a very great impression on Shaw that I had kept my word and accomplished what I set out to do’. What Shaw felt for Trebitsch was naked gratitude – the emotion he usually denied and invariably distrusted. Trebitsch in his autobiography presents a chronicle of unchecked success. The first night of The Devil’s Disciple ‘was one of the most remarkable I have ever experienced,’ he writes. Mrs Warren’s Profession ‘was the greatest success of the season’. The production of Candida ‘turned out to be a sensation’ and so on. The stream of Shaw’s letters along this triumphant passage form a curious undercurrent. Over a period of two and a half years, he writes:
‘Give up all anxiety about those plays... let this experience cure you of your excessive sensitiveness to reviews... If I bothered about such things I should go mad three times a week, and die on the alternate dates... you must not lie awake and get neuralgia... As to the play being ruined for all German stages, do not trouble about that. When you have been ruined as often as I have, you will find your reputation growing with every successive catastrophe. Never ruin yourself less than twice a year, or the public will forget about you... Dismiss it from your mind now: there is no use bothering about a commercial failure... we can say that it is the public that failed... let us laugh and try again... nothing succeeds like failure... We shall be hissed into celebrity if this goes on.’
Shaw developed a paternal tenderness for Trebitsch. For many years Trebitsch was violently attacked in Germany for knowing neither German nor English. He never learned what Shaw called ‘the grand style of fighting’, falling upon your opponent and clubbing him dead with the weapons of generosity and politeness. In spite of Shaw’s work with the dictionary, many misunderstandings persisted, the most notorious being Trebitsch’s interpretation of the Waiter’s remark in You Never Can Tell: ‘I really must draw the line at sitting down’ – after which, following Trebitsch’s stage directions, he goes to the window and, before taking his seat, draws the curtains. Shaw knew all about these howlers. ‘Never join in attacks on translators,’ he advised one of his biographers. His loyalty to Trebitsch took the form of claiming for these ‘so-called translations’ the status of ‘excellent original plays’. Had they been the least like his own, he explained, they could never have succeeded so well.
Shaw’s experiences with Trebitsch influenced his arrangements with other translators. ‘I calculated that the only way to make the job really worth doing was to catch some man in each country who would undertake all my work, and thus get something like an income out of half the fees,’ he wrote to Henry Arthur Jones in 1908. ‘At last I succeeded everywhere except in Portugal... Sometimes I picked a man who had never dreamt of the job and hypnotised and subsidised him into it. Whenever possible, I got a man with an English or American wife... The results have been very varied.’
He chose his translators because they charmed him, touched his sense of humour or presented impeccable political credentials. His most extreme translators were Augustin and Henriette Hamon. He was a socialist and an anarchist of ‘terrific intellectual integrity... whose main means of subsistence has always been borrowing money’; she knew some English, which was helpful. Hamon did what he could to wriggle away. He was not a literary man, had never written a play and knew little of the theatre. It was true that he had published a number of works on hygiene and sociology. It was also true that he was the radical editor of L’Humanité Nouvelle, a periodical frequently visited by the police. Yet Shaw seemed determined to prove Hamon ‘a born homme de theatre’. That Hamon was an individual bicyclist and a revolutionary with exemplary collectivist principles pleased him. As evidence of his good choice, Shaw pointed to the ‘dramatic liveliness’ of Hamon’s reports on various socialist congresses.
So Shaw bought a Larousse dictionary and set about becoming a co-translator of his plays into the French language. He enjoyed firing off letters in a French that was so ‘extremely Britannic’ that it ‘must be positively painful’ to any man of literary sensibility to read them. ‘“Hard as nails” – “dure comme un clou” – is an expression which ought,’ he judged, ‘to enrich the French language.’ The Hamons were able, he discovered, to concentrate into ten amazing lines of their translated text ‘all the errors which I spend my life in combating’. Hamon had no notion that he might be translating comedies, and was once seen rushing from the theatre when the audience began to laugh, crying to his wife, ‘Mon Dieu! On rit. Tout est perdu.’
All Shaw’s schooling could not make these translations good. They were caustically attacked in France as forming a permanent barrier to the acceptance of Shaw’s plays by the French public. Hamon never fathomed ‘the utter illiteracy of the playgoing public’, to prepare for which, Shaw reminded him, Molière used to read his plays aloud to his cook. The great failing of the Frenchman, Shaw maintained, was his academicism. ‘Every Frenchman is a born pedant,’ he advised Hamon. ‘He thinks it a crime to repeat a word – the crime of tautology.’
Despite the pleas of many eminent translators, Hamon went on to translate almost all Shaw’s plays. Only seven or eight of these plays were produced in Paris, not at the commercial théâtres du boulevard but the small coterie theatres. ‘I have given up all hope of getting into touch with France,’ Shaw conceded in the 1920s, shortly before the success of Saint Joan.
‘This is all the more annoying as I do not believe for a moment that the French reading public is less accessible to my methods than any other public... I still believe that if only I could have secured a pulpit in France, I could have amused the inhabitants quite as effectively as the Germans.’
In the words of Vicomte Robert d’Humières, Shaw became attached to his translator ‘like a criminal is attached to the rope which hanged him’. It was ‘a defiant and heroic act’, intensely Shavian, that would end in ‘suicide on the threshold of our admiration’. To a perpetual gunfire of criticism Hamon dug in for the rest of his life with the work he had never wanted to do. He and his wife remained desperately poor. Feeling perhaps his own part in the Hamons’ poverty, Shaw purchased their house in Brittany for them and in the 1930s bought ‘an annuity for his own and his wife’s life, of £12 a month,’ Shaw revealed to Trebitsch. ‘And this enables him to live comfortably according to his standard of comfort.’
Trebitsch and Hamon were two principal members of Shaw’s family of translators over whom he exercised great power and generosity. The antagonism which their amateur status and exclusive rights brought them in their own countries intensified their loyalty. They became part of a special Shavian clan (their intimacy seldom tested by an actual meeting) through which, like pollen on the wind, Shaw’s words were eccentrically spread across the world.
A true dramatist should be interested in everything.
Shaw to Trebitsch (16 August 1903)
Charlotte treated her husband partly as an employer, partly as her child. It was the employer whose correspondence she dealt with, whose manuscripts she took to the typist. She also arranged lunches with people he should meet and protected him from other people who would worry him needlessly. It was on behalf of this employer, too, that she still sat on committees at the London School of Economics and the School of Medicine for Women, and had joined the play-reading committee of the Stage Society.
But it was the child who exercised her talent for anxiety. Some of his young hobbies – photography or the piano – were harmless. She didn’t mind him taking her picture in the least (though she hated others doing so) and she grew to like his playing to her in the evening. Bicycles were dangerous; and he did very naughty things in newspapers – writing, for example, after the Queen died to denounce the rapturous lying-in-state as ‘insanitary’.
She had given instructions to the servants to vary his diet as much as possible, and from time to time felt half-persuaded to try it herself. Whenever she was unwell she would pick at something of his vegetarian food, washed down with a glass of whisky. ‘My wife has at last become a convinced vegetarian,’ Shaw reported to Henry Salt in the summer of 1903, ‘...and she now eats nothing but birds & fish, which are not “butcher’s meat”.’
Charlotte regarded G.B.S.’s lust for publicity as part of the odder equipment of his genius. There was no other respectable way of explaining it. He literally asked for what he got sometimes, arriving at Max Beerbohm’s house on his bicycle and requesting the cartoonist to do a drawing of him. ‘Max was less gratified by this than might have been expected,’ Lord David Cecil wrote, ‘...and suspected that Shaw was actuated less by admiration than by a desire for the publicity the cartoon might bring him. Max also found Shaw’s appearance unappetizing; his pallid pitted skin and red hair like seaweed. And he was repelled by the back of his neck. “The back of his neck was especially bleak; very long, untenanted, and dead white,” he explained.’
Max did over forty caricatures of G.B.S.’s ‘temperance beverage face’ and, as dramatic critic, reviewed more than twenty of his plays. ‘My admiration for his genius has during fifty years and more been marred for me by dissent from almost any view that he holds about anything,’ Max was to acknowledge in a letter written for Shaw’s ninetieth birthday. And G.B.S. endorsed this: ‘Max’s blessings are all of them thinly disguised curses.’ Max reinforced the disgust Shaw himself felt at the Shavian publicity phenomenon. After a couple of highly successful speeches in Glasgow during the first week of October 1903 he wrote to Trebitsch: ‘I have hardly yet quite recovered from the self-loathing which such triumphs produce...
‘I always suffer torments of remorse when the degrading exhibition is over. However, the thing had to be done; and there was no doing it by halves... I am not at all ashamed of what I said: it was excellent sense; but the way I said it – ugh! All that assumption of stupendous earnestness – merely to drive a little common sense into a crowd, like nails into a very tough board – leaves one empty, exhausted, disgusted.’
