Do you know Shaw’s writings? That’s the man who has quite a good way of coming to terms with life – of putting himself into harmony with it (which is no small achievement). He is proud of his work, like Wilde or Whistler but without their pretension, rather like a dog that is proud of its master.
Rainer Maria Rilke to Elizabeth von der Heydt (26 April 1906)
‘We are in the agonies of househunting,’ Shaw had appealed to Wells in April 1904. ‘Now is the time to produce an eligible residence, if you have one handy.’ Charlotte had grown more ingenious at braking her husband’s flow of work. Early in 1906 she encouraged him to sit for his portrait by Neville Lytton. It was an extraordinary picture, owing much to an observation by Granville Barker that the Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X in the Doria Palace at Rome was uncannily similar to G.B.S. Working in imitation of Velázquez, and placing his subject in papal vestments and throne, Neville Lytton achieved what Shaw was to call a ‘witty jibe at my poses’.
These poses multiplied over the last half of Shaw’s career – as busts, statuettes, medallions, stamps, portraits in oils, watercolours, crayon and needlework; as wooden marionettes, caricatures on posters and in papers, on film, as photographs (poised either naked or eccentrically tailored) on land, in cars, under parasols, at sea; and as likenesses rendered in stained glass, from a simple stick of shaving soap, as a brass door-knocker or waxwork tricyclist and, most extreme of all perhaps, in grisaille with hands held to ears on a Chinese famille rose vase decorated with dense peony, chrysanthemum, lily and vine...
People were aghast at Shaw’s Everest of vanity. But, admitting his addiction to public attention, he tried to employ it usefully. His commissioned portraits and busts may be seen as evidence of generous patronage. He was curious too about the public phenomenon he had manufactured to replace the unloved Sonny.
But Charlotte was not amused. Taking advantage of a visit to England by Rodin, she invited the French sculptor to visit her at Adelphi Terrace on the afternoon of Friday 1 March 1906. He came, they talked, and the consequence was that, as Shaw wrote to Trebitsch later that day, ‘my wife insists on dragging me to Paris for twelve days at Easter so that Rodin may make a bust of me!!!!!’
They stayed at the Hotel Palais d’Orsay, and after meeting Rodin on 16 April began the sittings at his private studio in Meudon. ‘He had, I believe, a serious friendship for us,’ Shaw was to write. They were at his house all day, most days, until they left France on 8 May. Talking to Rodin as he was preparing to begin, Charlotte complained that other artists and photographers had automatically produced the sort of mephistophelean figure they assumed her husband to be, without taking the trouble to look at him. Rodin replied that he knew nothing of Shaw’s reputation: ‘but what is there I will give you.’
G.B.S. was determined to prove a champion sitter, putting immense vitality simply into standing still. ‘The portrait makes tremendous strides, thanks to the energy with which Shaw stands,’ wrote Rainer Maria Rilke, then Rodin’s secretary. ‘He stands like a thing which has the will to stand, over and above its natural capacity for it...
‘Shaw as a model surpasses description. He... has the power of getting his whole self, even to his legs and all the rest of him, into his bust, which will have to represent the whole Shaw, as it were, that Rodin has before him something quite unusually concentrated, which he absorbs into himself and into his work (you can imagine with what zest).’
Rodin’s studio seemed transformed into a theatre. Each day an audience assembled and sat in mesmerized silence as Shaw (‘ce modèle extraordinaire’) collected and concentrated himself and Rodin filled the place with ‘his raging activity, his gigantic movements’, and volleys of unintelligible sound. In the intervals Charlotte played about G.B.S. ‘like a spring wind about a goat’. In a letter to his wife, Rilke sent a beautifully exact description of the work’s development. ‘After rapidly cutting out the eyebrows so that something like a nose appeared, and marking the position of the mouth by an incision such as children make in a snowman, he began to make first four, then eight, then sixteen profiles, letting the model, who was standing quite close to him, turn every three minutes or so...