Max and Charlotte found themselves in agreement over G.B.S. He was never an artist, they said, but a reformer. ‘That is what I always tell him,’ insisted Charlotte. But in their married life it was she who attempted to reform him. Since it was only on holiday that, as he put it, ‘I prefer to leave my public character behind me and to be treated as far as possible as a quite private and unknown individual’, she tried to lead him on a succession of long holidays. During April and May 1901 she had him touring through France with her; and in July and August she planted him in Studland Rectory at Corfe Castle in Dorset. ‘This is a very enchanting place – to look at,’ Shaw informed Beatrice Webb. ‘It also has the curious property of reviving every malady, every cramp, every pain, every bone fracture even, from which one has ever suffered.’
Next year Charlotte packed them both off to a safe hotel on the Norfolk coast for the summer. ‘The only way to rest and get plenty of work done at the same time is to go to sea,’ Shaw later concluded. This was not what Charlotte had in mind. She wanted to take him away from all his work. She wanted to banish the employer and make him wholly, for a time, her child.
In the spring of 1903 she rushed him through Parma, Perugia, Assisi, Orvieto, Siena, Genoa and Milan. ‘I am getting old and demoralized,’ he confessed to Janet Achurch, ‘I have been in Italy for three weeks.’ Three months later she placed him in Scotland, and held him there for ten weeks. ‘There is no railway, no town, no shops, no society, no music, no entertainments, no beautiful ladies, absolutely nothing but fresh air and eternal rain,’ Shaw wrote. ‘Our house is primitive; our food is primitive; we do nothing but wander about, cycle against impossible winds, or pull a heavy fisherman’s boat about the loch...’
For most Christmases Charlotte would board him out with her at a bracing hotel or in one of the houses she had rented. In April 1902 they had given up Piccard’s Cottage at Guildford and the following year took instead a country house, Maybury Knoll, in a favourite part of Surrey, near Woking. Here they spent winter weekends and the whole of Christmas at the end of 1903, after which Charlotte was to rent a grander place at the top of a hill overlooking Welwyn which she liked better.
No sooner had Charlotte marched him up to the top of the hill than she marched him down again – and back to Italy. They started out on 1 May 1904 and arrived back in London on 10 June. A week later Shaw began a new play, his thirteenth, to be called John Bull’s Other Island. Charlotte shuttled him between Adelphi Terrace and Welwyn, and then returned him, protesting, for the summer to Scotland. ‘Our expedition has been so far a ruinous failure,’ he calculated. ‘The place is impossible – no place to write – no place to bathe... Oh these holidays, these accursed holidays!’
For fourteen years they were to go through every holiday side by side, despite his belief that married people ‘should never travel together: they blame one another for everything that goes wrong.’ It was particularly irritating for him to see how she preened herself on toning up his health while really driving him mad; it was exasperating for her to find, however exorbitant their journeys, he never failed to carry his work with him everywhere. But still they manacled themselves, each for the sake of the other. ‘I am overacting the part of a respectable married man,’ Shaw admitted. ‘But I am only rehearsing for my old age: my guiltiest passions are still glowing beneath the surface.’
I am not writing popular plays just now.
Shaw to Alma Murray (19 February 1901)
‘You know all about “The Admirable Bashville”, or at least you would know if you ever read my books,’ Trebitsch read in one of Shaw’s letters.
The Admirable Bashville or Constancy Unrewarded was itself a translation from Shaw’s novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession, into a three-act play in ‘the primitive Elizabethan style’. This was Shaw’s eleventh play and he had finished it in a week on 2 February 1901. Hearing rumours that there were several pirated stage versions of his novel in the United States, and that one of these productions was coming to Britain, he ‘took the opportunity to produce a masterpiece’ in order to protect his copyright. He squeezed out of this exercise all the fun he could, using it as another squib against bardolatry and claiming that he had been forced to employ the rigmarole of Shakespearian verse (of which ‘I am childishly fond’), occasionally patching in actual lines from Shakespeare and Marlowe, because he did not have the time to write it all in prose. Having plagiarized his own work and parodied Shakespeare’s, he produced a caricature of his advertising methods. It was, he assured Trebitsch, ‘my greatest play’. But this delight in what was ‘my only achievement in pure letters’ began to recoil once other playwrights hit on the notion of agreeing with him.
A number of Shaw’s ‘serious intentions’ are planted in the burlesque. He has some fun with phonetics; he airs his expertise on self-defence; he owns up to the loneliness of excellence and devotes some mighty lines to family and filial sentiment. There is a surge of real feeling when Cashel contrasts the presumed barbarities of boxing with the concealed cruelties of polite life.
...this hand
That many a two days bruise hath ruthless given,
Hath kept no dungeon locked for twenty years,
Hath slain no sentient creature for my sport.
I am too squeamish for your dainty world,
That cowers behind the gallows and the lash,
The world that robs the poor, and with their spoil
Does what its tradesmen tell it. Oh, your ladies!
Sealskinned and egret-feathered; all defiance
To Nature; cowering if one say to them
‘What will the servants think?’ Your gentlemen!
Your tailor-tyrannized visitors of whom
Flutter of wing and singing in the wood
Make chickenbutchers. And your medicine men!
Groping for cures in the tormented entrails
Of friendly dogs. Pray have you asked all these
To change their occupations? Find you mine
So grimly crueller? I cannot breathe
An air so petty and so poisonous.
Shaw assisted Harley Granville Barker in directing the first professional presentation of the play, put on by the Stage Society on 7 and 8 June 1903 at the Imperial Theatre in London. It was an early instance of the working association between the two men, and laid down the lines for their later collaborative work at the Court Theatre. Barker was (in the modern sense) stage-manager and Shaw arrived fairly late in the preparation of his play. He hunted enthusiastically for bird-whistles, some soft-nosed spears, a white beaver hat, post-horn, one enormous blue handkerchief with white spots, a throne: also ‘We shall want a crowd’; and directed it in the Elizabethan stage manner with traverses, and two beefeaters with placards denoting the scenes. He insisted that it should be announced as ‘Bernard Shaw’s celebrated drama in blank verse with, possibly, an epigraph: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.” Shakespeare.’
As in his subsequent ‘Interlude’, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the humour depends upon the audience’s familiarity with Shakespeare. Those with no Shakespearian knowledge would sit bewildered or else, in all earnestness, break into applause. Despite its awkward playing length, the Stage Society production ‘went with a roar from beginning to end’. The policeman (played by the cricketer C. Aubrey Smith, later to become famous as a Hollywood film actor) was made up as G.B.S. so effectively that his mother, sitting next to him, was deeply perplexed.
Also performed was the copyright trick of upstaging all American dramatizations of the novel – including one by Stanislas Strange (who was to write the libretto for The Chocolate Soldier) and starring, as Cashel Byron, former world heavyweight champion ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett.
The Admirable Bashville was published by Grant Richards in October 1901 as part of a new edition of Cashel Byron’s Profession that also included Shaw’s essay ‘A Note on Modern Prizefighting’. The book was reviewed at length, and disconcertingly, by Max Beerbohm.
‘As a passage by steam is to a voyage by sail, so is Mr Shaw’s fiction to true fiction... he wants to impress certain theories on us, to convert us to this or that view. The true creator wishes mainly to illude us with a sense of actual or imaginative reality. To achieve that aim, he must suppress himself and his theories: they kill illusion. He must accept life as it presents itself to his experience or imagination, not use his brain to twist it into the patterns of a purpose. Such self-sacrifice is beyond Mr Shaw.’
Here was the most coherent argument so far raised against the Shavian art. Shaw could not create: his characters were all victims of Shavian theses, all parts of himself differentiated only by quick changes and superficial idiosyncrasies. On another level, as a personality, G.B.S. was immortal. There was no one like him. Seriousness and frivolity were the essence of Shavianism. ‘He is not a serious man trying to be frivolous,’ Beerbohm explained. ‘He is a serious man who cannot help being frivolous, and in him height of spirits is combined with depth of conviction more illustriously than in any of his compatriots.’ It did not matter what he wrote. All his writing was filleted with Shavianism – that quality whose deep seriousness served artistically to raise the humour. ‘As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr Shaw is no good at all,’ Beerbohm joyfully concluded. It was as a comedian whose frivolity, vampire-like, sucked the seriousness from his work, that he was unique. So when he claimed apropos his next play, Man and Superman, that ‘the matter isnt really in my hands. I have to say the things that seem to me to want saying’, everyone sharing Beerbohm’s view of G.B.S. drew in their breath and prepared to greet it with a good laugh.
You must not translate it, as you would get six years in a fortress for the preface alone.
Shaw to Trebitsch (7 July 1902)
The characters had started talking inside Shaw’s head over two years before. In May 1900 he began outlining a Parliament in Hell between Don Juan and the Devil. Around the Socratic debate he composed a three-act comedy, completing the scenario between 2 July and 8 October 1901. He worked between accidents and on journeys, in hotels and at home: he worked whenever Charlotte took her eye off him until, in June 1902, this many-layered work, now called Man and Superman. A Comedy and a Philosophy, was finished – when the business of revision immediately began. In January 1903 Shaw read it aloud to the Webbs at the Overstrand Hotel at Cromer in Norfolk. ‘To me it seems a great work; quite the biggest thing he has done,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary. ‘He has found his form: a play which is not a play; but only a combination of essay, treatise, interlude, lyric – all the different forms illustrating the same central idea.’
Since it was ‘useless as an acting play’, he explained to Hamon, being ‘as long as three Meyerbeer operas and no audience that had not already had a Shaw education could stand it’, he had decided to publish Man and Superman himself, abandoning Grant Richards and signing an agreement with Archibald Constable to act as distribution agent for his works – an agreement that lasted the remaining forty-seven years of his life.
Man and Superman was published on 11 August 1903. ‘I cannot be a bellettrist,’ Shaw wrote in his Preface. ‘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. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains.’
Between style and art and power and reality Shaw crossed the lines of his argument with such dexterity as to bring almost everyone into confusion. Critics were fixed in his net of words – though not Max Beerbohm who seemed to slip between the meshes. Max was to draw a caricature of Shaw bringing a bundle of clothes to the Danish critic, Georg Brandes (who is represented as a pawnbroker), and asking for immortality in exchange for the lot. Brandes protests: ‘Come, I’ve handled these goods before! Coat, Mr Schopenhauer’s; waistcoat, Mr Ibsen’s; Mr Nietzsche’s trousers – .’ To which Shaw answers: ‘Ah, but look at the patches!’ As for style, Max astutely judged his Alpha and Omega to be ‘more akin to the art of oral debating than of literary exposition. That is because he trained himself to speak before he trained himself to write.’
For the same reason, Max conceded, Shaw excelled in writing words to be spoken by the human voice. ‘In swiftness, tenseness and lucidity of dialogue no living writer can touch the hem of Mr Shaw’s garment,’ Max wrote. ‘In Man and Superman every phrase rings and flashes. Here, though Mr Shaw will be angry with me, is perfect art.’ For Shaw used art ‘as a means of making people listen to him...
‘He is as eager to be a popular dramatist and... willing to demean himself in any way that may help him to the goal... I hope he will reach the goal. It is only the theatrical managers who stand between him and the off-chance of a real popular success.’
Man and Superman, Max concluded, was Shaw’s masterpiece so far. This ‘most complete expression of the most distinct personality in current literature’ showed G.B.S. able to employ art without becoming an artist and excelling in dialogue without developing into a playwright. From this opinion Max somewhat recanted two years later when he saw Man and Superman (in its three-act version) performed on stage. It was not only the humanizing of Shaw’s words by living actors that changed his mind. He also appears to have been swayed by Shaw’s argument that, as a caricaturist, Max also did not ‘see things and men as they are’, but that his distortions, far from disqualifying him as an artist, were the essence of his art. The artist creates his own reality and his own epoch: and Britain was about to enter a Shavian epoch. Max sensed this. Shaw was one of those for whom the visible world had largely ceased to exist and was being replaced by a world seen through his mind’s eye. That it was a world disliked by Max was partly the reason why he had denied its creator artistic capacity. The production of John Bull’s Other Island in 1904 was to convince him that Shaw had ‘an instinct for the theatre’. And when he saw Man and Superman on stage in 1905, he prepared to make way for the coming Shavian revolution in the British theatre:
‘Mr Shaw, it is insisted, cannot draw life: he can only distort it. He has no knowledge of human nature: he is but a theorist. All his characters are but so many incarnations of himself. Above all, he cannot write plays. He has no dramatic instinct, no theatrical technique...
That theory might have held water in the days before Mr Shaw’s plays were acted. Indeed, I was in the habit of propounding it myself... When Man and Superman was published, I... said that (even without the philosophic scene in hell) it would be quite unsuited to any stage. When I saw it performed... I found that as a piece of theatrical construction it was perfect... to deny that he is a dramatist merely because he chooses, for the most part, to get drama out of contrasted types of character and thought, without action, and without appeal to the emotions, seems to me both unjust and absurd. His technique is peculiar because his purpose is peculiar. But it is not the less technique.’
*
Man and Superman is the first in a trilogy of plays in which Shaw’s thesis and antithesis of fact and fantasy produced the synthesis of evolutionary progress. Creative evolution had the potential for replacing his lonely sense of being ‘a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it’ with the feeling of being part of the collective consciousness ‘up to the chin in the life of his own time’. The Life Force was not a rival scientific theory to Darwin’s Natural Selection, but a different outlook on life. By making external a division he felt to exist within himself Shaw was able to use an intellectual method – the Hegelian triad which he had picked up from the British socialist philosopher Belfort Bax – of reconciling opposites and bringing harmony to his life. He wished to create the new drama in which, as in a series of parables, he could rewrite history and set it on a new course.
The Hegelian structure became a model for his thought. Reviewing a novel by Moncure Conway early in 1888, he had written of Hegelianism as never having been positively ‘adapted and translated into practical English politics’. In the hands of Marx, it had been ‘chiefly effective as a scathing but quite negative criticism of industrial individualism’.
It was positive Hegelianism that Shaw wanted to import into English politics. This is made explicit in a letter he sent some fifteen years later to the Labour Member of Parliament Charles Trevelyan. ‘A Government... if it is really to govern and propagate its species... must have a common religion, which nowadays means a philosophy and a science, and it must have an economic policy founded on that religion.
‘Well, I contend that such a nexus exists... you will find it in Thomas Hardy’s poems at one extreme of literature and in the blitherings of Christian Science at the other. But take two expositions that may be known to you: the third act of Man and Superman and Bergson’s Creative Evolution. These are totally independent of one another: Bergson and I would have written as we did, word for word, each if the other had never been born. And yet one is a dramatization of the other. Our very catch-words, Life Force and Elan Vital, are translations of one another... why not a creative-evolutionist party?...
The economic policy of the party is clear enough. Everyone who can see the sun shining at noon can also see that there is only one main problem to be solved, and that is the redistribution of income. Also that it is not only an economic question, but a political and biological one. Here you have a body of doctrine on which a party could be built literally over a whole epoch.’
Towards the third act of his play Shaw felt especially protective. Its long second scene, staged as a dream and held in a chronological paradox ‘Beyond Space, Beyond Time’, is a science fiction made from Shaw’s retrospective longings. It is a contest between his optimism for which the Tanner-surrogate Don Juan speaks, and his pessimism which is represented by Mendoza’s counterpart, the Devil. Agreeing on much, they are divided in their debate over the need and practicality of human progress. Both are contemptuous of the morality of pretence which filled the Victorian theatre and reflected the conventions of life outside. But what are the alternatives? The Devil says fantasy and play; Don Juan says the evolution of a higher type of human being.
Heaven and hell are not states of afterlife but metaphors for opposing temperaments, values and philosophies. Juan defines hell as ‘the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness... Here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are... in a word, bodiless... here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance.’
This aspect of Shaw’s hell was to become a factor of his theology almost twenty years later in Back to Methuselah where the tyranny of the flesh disappears in a whirlpool of pure thought. Here was a three-hundred-year romance by an extremely fastidious man whose disgust with the physical condition of human beings compelled him to eliminate them from his philosophy. ‘There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions.’ Shaw’s formula for hell in Man and Superman has enough in common with the bodiless Utopia of Back to Methuselah to suggest that the Devil may surreptitiously be going to win a good part of his case.
Conventional morals will always succumb to the Devil’s attractions. To resist his hell, Juan argues, we need evolutionary morals. If reality is worry, ugliness and age, sadness and tragedy and death, why not, asks the Devil, use your ingenuity to create a life of endless escape from it? For two reasons, answers Juan. Nature has given man a brain; he needs the power of self-awareness and understanding. The direct pursuit of happiness and beauty leads to misery – happiness may only be gained as a byproduct of other endeavours. Secondly, life is not composed as the Devil would like us to believe. It is an illusion to think that we can solve our problems. From each problem solved springs some new challenge. So life must forever progress upwards: or end. Man’s quest for knowledge has set him off on the great adventure of transforming his environment and understanding the universe. He may not stop the world and go off on a perpetual holiday.
Juan’s belief in brains provokes the Devil into his first great counterattack. ‘Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately?’ he enquires. What have human brains done but produce more awful weapons of destruction? It is when we become too ambitious on behalf of the human race that we end up destroying ourselves. His monologue amounts to a conservative attack on the illusions of progress and a recommendation of the aristocratic principle of cultivated living.
Don Juan’s reply reveals his belief that salvation depends upon the urge to transcend past achievements. It is easily conceivable that the world will blow itself up, or Western civilization peter out, unless this human urge is renewed. But the Devil is no vulgar hedonist. ‘I am also on the intellectual plane,’ he says. It is the credulous strivers after perfection in the social organization, he insists, who slaughter millions. He, the Devil, stands for moral principles in that he treats people as ends, not means.