‘In the third sitting, he placed Shaw in a low child’s chair (all of which caused this ironical and mocking spirit, who is however by no means an unsympathetic personality, exquisite pleasure) and sliced the head off the bust with a wire – (Shaw, whom the bust already resembled very strikingly, watched this execution with indescribable delight.)’
What appealed to Shaw was Rodin’s monumental matter-of-factness. He never pretended to a knowledge of his plays (‘he knows absolutely nothing about books,’ Shaw commented, ‘ – thinks they are things to be read’), his eyes never twinkled, his hands did not gesticulate: he worked, and ‘like all great workmen who can express themselves in words, was very straight and simple’. Shaw’s words, according to Rodin, were less straight but even more simple: ‘M. Shaw ne parle pas très bien,’ he said; ‘mais il s’exprime avec une telle violence qu’il s’impose.’
These séances at Meudon became one of the features of Paris’s spring season. People as various as G. K. Chesterton and Gwen John were reported to have bulged or peeped in for a moment. From Vienna came Trebitsch to marvel and absorb the ‘lofty mind’ of Charlotte in ‘profound talk about God and the universe’.
To other acquaintances – including the young American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn – Shaw sent invitations for the unveiling of Rodin’s sculpture ‘Le Penseur’. Coburn had photographed Shaw two summers earlier, and in 1906 Shaw had written a preface to the catalogue for an exhibition of his work in which he compared Coburn’s photograph of Chesterton to Rodin’s statue of Balzac. The inauguration of ‘Le Penseur’ outside the Panthéon took place on the afternoon of 21 April. Next morning Shaw surprised Coburn with the suggestion that ‘after his bath I should photograph him nude in the pose of Le Penseur’ on the edge of his bath. With this parody of ‘Le Penseur’ he came close to sabotaging his purpose in going to Rodin for evidence of himself ‘just as I am, without one plea’. He wanted to feel cleansed of the revulsion that periodically rose up in him over his own notoriety. But this Shavian fame arose from so deep a need that he sentimentalized his humility towards Rodin when famously remarking: ‘at least I was sure of a place in the biographical dictionaries a thousand years hence as: “Shaw, Bernard: subject of a bust by Rodin: otherwise unknown”.’
They went to Ibsen’s Canard Sauvage and to the Grand Guignol with Trebitsch. The more blood-curdling these plays, Trebitsch observed, the more of an effort Shaw had to make ‘not to burst out laughing’. He particularly enjoyed the guillotine. Nothing, it seemed to Trebitsch, could frighten G.B.S., not even the evening newspaper predictions of a revolution in Paris on May Day which he looked forward to as ‘the next instalment of the horror-play we have just been seeing’. Shaw spent the afternoon of May Day with Charlotte on the Place de la République and afterwards sent a message to the Labour Leader commenting that the French Government wanted to win the General Election ‘by suppressing a revolution. Unluckily there is no revolution to suppress. The Government therefore sends the police and the dragoons to shove and charge the lazy and law abiding Parisians until they are goaded into revolt. No use: the people simply WON’T revolt.
‘But several respectable persons have been shoved and galloped over and even sabred. Surely it ought to be within the resources of modern democracy to find a remedy for this sort of official amateur revolution making. It is a clear interference with our business as scientific revolutionists.’
In a letter to Granville Barker he admitted there had been a little more activity, describing Charlotte as clinging to lamp-posts in order to see over people’s heads and growing ‘so furious when she saw a real crowd charged by real soldiers that she wanted to throw stones’. After being ‘pushed roughly hither and thither’ she was led back by Shaw (‘by dignified strategy which did not at any time go to the length of absolutely running away’) to their hotel ‘bursting into fresh spasms of rage all the way’. They had quitted the field without wounds and Shaw insisted that Charlotte had ‘rather enjoyed being part of a revolution’. ‘We finished up in the evening with a very stirring performance of Beethoven’s 9th symphony at the Opera,’ he told Trebitsch; ‘so the day was a pretty full one.’