The resolution to their debate comes through Doña Ana with her cry at the end of the scene: ‘a father for the Superman!’ And so, from the two ways of serving the Life Force, the biological and the intellectual, Shaw gives priority in time to the first. Evolutionary progress, he suggests, depends on sexual instinct; on the coming together of opposites to produce through generations a better human combination of mind and body. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism and The Perfect Wagnerite, the battle had been fought between realist and idealist for the mind of the philistine; in Man and Superman the evolutionary need for greater intelligence lies in the sexual conquest of the realist by the philistine. So the dramatic pursuit of the intellectual Tanner by the predatory Ann is not a defeat for intelligence after all. Tanner’s dream and disquisition with the Devil is Shaw’s attempt, through operatic argument, to achieve the ‘drama of thought’. But Don Juan’s speeches grow too long and, behind their resolute optimism, reveal Shaw’s panic.
There is no doubt that Shaw intended Don Juan to win the debate. Against the common belief in a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, he postulated a God who looked and saw it could be bettered. ‘I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it,’ says Juan. ‘That is the law of my life.’ That this purpose is Shaw’s own is made clear by a parallel passage in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, where he writes: ‘This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.’
Tanner wins all his word-battles. Ann wins the actual battle between them. Shaw’s Superman was a symbol for the synthesis between word and deed.
Only the obtuseness of theatre managers, as Beerbohm had said, was able to postpone Shaw’s success as a playwright. The younger generation of theatre audiences was waiting for him. Almost two years after publication of the book the three-act play was first performed. This version, full of melancholic autobiographical undertones, has a precise theatrical unity. It is a romantic courtship comedy about the stock subjects of marriage and money, and has all the farcical episodes of the love-chase. The Victorian and Edwardian theatregoer would easily recognize the situations and characters. There is a love-pursuit through Europe, a capture by brigands and a rescue; there is a clandestine marriage, an emotional triangle, the reading of a will, a happy ending; the stage is peopled by standard figures – the romantic artist, the heavy father, the lover and the servant in a long line from Leporello and Sancho Panza to Sam Weller and Jeeves.
Yet nothing is what it seems to be and everywhere romantic expectation is confounded. Shaw replaces the woman-on-a-pedestal with the female huntress; the new woman with the technological man. The play is crowded with paradoxical reversals. His brigands are vestrymen and Fabians, their leader a love-afflicted sentimentalist; the rich and difficult father turns out to be a social eccentric who wants a misalliance for his son and is reconciled to his marriage not by his daughter-in-law’s purity and sweetness but her business acumen. A daughter dominates her mother; a servant rules his employer; and the governing action of the play is the woman’s pursuit of her lover. Hell is revealed as a sentimentalist’s picture of heaven.
In this skill at inverting popular conventions and creating genre antitypes lay the special power of Shaw’s ‘heretical’ plays. He welcomed his audience into a world where everything was familiar to them, then upset all its values and forced it to ‘reconsider its morals’.
The object of the play is to teach Irish people the value of an Englishman as well as to shew the Englishman his own absurdities.
‘Author’s Instructions to the Producer’, John Bull’s Other Island
Two years separated the completion of Man and Superman from the composition of Shaw’s next play. Shortly before the publication of Man and Superman, Shaw confided to Yeats that he had it ‘quite seriously in my head to write an Irish play (frightfully modern – no banshees or leprechauns)’; but he did nothing further until what seemed a fair chance appeared.
It was Yeats who gave him this chance. Together with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, he had founded the Irish Literary Theatre which proposed to create in Dublin ‘a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature... [with] that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England’. They must ‘escape the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce’ which clung to London’s West End.
There was much that was familiar in this to Shaw and much that appealed to him. Lady Gregory was to his mind ‘the greatest living Irishwoman’; Edward Martyn, an owl-blinking misogynist, lover of wine and caviar, and first president of Sinn Fein, was an admirer of Ibsen; and Yeats manoeuvred his theatre colleagues with all the skill Shaw devoted to the Fabians. In 1902 Yeats fell in with the Fay brothers, Frank and Willy, and their little band of Irish actors. From this association, the following year, the Irish National Theatre Society was born with Yeats himself as president, and a new set of colleagues, Maud Gonne, Douglas Hyde and the poet, theosophist and visionary painter George Russell (known as A.E.) its vice-presidents. In the spring of 1904, the Society was invited to play at the Royalty Theatre in London, and Shaw went along to watch them. They played Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea; Yeats’s The King’s Threshold and A Pot of Broth; and Padraic Colum’s Broken Soil, all showing the influence of Gordon Craig’s revolt against the elaborate productions of Irving and Beerbohm Tree. It was then that Shaw opened his eyes to a renaissance in the Irish theatre.
Yet it had been, until this year, a hole-and-corner affair not dissimilar, in its fashion, to the Stage Society. What changed matters was the involvement of Annie Horniman who bought a ninety-nine-year lease on a small music-hall theatre within the Mechanics Institute on the corner of Lower Abbey Street, and adjacent premises in Marlborough Street that ‘had served as a bank, the home of a nationalist debating society, a recruiting centre for the Fenian movement, and the City Morgue’. She now offered Yeats, as president of the Society, use of the new theatre cost-free. The Abbey Theatre was to open its doors at the end of 1904, and it was for this opening, ‘as a patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre’, that Yeats invited Shaw to write his next play.
‘Not a word of the play yet on paper,’ Shaw promised Lady Gregory on 20 June. In fact he had begun writing it, under the provisional title Rule Britannia, in a pocket notebook three days earlier while staying with Charlotte at Hindhead. It continued seething in his mind and filling his notebooks over the next ten weeks.
On 7 September Shaw sent the completed play to Ethel Dickens with instructions to type it out and forward a copy to Yeats. He had been horrified to find that the autograph manuscript, scattered through four pocket notebooks, contained about 32,000 words. Henry Arthur Jones, he recollected, had put 18,000 as the correct length, ‘but I am too exhausted to attempt to cut it,’ he told Yeats.
In John Bull’s Other Island Shaw contrasted the twenty years of his upbringing in Dublin with the twenty years of his career in London. At one level, which he later developed in his Preface, the play is about the opposing political histories and national characteristics of the two countries. But Ireland and England are also metaphors for differing philosophies: and Shaw’s experiment at reconciling them is the theme of this self-revealing work.
‘Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal.’ This wish, voiced by Larry Doyle, the exiled Irishman working in England, was the motive-power behind these middle-period plays. Larry Doyle is the vertex of a triangle at one corner of which stands the successful English businessman Tom Broadbent, and at the other Peter Keegan, the unfrocked Irish priest, who meet over Broadbent’s plan to form a Land Development Syndicate.
In Broadbent Shaw created, for Irish audiences, the stage-Englishman, having in the first scene chased the stage-Irishman Tim Haffigan off as an impostor. Broadbent represents the world of facts, however brutal; Keegan the world of dreams, however unreal. Broadbent is the perfect philistine, a ‘robust, full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life’. His kingdom is the material world. He feels happy in what Keegan describes as ‘very clearly a place of torment and penance’. On the contrary, Broadbent declares, it is ‘quite good enough for me: rather a jolly place, in fact’.
The key to Broadbent’s success is his narrowness of intelligence and imagination. He simplifies everything for profitable use. ‘The only really simple thing is to go straight for what you want and grab it,’ says another philistine, Ann Whitefield, in Man and Superman. Broadbent is the acquisitive man. Within twenty-four hours of arriving at Rosscullen he has collared the parliamentary seat, taken up Larry’s sweetheart Nora Reilly and acquired the land for development. He brings to Ireland a terrible corruption of Shaw’s belief in improvement, but he brings it cheerfully. The stage directions picture him as ‘always buoyant and irresistible’.
Everything that is absent from Broadbent goes to make the character of Peter Keegan. Broadbent could be played by a Falstaffian performer; Keegan needed ‘a poetic actor’. Broadbent is a land speculator interested in the modern technology of motor cars, neat golf links, new hotels. Keegan, who loves the land, speaks with grasshoppers and calls the donkey, the ass and the pig his brothers. In contrast to Father Dempsey, the parochial reality, Keegan is ‘an ideal Catholic’, the first and most convincing of Shaw’s mystical sages, who retreats at the end of the play to the Round Tower and will reappear briefly as Androcles and later as the damaged Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House.
Into Keegan’s mouth Shaw put his own fastidious sense of horror at Broadbent’s world –
‘[a] place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing, and the weak in character are put to the horrible torture of imprisonment, not for hours but for years, in the name of justice.’
Broadbent’s schemes for the future (‘this place may have an industrial future, or it may have a residential future’) do not impress Keegan who replies that it ‘may have no future at all’.