On 8 May Shaw sat to Rodin for the last time, then he and Charlotte caught the four o’clock train back to London. She carried with her two pencil-and-wash sketches of herself inscribed by Rodin ‘Homage à sympathique Madame Charlotte Shaw’. From London she sent him chocolates and her photograph of him (none of Shaw’s had come out) and in October the curiously tame marble bust arrived at Adelphi Terrace; ‘maintenant je suis immortel,’ wrote Shaw in a letter to Rodin that was returned to him as insufficiently addressed.
Within six weeks of returning to London Shaw was turning his head to William Strang for a good tight portrait. The following year, 1907, began with a couple of quick sittings for a bust by Troubetzkoy and ended with a preliminary one for Epstein. Shaw was to use these busts (and others by Sava Botzaris, Kathleen Bruce, Joseph Coplans, Jo Davidson, Sigismund de Strobl and Clare Winsten) to pull faces at his ‘reputation’. Prince Troubetzkoy, being paternally Russian, ‘made me flatteringly like a Russian nobleman’; and in the hands of Jacob Epstein, an American expatriate, he later became ‘a Brooklyn navvy... my skin thickened, my hair coarsened, I put on five stone in weight, my physical strength trebled’. It followed that his plaster reputation lay in the imaginations of other people, not within himself.
Charlotte welcomed the respite from work these sittings and standings and posings obtained for him. But Epstein’s ungentlemanly bust (completed in 1934) was ‘like a blow in the face’ and she told everyone who mentioned it to her that if this object ‘came into our house she would walk out of it’. As Rodin had not understood his humour so Epstein had overlooked his Shavian veneer: and ‘without my veneer I am not Bernard Shaw’.
This veneer, he had sometimes argued, was his reputation. In these busts and portraits, Shaw often felt he recognized part of himself; but never could he find all parts combined. Perhaps there was no method, even in his own work, of allying the opposing forces within himself. At the age of fifty he had proposed ‘to furnish the world with an authentic portrait-bust of me before I had left the prime of life’. The nearest he came to this was perhaps Strobl’s work – Charlotte certainly thought so. But the search for comprehensive authenticity continued almost to the end of his life. It was impossible, H. G. Wells complained, to move around Europe without being stared at by these Shavian images which seemed at the same time to mock and celebrate his rising success.
In the summer of 1906, as if in sympathy with this success, Shaw ascended from Wandsworth Gas Works in a balloon (a happening he would later re-compose for his play Misalliance). He rose and floated and descended over two and a half hours, without Charlotte’s knowledge yet in the company of her sister, Granville Barker and the aviator-actor Robert Loraine. Loraine was a combination of artist and man-of-action Shaw particularly admired. ‘I was never free from the impression when Shaw was speaking to me,’ Loraine had written in his diary, ‘that he might at any moment ascend to Heaven like Elisha on a chariot of fire.’ They were guided in their balloon by an aeronaut Percival Spencer (who was translated into Joey Percival in Misalliance) to a height of 9,000 feet. After forty minutes’ drifting ‘very pleasant and seraphic with nothing happening, except that Shaw would peer through a hole in the boarding at his feet which made him feel rather sick, we discussed landing,’ Loraine wrote. ‘...I thought the people would be rather interested to receive visitors from the air, and especially flattered when they discovered Shaw’s identity. “Don’t be so certain,” said Shaw. “They may think my works detestable.”’ In the event they bumped down in a field near Chobham and were met by a purple-faced landowner, unacquainted with Shaw’s oeuvre and waving a shooting-stick. ‘The welcome he gave us was a curt direction as to the quickest way off his property.’
Shaw to Beatrice Webb (9 December 1910)
Their agonies of house-hunting ended when they came across the Rectory at Ayot St Lawrence, not far from Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire. The Rector, who could not afford to keep up the grounds, had no need of such a large house himself, and Charlotte decided to rent it. She did not plan to stay there long. They continued renting the place for fourteen years and shortly after the First World War bought it – following which it became known as ‘Shaw’s Corner’.
Ayot was a remote twelfth-century village where ‘the last thing of real importance that happened was, perhaps, the Flood’. It had two churches, one shop, no omnibus or train service and, even by the 1930s, no gas or water supply, no delivery of newspapers and no electricity – the Rectory itself making use of a private generating plant. The house, which had been built in 1902, was a plain dark-red building standing in a sloping two-acre plot with scraps of kitchen-garden, orchard, lawn and a belt of conifers. Besides the dining-room, study and a small drawing-room, there were eight bedrooms.
Shaw and Charlotte moved in at the beginning of November 1906, with a married couple, Henry and Clara Higgs, to look after them. Higgs took over the garden, with an odd-job man to help him; and Charlotte engaged two maids to assist Mrs Higgs indoors. The Higgses, who had already been with them at Adelphi Terrace, were to remain in their service for some forty years. ‘Mrs Shaw looked upon my wife almost as a daughter,’ Higgs reckoned; ‘they were like a father and mother to us.’ Shaw recognized their value to him with an inscription in one of his books: ‘To Harry and Clara Higgs, who have had a very important part in my life’s work, as without their friendly services I should not have had time to write my books and plays nor had any comfort in my daily life.’
The Rectory was a fairly comfortable, fairly dismal house. Charlotte filled it with stiff armchairs, bureaux, beds: lodging-house objects with hardly a good piece among them. They had grown tired of house-hunting and this was one of the few houses about which they were agreed: neither of them liked it. Every day at Ayot felt like a Sunday. Once they had settled in, they were free to move out and around.
*
They had kept their maisonette in Adelphi Terrace, went regularly between London and Hertfordshire, and erratically everywhere else. At the end of March 1907, Charlotte carried Shaw off to France and they whirled through town after town for twelve days of hectic relaxation. ‘I shall go to Beauvais probably tomorrow or next day,’ Shaw wrote from Rouen, ‘and shall either do the cathedral in ten minutes & hurry on Lord knows where, or stay there a day or two.’ But, he owned, ‘the cessation of writing & talking has done me a lot of good’.
To lighten the load of correspondence he had devised in 1906 a series of five stereotyped postcard messages. Over the next years the range of these cards greatly expanded. He attempted to give them a series of coloured codes, though eventually running out of colours. His views on capital punishment, on temperance, and the forty-letter British ‘alfabet’ were to be relayed in tones of green, orange-brown and blue. Neat piles of these coloured cards lay on his desk and, as he read through his mail each day he was able to cap many letters with an appropriate card. Snap! Politely and with force, they spelled out his reasons for being unable to read and report on unpublished manuscripts, give spoken interviews, inscribe books that were not his personal gifts, or comply with requests from strangers for his signature (with or without a photograph); why he could not receive visitors, acknowledge gifts, encourage people to celebrate his birthdays, respond to appeals founded on the notion that he was a multi-millionaire, open bazaars, speak at public dinners, write prefaces, read or write letters. In short: why he could not do so many of the things he spent his life doing.
‘The only way to avoid giving offence by refusing is to refuse everybody by rule.’ But Shaw consistently disobeyed his rule – even his authoritative refusals to provide autographs were sometimes signed. The cards were a method of saving time. He invested many hours in drafting variant texts. But always there was an ample margin that he could fill with commentary, outwitting the purpose of a printed message.
In 1907 he engaged Georgina Gillmore, daughter of his mother’s half-sister Arabella, as his secretary. Charlotte and Shaw were fond of ‘Judy’. She was eighteen and lived with Lucinda Shaw in Fitzroy Square when she started work for G.B.S. He sent her to secretarial college and she worked for him until her marriage in 1912.