Broadbent embodies action, Keegan speaks for the emotions and Larry Doyle represents the intellect. Throughout the play there is a bias in favour of action. Larry has had only two ideas: ‘to learn to do something; and then to get out of Ireland and have a chance of doing it’. Ireland ‘produces two kinds of men in strange perfection: saints and traitors,’ we are told. If Keegan is the saint, Larry Doyle is the traitor. He has repressed everything he shares with Keegan: he has rejected Ireland. Shaw’s stage directions throughout Larry’s long speech on ‘the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!’ of Ireland underline the personal feeling he put into these pages: ‘With sudden anguish... Savagely... bitterly, at Broadbent... With fierce shivering self-contempt... Dropping his voice like a man making some shameful confidence.’
Not sharing Keegan’s self-sufficiency, Larry must borrow his strength from Broadbent’s self-confidence. Otherwise, he says, ‘I should never have done anything’. It is Broadbent who sees clearly the price Larry has paid. ‘He has absolutely no capacity for enjoyment,’ Broadbent tells Nora: ‘he couldn’t make any woman happy. He’s as clever as be-blowed; but... he doesn’t really care for anything or anybody.’
Keegan is the man Sonny might have grown into if he had been able to endure the anguish of living in the Land of Dreams; Larry Doyle, with his ‘clever head’, his ‘suggestion of thinskinnedness and dissatisfaction’ and determination to be ruthless, must have been Shaw’s nightmare. The syndicate which Keegan and Broadbent have formed (in which Larry owns a ‘bit of the stock’) is not the synthesis between dreams and facts for which Shaw was looking. It is a business partnership in which Larry’s intellectual powers are used to serve Broadbent’s philistine aims.
The second partnership in the play, that between Broadbent and Nora, is not a marriage of body and spirit, but a devouring of the spirit by the body. A ‘frail figure’, she is ‘almost sexless’ and he, with his ‘good broad chest’, promises to ‘plump out your muscles and make em elastic and set up your figure’. She is his ethereal ‘ideal’ and he will make her into the housewife of ‘a solid four-square home’.
Everyone remains separated in the play and no one is converted. Broadbent takes charge of the world; Keegan retires to his tower; and the conflict within Larry is not reconciled. He has split life into dreams and facts, and chosen facts as reality.
But was the world of facts real? Shaw’s insistence that it was is continually interrupted by his subversive humour and a pessimism that undermines much of what he dedicated his career to establishing. ‘Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time,’ says Keegan who explains to Nora that ‘my way of joking is to tell the truth’. It is Keegan who sees reality in dreams and strikes an apocalyptic note over Shaw’s own Fabian territory of statistics: ‘For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.’
*
The play was ‘a wonderful piece of work’ and ‘full of good things,’ William Fay, the Abbey Theatre manager, reported to Yeats. Synge, too, believed it would ‘hold a Dublin audience, and at times move them if even tolerably played’. And Yeats wrote to Shaw: ‘I thought in reading the first act that you had forgotten Ireland, but I found in the other acts that it is the only subject on which you are entirely serious...
‘You have said things in this play which are entirely true about Ireland, things which nobody has ever said before... It astonishes me that you should have been so long in London and yet have remembered so much. To some extent this play is unlike anything you have done before. Hitherto you have taken your situations from melodrama, and called up logic to make them ridiculous. Your process here seems to be quite different, you are taking your situations more from life, you are for the first time trying to get the atmosphere of a place... a geographical conscience... You have laughed at the things that are ripe for laughter, and not where the ear is still green... we can play it, and survive to play something else.’
Yet there were difficulties. The company met to discuss these difficulties in the second week of October 1904: the difficulty of length; the difficulty of getting a cast; the difficulty of handling modern appliances such as grasshoppers and hydraulic bridges. These difficulties accumulated as they argued, silencing a more fundamental difficulty: that (to use Shaw’s words in the Preface to the 1906 edition) ‘it was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland’. Yeats was to concede when he saw it performed in London that ‘it acts very much better than one could have foreseen’. Like Max Beerbohm, he had underrated Shaw’s instinct for the theatre partly because ‘I don’t really like it,’ he wrote. ‘It is fundamentally ugly and shapeless.’
The shape of the play, loosely constructed round a string of character-turns with the emphasis directed away from the action and focused on a parallel series of discussions that occur at rather unremarkable moments (the after-breakfast pause, the after-tea stroll) makes use of the conventional props of Irish Romance to explode the Irish romantic ideal. Yeats instinctively felt opposed to such extravaganza. Yeats’s writing was oblique and Shaw’s assertive; and Yeats wrote poetry where Shaw laughed. All they shared were the same enemies. ‘If I had gone to the hills nearby to look upon Dublin and to ponder upon myself, I too might have become a poet like Yeats, Synge and the rest of them,’ Shaw stated. ‘But I prided myself on thinking clearly, and therefore could not stay. Whenever I took a problem or a state of life of which my Irish contemporaries sang sad songs, I always pushed it to its logical conclusions, and then inevitably it resolved itself into comedy.’
Such a passage helps to explain Yeats’s description of Shaw as a ‘barbarian of the barricades’. When Shaw made Larry Doyle deride Keegan as sentimental, chastise the eternal dreaming in himself, and question the holy ground on which they both stood, he uprooted the Irish legends from which sprang Lady Gregory’s and Yeats’s plays. His ‘queer elephant’ of a play seemed antagonistic to everything the Abbey Theatre was to achieve. ‘We all admire it,’ Yeats wrote: and between them all a polite understanding was kept up that it had merely been too large and difficult a work for the Abbey to handle.
Yeats could recognize the wonderful power of Shaw’s pen – its logic, justice, audacity, conviction. But Shaw represented ‘the spirit of the press, of hurry, of immediate interests’ over what Yeats felt was the slow-burning spirit of literature. He was consuming his own talent with superficial theatricality, the unnerving tic of his wit, rambling vulgarity – anything that seemed to stiffen the purpose of the moment.
We shall have to play off the piece as a very advanced and earnest card in the noble game of elevating the British theatre.
Shaw to Granville Barker (24 August 1904)
Looking around for an actor suitable to play Marchbanks for a Sunday performance of Candida at the Strand Theatre in the summer of 1900, Charrington had proposed the name of Harley Granville Barker. At the sixth ‘meeting’ of the Stage Society, Barker played Marchbanks and was ‘the success of the piece’, Shaw told Archer. This performance of Candida completed the Stage Society’s first season. The Society was now the principal rallying point for things modern in the theatre. On 16 July 1900 the maximum membership was increased from three to five hundred (each paying a yearly subscription of two guineas) and a decision was taken to add to the private Sunday evening presentation a weekday matinée to which the press (though required to pay) would be admitted. Performances were still described as ‘meetings’; no scenery was employed and no salary offered to the actors who all received the same nominal sum – one guinea – for expenses. These rules enabled the Society legally to present new British plays as well as classical and contemporary foreign dramas (for some of which the Censor had refused a licence).
The Stage Society’s Sunday evening and Monday afternoon performances gave Barker some experience as a director as well as actor, particularly in the presentation of his own four-act comedy, The Marrying of Ann Leete. ‘Do you realise that he is a great poet and dramatist,’ Shaw asked Henry Arthur Jones. ‘...His The Marrying of Ann Leete is really an exquisite play. I truckle to G.B. in order to conciliate him when he is forty.’ Behind this half-frivolous tone was the feeling that he was no longer alone: at last he had a successor in the theatre, someone to share, inherit and modify the Shavian stage experiment. Before Ann Leete, Barker had written other plays. Like Shaw’s, they had seemed unplayable. But Shaw ‘found them fascinating’. At first he had doubted whether Barker’s ‘delicacy of style’ would travel across the footlights. But on seeing Ann Leete performed under Barker’s own stage management, ‘I had to confess that he had succeeded,’ Shaw wrote.
‘There is a sort of dainty strangeness about it that fits its eighteenth century period and costumes; and the curious way in which it begins in a garden at midnight takes it so effectually out of the Philistine key that its quaint fantastic conversation, consisting mostly of hints and innuendoes, seems to belong to it naturally.’
Here lay the theatre of the future. Shaw felt a special tenderness towards the young man, as if his own blatant qualities, obliterating much that was sensitive in himself, had served to protect him. After all, it had been to bulldoze Irving’s execrable Lyceum mutilations off the stage that the phenomenon of G.B.S. had been partly manufactured. That Barker could afford to take no notice of Irving was partly due to G.B.S.; and partly, of course, a matter of age.
Shaw was twenty-one years older than Barker, ‘old enough’, he wrote, ‘to be his father’. This was indeed the peculiar kinship he felt for him. He had grown up in an atmosphere of good speech and drama and with a thorough knowledge of Dickens and Shakespeare. He scored his first stage success in 1899 playing Richard II for William Poel, but was to be no happier as a successful actor than Shaw was as a successful platform speaker. Beatrice Webb observed him to be ‘a most attractive person... good looking in a charming refined fashion – with a subtle intellectual expression – faculties more analytic than artistic?