Even with her help, Shaw complained that only ‘the fear of my wife’ was keeping him from a breakdown. Throughout the year, more than fifty of his articles, statements, interviews and letters appeared in the newspapers. There was Shaw on disarmament in the Evening Standard, on polygamy in The Times and on diet in the Daily Mail. His most common subjects were marriage, censorship and women’s suffrage. But readers of the Daily Graphic could pick up what he had to say on ‘the imperfections of phrenologists’; and Clarion subscribers could learn about ‘the Gentle Art of Unpleasantness’, a social exercise in three parts. He fired off a piece on Delacroix to the Saturday Review; composed a famous essay on Belloc and Chesterton for the New Age; and published a review of A. R. Orage’s book on Nietzsche in Fabian News. The variety seemed infinite, the quantity endless.
In July 1907 the Shaws and the Webbs went off to a large house in Llanbedr, a village on the Welsh coast between Barmouth and Harlech, where the first Fabian Summer School took place. The event was underwritten by Charlotte who saw it as a method of ventilating their studies with fresh air and a holiday atmosphere.
The Fabian Summer Schools, which later came to be seen as a foundation of the intellectual wing of the Labour Party, were originally designed to get country members to meet metropolitan Fabians, and grey-haired socialists to mingle with the Fabian nursery. Occasional romances glimmered, but the exhilarations were generally those of a ‘joyous monastery’. The day would begin with Swedish Drill led by Mary Hankinson, a much-loved muscular games mistress and leading Fabian cricketer, who was to be a prototype for Shaw’s St Joan. Breakfast, an experimental meal, was followed by a venture into co-operative washing-up. Cold baths were free (hot baths cost sixpence); rooms were set aside in which to practise silence, and no smoking was permitted (except, literally, in the smoking-room). There were courses of lectures available on the National Debt and the Modern Novel. Additional fixtures included swimming and tugs-of-war (Vegetarians versus Meat-eaters); and people were allowed to bring bicycles and eventually tennis balls – though never dogs or children. Highly organized games were discouraged, but there was always some tonic recreation such as country dances with the aid of Cecil J. Sharp’s The Country Dance Book (3 vols.). Lights went out and doors were bolted at 11 p.m., and Fabians were requested ‘to refrain from loud talk and noises’ in the dormitories.
‘The Fabian School is sleeping five in a room, and apparently enjoying it,’ Shaw wrote to Granville Barker. G.B.S. was the chief attraction. He lectured on marriage, education and foreign politics; gave readings from his plays; and chatted with everyone. Thirty-nine Fabians camped in the old schoolhouse down the road from the Shaws, who had been joined in their house by Charlotte’s sister and Robert Loraine. After one day’s hike Shaw failed to return. Dressed in convenient drill-costumes and equipped with lanterns, a party of almost a hundred Fabians streamed across the mountains and valleys: and he was discovered asleep in a hotel.
More alarming were his exploits at sea. Each morning he swam and one morning, after a storm, almost drowned. Pressing him later as to what thoughts had come to mind during what might have been his last few moments alive, Loraine was told that he had been almost completely preoccupied by the business inconveniences of his death. How would Charlotte understand the arrangements with his translators? How would she cope with his lateness for lunch? ‘Then my foot struck a stone, and instead of saying “Thank God!” I said, “Damn!”’
It was against this terrible capacity for endangering himself, and his instinctive ‘Damn!’ rather than ‘Thank God!’ on reaching safety, that Charlotte had to be so fiercely on guard. Increasingly, as Arnold Bennett noticed, she looked ‘like the mother of a large family’. For Christmas she tucked Shaw up again in her sister and brother-in-law’s house, where it was pretty well impossible for him to get into scrapes. And she kept him under her supervision and out of the country for three summer months of 1908 while the drains at Ayot were being replaced. First they went to Stockholm. To help preserve its exclusiveness, he promised to ‘perpetrate the notion that Sweden is a frightful place, where bears wander through the streets and people live on cod liver oil’. He then descended to Bayreuth where he heard Richter conduct Wagner’s Ring as well as ‘the most perfectly managed performance [of Parsifal] I ever saw (and I had seen six before)’. Finally, Charlotte escorted him round the railway hotels of Ireland, from Galway to Dublin, where he was to present the Municipal Art Gallery with one of his Rodin busts.
The visit marked a change from their previous tours of Ireland when they had stayed with the ‘Brandons and Castletowns and Kingstons & other Irish peers in their castles’. These families regarded G.B.S. as a jumped-up Dublin office boy. ‘Charlotte seems perfectly happy and delighted with her cad,’ reported Edith Somerville, ‘for cad he is in spite of his talent.’ For Charlotte’s sake Shaw made himself ‘very agreeable and quite affable,’ as Edith Somerville admitted, but this affability cost him a good deal in patience and energy, and after 1907 (when he declined to accompany Charlotte to Castle Haven) they stayed at hotels or with more recent friends such as Lady Gregory.
Their motor tour of Europe had been an ambitious excursion. ‘I was crushed, I am now exasperated,’ Shaw cried out in a letter to Granville Barker, ‘...another day’s motoring will murder me.’ But the next day’s motoring near Rothenburg had almost murdered Charlotte, the motor having ‘backjumped,’ Shaw explained, ‘& sent Charlotte like a rocket to the roof of the car (a limousine, unluckily)’. Her symptoms (a bad throat) made her uncertain whether or not her neck was broken. ‘She leans to the belief that it is,’ observed Shaw who had the advantage, while she recuperated, of remaining four days in the same place. Pathetically he signalled his friends for business letters, and confided to Granville Barker how fed up he was with ‘the cat and dog life I lead with poor Charlotte... Another month of it would end in a divorce.’
Their most curious holiday episode had been an encounter with Strindberg. ‘I thought it my duty to pay my respects to a great man whom I considered one of the great dramatists of Europe,’ Shaw afterwards remembered. ‘People told me it was not of the slightest use. He is absolutely mad, they said, he won’t see anybody, he never takes walks except in the middle of the night when there is nobody about, he attacks all his friends with the greatest fury. You will only be wasting your time.’ Nevertheless, ‘I achieved the impossible,’ Shaw wrote to Archer. Strindberg was ‘quite a pleasant looking person,’ Shaw recalled, ‘with the most beautiful sapphire blue eyes I have ever seen. He was beyond expression shy.’ Shaw had prepared some conversational material in French, but Strindberg took the wind out of his sails ‘by addressing me in German’. Their exchange developed by way of some embarrassed silences, a ‘pale smile or two’ from Strindberg and an undercurrent of polite French from Charlotte.
Strindberg had arranged for them to see that morning a special performance of Miss Julie at his Intimate Theatre, having summoned August Falck and Manda Björling back from their holiday in the archipelago to play the two protagonists. The absence of an audience and the presence of Strindberg had been unsettling – this astonishingly being ‘the first time Strindberg had accepted to see the play in the 20 years of its existence,’ Anthony Swerling records, ‘so much did he shy from the theatre’. Though Strindberg had proudly shown the Shaws round his theatre beforehand, shortly afterwards, in a celebrated spasm of gloom, he consulted his watch and, noting it was almost half-past one, remarked in German that at two o’clock he was going to be sick. ‘On this strong hint the party broke up.’
How much did they comprehend each other, the author of Married which Strindberg called ‘the reverse side of my fearful attraction towards the other sex’; and the author of Getting Married, a tentative ‘conversation’ with feminist implications dramatizing the economic relations of marriage? Shaw was to describe what he had seen at the Intimate Theatre as one of Strindberg’s ‘chamber plays’. With the emotional intimacy of chamber music he had never felt easy. But generally he knew where Strindberg stood. ‘I was born too soon to be greatly influenced by him as a playwright, but,’ he was to write ‘he is among the greatest of the great.’ In the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans he had described him as ‘the only genuinely Shakespearean modern dramatist’, a resolute tragi-comedian, logical and faithful, who gave us the choice either of dismissing as absurd his way of judging conduct or else, by accepting it, concluding that ‘it is cowardly to continue living’.