‘...with varied interests, good memory, a sharp observer of human nature and above all a delicate appreciation of music, poetry and art – a medley of talents of which I do not yet see a very definite whole. He has not yet emancipated himself from G.B.S.’s influence or found his own soul.’
Barker’s incompleteness fascinated people. What Beatrice thought of as the influence of G.B.S. was probably a similarity of temperament. ‘I am an intellectual, but by no means a dramatic disciple of G.B.S.,’ Barker declared. ‘We have quite different ideas... ’ G.B.S. agreed. ‘We were as different as Verdi from Debussy.’ Yet there was a natural intimacy between them. They talked much in quotations from Dickens and Shakespeare, using them as a private code. But they seldom discussed their own plays. ‘We took them as they came, like facts of nature.’ Shaw was able to watch and direct Barker in a number of his roles during the early stages of their friendship: he was Marchbanks, the poet Shaw had repressed in himself; he was Father Keegan, the best self Shaw had sealed up in the Round Tower; he played Jack Tanner made up with a beard to look like a younger G.B.S.; and in Shaw’s next play Major Barbara, he was to play Adolphus Cusins, the foundling academic who is adopted as his heir by the Shavian father figure of Undershaft, also a foundling. From this succession of sympathetic roles a whisper arose that Barker was Shaw’s natural son. The notion appealed to Shaw who observed that most people rejected the hypothesis ‘on the ground that I am physically incapable of parentage’.
Barker fulfilled the imaginative role of son to Shaw’s father and Charlotte’s mother, replacing the natural child they never had. He seemed all things to all people – whatever they wanted most. Charlotte was one of several childless women in whom he prompted a maternal instinct. For G.B.S., Barker became someone to scold and schoolmaster, encourage and idealize; he was the juvenile lead with whom G.B.S. shared the family companionship of work.
In the summer of 1901 Barker and Shaw had joined the management committee of the Stage Society which had decided to put on Mrs Warren’s Profession towards the end of that year. Because the play had not been granted a licence, however, thirteen theatres, three hotels, two music halls and the Royal Society of British Artists refused to lend their premises. From these difficulties and delays Shaw and Barker drew differing lessons. Shaw felt that the Stage Society was capable of putting on a ‘tomfoolery’ such as The Admirable Bashville; but a performance even of the first act of Caesar and Cleopatra was too large an enterprise: the Society could not scrape together ‘the price of a sphinx & an old pantomime wardrobe for the Egyptian & Roman soldiers’. It was for this reason that he had turned to the Abbey Theatre.
For Barker, the cap-in-hand, door-to-door experiences over Mrs Warren’s Profession had emphasized the need for a permanent theatre. His chance came early in 1904 when he was invited to produce Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Court Theatre in Sloane Square. The lease of this theatre had recently been bought by J. H. Leigh, a wealthy businessman and amateur actor, to stage a series of ‘Shakespearean Representations’ featuring his wife Thyrza Norman. The first two productions had been unsatisfactory and Leigh, coming to William Archer for help, was advised to employ Granville Barker for his next play. Leigh struck up an arrangement with Barker that allowed him to give six matinées of Candida at the Court. The play was well-received by the critics and actually made a profit.
Three weeks later Barker was producing Gilbert Murray’s rhyming translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus at the Lyric Theatre. ‘J. H. Leigh has expressed himself bitten with the idea of doing Greek plays,’ Barker confided to Murray. ‘Not a word – but let us talk anon.’ This talk between Barker, Leigh and the Court Theatre’s manager J. E. Vedrenne ‘led to the most important development in Barker’s career’. He suggested giving regular matinées at the Court on those afternoons when the London West End theatres were closed. The management would then be able to engage first-class professional actors who would not be playing at those hours and, because they were interested in this new work, would be prepared to act for a nominal salary. Vedrenne took charge of the management and, with the backing of small sums of money from friends, they agreed to begin the experiment that autumn.
As the opening performance at the Court Theatre, he repeated the Murray-Euripides Hippolytus. The second Court play, after a good deal of negotiation, was John Bull’s Other Island.
Nominally it was Barker who produced John Bull’s Other Island; in fact it was Shaw. ‘You can imagine the state I am in with rehearsing,’ he wrote to the actress Ada Rehan. ‘It is great fun; and I have got them all to the point of believing that this is the turning point of their careers, and that something immense is happening.’ He had got himself to believe this too.
Shaw had strong opinions as to how all the parts should be played. But these opinions were for the actors to interpret and adapt: ‘Dont worry yourself by trying to carry out my suggestions exactly or hampering yourself in any way with them,’ he advised J. L. Shine, who was playing Larry Doyle. ‘Very likely when you study them over you will be able to improve on them.
‘That’s all they’re for. I think I am probably nearly right as to the best changes and stopping places on the journey; but as to the way of making them, follow your own feeling and make the most of your own skill: turn the whole thing inside out if you like... dont hesitate on my account to make the part entirely your own.’
He was full of advice, but also ready to learn; and his tirades, being comic performances themselves, did not shrivel the actors’ self-confidence. ‘I know very well that it is often the artists who give the author least trouble who get the least acknowledgement and have their virtues taken as a matter of course,’ he wrote to Ellen O’Malley, who took the part of Nora. ‘This is not so, I hope, with me: I am very sensible of how good you have been in every way, though I have had no opportunity of saying so.’
The reviews, though sometimes niggardly, were good, and the best critics wrote most enthusiastically. Max Beerbohm’s notice in the Saturday Review was headed ‘Mr Shaw at his Best’. Desmond MacCarthy declared the play to be ‘an absolute success’; and William Archer in The World wrote that Shaw ‘has done nothing more original’.
To the fifth matinée, on 10 November, Beatrice Webb brought the Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour. To her surprise he liked the play so much that he eventually saw it five times, bringing with him two leaders of the Liberal Opposition, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. Most people in London saw it as a largely affectionate satire on the Liberal Party’s attitude towards Ireland, and Balfour himself praised it for clearing away humbug. His interest led to a special evening performance being given, on 11 March 1905, for King Edward VII. The King laughed so belligerently that he broke the special chair Vedrenne had hired for the evening and, in falling, flung Shaw’s dramatic reputation high into the air. Here, a few months short of his fiftieth year, was success. Yet he felt uneasy. What was it worth? What had been the cost? The Prime Minister had told the King, and the King had told his countrymen, and now they were all telling the world that G.B.S. was the funniest of Irishmen. He began to react against the play, and gave his answer to his King’s heehawing by adding to the programme of a later production a ‘personal appeal’ to the audience not to demoralize the actors with shouts of laughter and noisy applause.
‘Would you dream of stopping the performance of a piece of music to applaud every bar that happened to please you? and do you not know that an act of a play is intended, just like a piece of music, to be heard without interruption from beginning to end?... Have you noticed that people look very nice when they smile or look pleased, but look shockingly ugly when they roar with laughter or shout excitedly or sob loudly? Smiles make no noise.’
Eleven days after the royal command performance of John Bull’s Other Island, he began a new play. In this, the last of his ‘big three’, he would challenge his own popularity and present himself as a moral revolutionist. ‘The play is wildly impossible,’ he told the actress Eleanor Robson. ‘...It would run for a week. But what a week that would be!’
It seems to me that what Barbara finds out is that the ancient Greek (whoever he was) who said ‘First make sure of an income and then practise virtue’ was rightly preaching natural morality.
Shaw to Gilbert Murray (5 September 1941)
Father Keegan had been a saint, ‘and now I want to see whether I can make a woman a saint too,’ Shaw wrote to Eleanor Robson. ‘The heroine is so like you that I see nobody in the wide world who can play her except you.’
Charlotte was not happy with the way her husband corresponded with actresses. But he believed that Eleanor Robson would be striking in the piquant role of his Salvation Army officer. She was little more perhaps than a professional model for the part: the biographical model was Beatrice Webb. Like Barbara, Beatrice was a rich man’s daughter and had gone East Ending with the gospel of social salvation. Her violent reaction to the play (‘a dance of devils... hell tossed on the stage, with no hope of heaven... the triumph of the unmoral purpose’) registered her involvement in the ruin of Barbara’s salvationism.
Barbara, as a prototype of St Joan, is a woman apparently converted from religion to a creed of action. But hers is not really a conversion: it is a growing-up. She is a chip off the old block, her father Undershaft having a genius for action that Barbara inherits. The man who stands between Barbara and Undershaft, Adolphus Cusins, is the real convert. Modelled on the classicist Gilbert Murray, Cusins represents Shaw’s own position: that of the fastidious scholar trying to find his place in the political world. He is attracted to Undershaft as the only man who can make him effective through marrying his intellect to power.