The suffering men and women inflict on each other in the name of love never appears in Shaw’s work as it does in Strindberg’s. Greatness ‘implies a degree of human tragedy, of suffering and sacrifice,’ wrote Thomas Mann. ‘The knotted muscles of Tolstoy bearing up the full burden of morality, Atlas-like; Strindberg, who was in hell; the martyr’s death Nietzsche died on the cross of thought; it is these that inspire us with the reverence of tragedy; but in Shaw there was nothing of all this. Was he beyond such things, or were they beyond him?’
Shaw’s tragedy lay in the need to suppress such things; Strindberg’s in the need to re-enact them. But Shaw felt the force of that re-enactment. He tried to persuade Beerbohm Tree to put on Lycko Pers Resa at His Majesty’s (the play closest to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt), but without success. Almost none of Strindberg’s plays had been translated into English before Shaw’s sister Lucy, with Maurice Elvey, produced a version of Miss Julie that was first presented in London by the Adelphi Play Society in 1912. That year, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter circulated a letter eliciting opinions of Strindberg’s role in European culture to be published in the event of his death from cancer. ‘Strindberg is a very great dramatist: he and Ibsen have made Sweden and Norway the dramatic centre of the world,’ Shaw replied. ‘...Time may wear him out; but Death will not succeed in murdering him.’ Strindberg died a fortnight later.
This multiplicity of motives is, I like to think, typical of our times. And if others have done this before me, then I congratulate myself in not being alone in my belief in these ‘paradoxes’ (the word always used to describe new discoveries).
Strindberg, Preface to Miss Julie
‘On the question of technique, I have, by way of experiment, eliminated all intervals,’ wrote Strindberg in his Preface to Miss Julie. For Getting Married Shaw used a similar experiment. ‘The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused,’ he wrote, ‘and a return made to unity of time and place as observed in the ancient Greek drama.’
By directing critics to the play’s Aristotelian rules, Shaw swept their attention past an embarrassing parallel. For years in the Saturday Review he had made fun of the plays of Victorien Sardou, full of a ‘bewildering profusion of everything that has no business in a play’. Getting Married is in places an ingenious adaptation of Sardou’s Divorçons. The parallels are ‘not only in the overall fusion of Farce with a genuine discussion of marriage and divorce,’ observed the critic Martin Meisel, ‘but in particulars and details’. Sardou’s plan of playwriting, Shaw had written, ‘is first to invent the action of his piece, and then to carefully keep it off the stage and have it announced merely by letters and telegrams’.
The Shavian play structure too moved the action off stage, and reversed the relationship between dialogue and incident. Getting Married progresses by means of a series of conversations: duologues and trios that form and dissolve one into another. It is as if a conventional well-made play were being performed backstage, and we witness the performers discussing its event-plot during the intervals. ‘It is the wedding day of the bishop’s daughter,’ he wrote. ‘The situation is expounded in the old stage fashion by that old stage figure the comic greengrocer, hired for the occasion as butler.
‘The fun grows fast and furious as the guests arrive, invited and uninvited, with the most distracting malaproposity. Two are missing: the bridegroom and the bride. They have each received anonymously a pamphlet entitled “Do you know what you are going to do? By one who has Done It,” setting forth all the anomalies and injustices and dangers of marriage under the existing British law. They refuse to get up and dress until they have read this inopportune document to the last word. When at last they appear they flatly refuse to face the horrors of the marriage law. Thereupon the whole company plunges into a discussion of marriage, and presently sits as a committee to draw up a form of private contract, as in the later days of ancient Rome, to supersede the legal ceremony. They are utterly unable to agree on a single article of it.’
Though Shaw claimed a classical provenance for Getting Married, it actually represented ‘a new dramaturgy’ as Eric Bentley wrote, ‘and not, as its critics thought, a mere pamphlet in dialogue form’. Like The Doctor’s Dilemma, it stages an institution. ‘The play is about marriage as an institution and about nothing else.’ His method of treating it was one that he had first attempted, and been persuaded to abandon, fifteen years before in the original last act of The Philanderer. It had been the celebrated divorcée Lady Colin Campbell who opened Shaw’s eyes to ‘the fact that I have started on quite a new trail and must reserve this act for the beginning of a new play’. With Getting Married Shaw finally started out on that trail.