There are more false starts, deletions and drastic changes in the holograph manuscript of Major Barbara than in any of Shaw’s previous plays. In the intervals and ‘mostly in Great Northern express trains’, he polished off a ‘new and original tragedy’ early that summer. Passion Poison and Petrifaction or The Fatal Gazogene completed a trilogy of ‘tomfooleries’ done while still at work on his ‘big three’. The invitation had come from Cyril Maude on behalf of the Actors’ Orphanage which each year commissioned a playwright to compose a burlesque of old-time melodrama to be performed in the Royal Botanical Gardens of Regent’s Park during the Theatrical Garden Party. Shaw’s idea came from a story he had once told the Archer children about his aunt, who liked making plaster of Paris figures, and her cat which one day mistook the liquid plaster of Paris for milk and, while asleep, turned into a ponderous mass of cement – to be used by the aunt as a doorstop. From the beginning when the cuckoo clock strikes sixteen (signifying eleven o’clock at night) to the moment when Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache’s lover is obliged to eat part of the ceiling (containing lime) as an antidote to the jealous husband’s poison, we are, as Irving Wardle writes, ‘into Ionesco territory’.
This ‘brief tragedy for Barns and Booths’ by the ‘Chelsea Shakespeare’ was performed ‘for the first time in any tent’ at intervals during the afternoon of 14 July. The author, who was absent, described it as a ‘colossal success’, and arranged for the royalties on all performances for the rest of its copyright life to be paid to the Actors’ Orphanage Fund. ‘Charities are remorseless,’ he explained.
He returned to, but could not finish, Major Barbara. At the beginning of July Charlotte took charge. She proposed returning G.B.S. to Ireland. It was twenty-nine years since he had boarded the North Wall boat for London. Like Larry Doyle, he had ‘an instinct against going back to Ireland’. Nevertheless, like Larry Doyle, he went. It was not of course on his own initiative. ‘I went back to please my wife; and a curious reluctance to retrace my steps made me land in the south and enter Dublin through the backdoor from Meath rather than return as I came, through the front door on the sea.’
They were to stay at Charlotte’s father’s house three miles out of Rosscarbery, a little market town in County Cork. It was a solid grey stone structure built on rising ground with gardens that sloped down to a lake. From the terrace, facing south, they ‘could look out on a great sweep of the bay, with a lighthouse rising like the stub of a pencil on the farthest point of land’. But could he work there? Did the house have a sitting-room well away from the drawing-room? This was vital since they were to be joined by Charlotte’s sister, Mary Cholmondeley, and her husband who was a colonel. It was important to be out of earshot.
G.B.S. spent much of the next three months in that sitting-room getting on ‘scrap by scrap’ with his new play. It progressed very slowly – ‘a speech a day or so,’ he informed Vedrenne. ‘I have not yet finished the play,’ he wrote to Eleanor Robson on 21 August; ‘and my inspiration, as far as the heroine is concerned, is gone. I shall finish it with my brains alone.’ On 11 September he reported that it was ‘just finished’: but he had been left ‘in a condition of sullen desperation concerning it’.
He had turned back from autobiography to politics – from his marriage and the country of his childhood to the economic questions that had first provided the themes of his Plays Unpleasant. Over twenty years separated the beginning of Widowers’ Houses from the completion of Major Barbara, and though the living standards of the middle class had risen in this period there were now almost a million people in the country receiving Poor Law relief. In London at the beginning of 1905 the number of paupers had risen to 150,000, of whom 1,500 were ‘casual paupers’ sleeping in the streets or the casual wards of workhouses and living, according to William Booth, ‘below the standard of the London cab-horse’. Booth had founded the Salvation Army in 1878 to make war on poverty. Though Britain was still at the summit of her imperial power, much of her population existed on the edge of destitution. It was this paradox that Shaw investigated in his play using, as a symbol of Imperialist prosperity, the armaments industry.
‘One never really makes portraits of people in fiction,’ he wrote: ‘what happens is that certain people inspire one to invent fictitious characters for them, which is quite another matter.’ The millionaire munitions capitalist, Andrew Undershaft, seems to have had a composite inspiration: there was the dramatist Charles McEvoy’s father, a benign grey-haired gentleman who, after fighting on the side of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, settled down quietly to establish a torpedo factory; there was Hans Renold, a businessman who came to lecture the Fabian Society on the principles of ‘service before self’ in the manufacture of high explosives. Another prototype was Alfred Nobel, ‘the gentle Bolshevik’ who had patented dynamite in 1867 and in 1901 endowed the Nobel Peace Prize which, as the critic Louis Crompton commented, ‘challenged the humanitarian liberals among his personal friends to solve the problems his discoveries had created’. William Manchester has argued that Shaw’s model was Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the Prussian ‘Cannon King’ whose paternalistic welfare arrangements for his workers in Essen may have suggested Undershaft’s model town. Krupp had died in 1902 and was succeeded by his daughter Bertha. ‘In 1906 – the year after the publication of Major Barbara – she married Dr Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach,’ wrote Maurice Valency, ‘who later assumed the name of Krupp, and took over the management of the Krupp combine, thus fulfilling in reality the role of Dr Cusins in Shaw’s play.’ Shaw himself wrote that Undershaft emerged into the world as Henry Ford. Other critics assumed that he derived from the legendary Basil Zaharoff, chief salesman of Vickers, who ‘made wars so that I could sell arms to both sides’.
Such a multiplicity of candidates attests to the rise of arms traffic throughout the world at the turn of the century. Some, like Zaharoff, made no apology for their merchandise. Others, such as Britain’s largest arms maker Sir William Armstrong, placed the responsibility for ‘legitimate application’ of weapons on the buyer and speculated that better armaments might well render war less barbarous. Others again, such as Nobel, argued for the deterrent effect of explosives.
Undershaft expresses all these attitudes. But when he challenges Cusins to ‘make war on war’ he is deliberately tempting him with the conventional paradox of those times which soon led to German, French and British soldiers being shot down with guns made by their fellow-countrymen in a ‘war to end wars’.
The first act of the play is a drawing-room comedy set in the library of Lady Britomart’s house in Wilton Crescent which displays the wealth of capitalist society; the second act is a Dickensian melodrama showing capitalism’s destitution at the West Ham Shelter of the Salvation Army. Shaw had got as far as Undershaft’s arrival at West Ham when he took his manuscript to Ireland. From then on Undershaft begins to take control of the play and in the third act, a political fantasy set in Perivale St Andrews, a futuristic model town, he dominates the stage.
On 8 September Shaw scribbled ‘End of the Play’ at the conclusion of the third act. But Undershaft’s annihilation of everyone else had left him feeling dissatisfied. Why had it happened? He appeared to have let his unconscious Will, with its fantasies of violence, speak through Undershaft. That name itself brings together the wishes of the unconscious and the underground kingdom of the Devil.
In London earlier that year he had blamed the pressure of business for his difficult progress on the play; at Rosscarbery he attributed his difficulties to the moisture of the Irish climate. His aggressive instincts, however, are more likely to have been aroused by ‘Mrs Chumly’, Charlotte’s sister. Mary Cholmondeley’s determination never to see her brother-in-law had gradually wavered. She had heard a good deal about him and, pricked by curiosity, allowed Charlotte to persuade her after half a dozen years to meet him. For the first week or two, perhaps feeling her disapproval, G.B.S. stayed working all day in the sitting-room. Charlotte joined him there in the mornings to do secretarial work; and in the afternoons she would visit friends in the neighbourhood with ‘Sissy’. Soon G.B.S. was accompanying them on these walks. ‘Mrs C and I, in view of our previously rather distant relations, laid ourselves out to conciliate one another, and rather more than succeeded,’ he confided to Beatrice Webb.
‘I have the important advantage in such matters of not being nearly so disagreeable personally as one would suppose from my writings. I am now completely adopted on the usual lunatic privileged terms in the Cholmondeley household. I have taken several photographs of Mrs C and taught her to swim. The Colonel has presented me with a watch which tells the date and the phases of the moon. I play accompaniments to Mrs C’s singing and the past is buried.’
From that past and behind the patina of politeness the sinister figure of Undershaft expanded. So favourable an impression meanwhile was G.B.S. making on the Cholmondeleys that they invited him to go with them on a round of Irish peers in their castles and only accepted his refusal (‘the worm turned at last’) on the understanding that he would rejoin them the following month at Edstaston, their home in Shropshire.
Shaw arrived back in London alone on 30 September and the next day went down to read his play at Gilbert Murray’s house in Oxford. The ostensible reason for his visit was to ensure that those people on whom his characters were modelled would not be offended. He had written to Murray asking whether Murray himself minded being represented as a foundling. Murray replied that the only thing that Shaw did at his peril was to fasten on him the Christian name Adolphus. In Shaw’s first draft the professor had been called Dolly Tankerville. But he changed this Wildean surname to Cusins, suggesting the foundling’s curious relationship (his own cousin) to himself.
His audience at Oxford that day included Murray and Granville Barker who was shortly to play the part of Cusins. At the end of the second act they were, Murray remembered, ‘thrilled with enthusiasm, especially at the Salvation Army scenes. Act 3, in which the idealists surrender to the armaments industries, was a terrible disappointment to us.’
Shaw returned to London and that night wrote to Murray confessing that he felt ‘quite desperate about my last act: I think I must simply rewrite it.’
To encourage himself he went next day to the Albert Hall where the Salvation Army was holding a festival to commemorate dead comrades. As the band played
‘When the roll is called up yonder
I’LL BE THERE’
he stood in the middle of the centre grand tier box, in the front row, ‘and sang it as it has never been sung before,’ he told Vedrenne. ‘The Times will announce my conversion tomorrow.’
The following afternoon he joined Charlotte and the Cholmondeleys at Edstaston. He had received a letter from Gilbert Murray enclosing some ideas set down in dialogue for the third act. ‘What I am driving at, is to get the real dénouement of the play, after Act ii,’ Murray explained. ‘...It makes Cusens come out much stronger, but I think that rather an advantage. Otherwise you get a simple defeat of the Barbara principles by the Undershaft principles.’
The rewriting of his last scene took Shaw eleven days. ‘I want to get Cusins beyond the point of wanting power,’ he replied to Murray. The Edstaston manuscript was completed on 15 October 1905. It is perhaps the most complex and ambiguous scene Shaw ever wrote. The debate between Undershaft, Barbara and Cusins takes place at many levels. Barbara, who represents evangelical Christianity, has lost her faith by the end of Act II, using Christ’s words upon the cross: ‘My God: why hast thou forsaken me?’ Cusins represents scepticism, a purely negative force by itself; and Undershaft embodies Shaw’s concept of the Life Force, a mindless power for good-or-evil depending (like all technology) on what human beings themselves decide to do with it.
Barbara’s transfiguration must come through a resurrected faith that involves Cusins and Undershaft – her future husband and her father: three in one and one in three. While she occupies the position of the Son, Cusins is the Holy Ghost and Undershaft God the Father. But Undershaft is also the Devil – ‘You may be a devil; but God speaks through you sometimes,’ Barbara admits. In the religion of Creative Evolution, life arises from the anonymous concept of energy. It is a force without morality and, as Barbara discovers, ‘there is no wicked side: life is all one.’
Cusins recognizes in Undershaft the mysterious spirit of Dionysus, capable of creation and destruction. Human beings therefore ‘create’ God or the Devil according to the way in which they employ Divine Energy. On the psychological level Barbara is the superego, Cusins the ego and Undershaft the id: three in one and one in three. According to the system laid out in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Barbara is the idealist, Cusins the realist and Undershaft the philistine. In his last scene Shaw attempts to unite all three: Cusins is to be Barbara’s husband and, as the foundling inheritor of his father-in-law’s munitions factory, will become Andrew Undershaft VIII. He will be able to join his intelligence and Barbara’s spiritual passion to his father-in-law’s money and material strength.
For all his pragmatism and lack of hypocrisy, Undershaft is a limited man. He writes up UNASHAMED as his motto and is contemptuous of democratic shams. The ‘ballot paper that really governs,’ he says, ‘is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it’. But though he exults in his power he is also its prisoner. Armaments are the instruments of revolutionary change and also the means by which authoritarian governments repress change. The will to live must do battle with the tendency to self-destruction.
The ambiguity of the play partly derives from the conflict of Undershaft’s motives. By inviting Cusins to be his successor is he tempting him, as Mephistopheles tempted Faust, to his damnation? Or is he an instinctive agent for the Life Force seeking in Cusins a better use of the power he commands? In fact he is doing both: that is how life operates. ‘You cannot have power for good without having power for evil, too.’
Cusins believes that he will reject the armourer’s faith and ‘sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to whom I please’. To this Undershaft replies: ‘From the moment when you become Andrew Undershaft, you will never do as you please again.’ This seems to be the percipient voice of the Devil having recruited a partner in his hellish trade. But elsewhere Undershaft appears to challenge Cusins and Barbara to use this power in a fundamentally different way: ‘Society cannot be saved,’ he says (paraphrasing Plato’s Republic), ‘until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek.’
In the earlier manuscript Undershaft had posed a conundrum for Cusins: ‘Why is a government a government?’ And Cusins answered: ‘Because the people are fools.’ In the Edstaston manuscript Cusins states his belief in the common man:
‘I love the common people. I want to arm them against the lawyer, doctor, the priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish.’
Cusins enshrines something of Gilbert Murray’s political idealism – it is not surprising that Murray’s later work for the League of Nations should be in line with Cusins’s decision to ‘make war on war’. Shaw and Barker felt the excitement of working in the theatre with this brilliant young Oxford professor. He was, Shaw told Pinero, a ‘genuine artistic anarchic character’. Shaw wanted to bring Murray’s classical scholarship to bear on twentieth-century politics and he uses Undershaft to give muscle to a man D. H. Lawrence was to call ‘all disembodied mind’. The passionate thinking Shaw put into Major Barbara was partly the result of this association with Murray; and their friendship became a bonus added to the successful breakthrough of Shaw’s plays at the Court. Both these factors helped to make the positive ending to Major Barbara – an ending with the ‘inconsequence of madness in it’.
This hard-won optimism had survived the initial effects of Shavian irony, but there are signs of rejection to the graft. Beatrice Webb records Shaw as arguing ‘earnestly and cleverly, even persuasively, in favour of what he imagines to be his central theme – the need for preliminary good physical environment before anything could be done to raise the intelligence and morality of the average sensual man’. But Undershaft’s general attitude towards life continued to trouble people.
Of all the play’s aphorisms and ideas echoing from Plato, Euripides, Nietzsche, the most significant derive from Shaw’s reading of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. What Shaw believed to be the central theme of Major Barbara – that ‘the way of life lies through the factory of death’ – is similar to several proverbs of Blake, with whom Shaw shared a religious faith in Energy. He could expound this faith so well that even Beatrice Webb ‘found it difficult to answer him’. Yet, she added, ‘he did not convince me.
‘...the impression left is that Cusins and Barbara are neither of them convinced by Undershaft’s argument, but that they are uttering words, like the silly son, to bridge over a betrayal of their own convictions.’
Shaw’s genius went into the creation of Undershaft. The armaments manufacturer loves his enemies because they have kept him in business. Like Christ, he comes ‘not to send peace but a sword’. Cusins he had constructed ‘with my brains alone’ – and with Gilbert Murray’s. ‘But you are driving me against my nature,’ Cusins protests to Undershaft. ‘I hate war.’ Shaw, too, seems to be driven against his nature. He had wanted to move Cusins and Barbara ‘beyond the point of wanting power’. But their final permeation of the Undershaft firm lacks conviction on stage. Shaw knew this. He continued tinkering with this last scene up to 1930 when the Standard Edition of the play was published, trying to make Barbara and Cusins ‘more prominent’ and giving them ‘more commanding positions on stage and stronger movement’. But as he told Robert Morley ten years later during the making of the film version of the play: ‘That’s always been a terrible act. I don’t think anyone could do anything with it.’
‘You have learnt something,’ Undershaft tells Barbara at a genuinely touching moment. ‘That always feels at first as if you have lost something.’
Shaw himself seems to have felt this sensation of loss. ‘But oh! Eleanor between ourselves, the play, especially in the last act, is a mere ghost, at least so it seems to me... It was a fearful job... Brainwork comes natural to me; but this time I knew I was working – and now nobody understands.’
This lack of understanding proceeds from the complexity of what Shaw was questioning. Is socialism at odds with human nature? Are the self-destructive impulses of human beings ineradicable? Are there ways of disarming oppressive power that do not betray the cause that uses them? Though the affirmation comes out strongly, getting through to it had been the hardest work the playwright had done. And the chance that he is wrong remains. The Devil’s Force of Death speech in Man and Superman, with its more efficient engines of destruction (‘of sword and gun and poison gas’) leads straight to Undershaft’s weapons factory with its ‘aerial battleships’ that eventually will fly over Captain Shotover’s villa at the climax of Heartbreak House, threatening with its ‘terrific explosion’ the end of humankind.
Shaw’s optimism was a perilous act of faith focused on the future. He had looked in John Bull’s Other Island for a country where the ‘facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal’. In Perivale St Andrews nothing is achieved ‘by words and dreams’: killing is ‘the final test of conviction’. It is the nightmare of a man with ‘honour and humanity on my side, wit in my head, skill in my hand, and a higher life for my aim’, who has a vision of world war to come. In the aftermath of this war, through the fantasy of Back to Methuselah, he will refashion humankind in the image of his heart’s desire.
*
The Salvation Army lent uniforms for the production at the Court Theatre. The audience for the first performance on 28 November 1905 included a box full of uniformed Salvation Army Commissioners who for the first time in their lives had entered a theatre. Among ‘the intelligentsia of London’ sat the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, in the last week of his Government, with Beatrice Webb, whom five days before he had appointed to the new Royal Commission on the Poor Law. The foyer of the Court was crowded to bursting – hundreds of people had to be turned away – and above the excitement floated a rumour that the play was blasphemous. The curtain rose.