The Philanderer had been one of Shaw’s most directly autobiographical plays; with Getting Married he had grown more oblique. Nevertheless there is an autobiographical undercurrent. The scene in which the whole company sits as a committee ineffectually attempting to draft an English Partnership Deed comes from Shaw’s memory of the contract Annie Besant presented to him over their piano duets.
More complex in derivation are the characters of Mrs George Collins and St John Hotchkiss. Mrs George, as she is called, is a mayoress, a coal merchant’s wife and also ‘Incognita Appassionata’, the mysterious writer of love letters to the Bishop of Chelsea: altogether ‘a wonderful interesting’ woman, her brother-in-law the greengrocer tells everyone. The others believe she is ‘too good to be true’ until her appearance, described in Shaw’s stage directions at the moment of her entrance as a ‘triumphant, pampered, wilful, intensely alive woman... But her beauty is wrecked, like an ageless landscape ravaged by long and fierce war... The whole face is a battle-field of the passions, quite deplorable until she speaks, when an alert sense of fun rejuvenates her in a moment, and makes her company irresistible.’
She represents three women in one. Her age is approximately Charlotte’s, but Shaw adds the qualities of two other women covered by Mrs Collins’s other names. As ‘Incognita Appassionata’ she embodies the sexual passion that had been excluded from his marriage. For more than two years Shaw had been receiving a series of extraordinary letters from ‘Poste Restante, Godalming’, signed ‘Miss Charmer’. He replied saying that love was an infinite mystery ‘like everything else’; and that she had better ‘marry and have children: then you will not ask from works of art what you can get only from life.’ The result was that the girl, who revealed herself as Erica Cotterill, a cousin of Rupert Brooke’s and daughter of a respectable Fabian schoolmaster, Charles Clement Cotterill, transferred her infatuation from the plays to the playwright whose unorthodox theories of sexual intercourse outside marriage for the procreation of babies she urgently wanted them to put into practice together. She challenged Shaw to confront all he had turned his back on: which he obliquely attempts to do by transferring them to Mrs Collins’s correspondence with the Bishop.
Then as ‘Mrs George’ Shaw summons up a third woman: the figure of his mother who appeared in his dreams as ‘my wife as well as my mother’. These dreams elevated his affection for Charlotte and intensified his feelings for his mother since, Shaw explained to Gilbert Murray, there was ‘the addition of the filial feeling and the redemption of the sexual feeling from “sin” and strain’.
Shaw’s practice of obscuring the self-portraits of his plays by giving the characters a superficial resemblance to other people – Marchbanks to De Quincey, Tanner to H. M. Hyndman, Professor Higgins to Henry Sweet – extends to St John Hotchkiss who is ostensibly modelled on his fellow-playwright St John Hankin. But when the ‘St John’ falls away and he confesses to Mrs George that ‘my own pet name in the bosom of my family is Sonny’ the pretence becomes transparent. In Hotchkiss we may see something of the reaction that Shaw produced on his contemporaries: ‘He talks about himself with energetic gaiety. He talks to other people with a sweet forbearance (implying a kindly consideration for their stupidity) which infuriates those whom he does not succeed in amusing.’
When Hotchkiss meets Mrs George on stage he recognizes her as the coal merchant’s wife with whom (‘when I was a young fool’) he had fallen in love. ‘I felt in her presence an extraordinary sensation of unrest, of emotion, of unsatisfied need,’ he remembers. It is not fanciful to feel in this ‘unsatisfied need’ Shaw’s own response to his mother when in Dublin. In Getting Married Shaw makes Hotchkiss run away abroad in place of his mother leaving for England. And now that they meet again, Hotchkiss again falls in love. The relationship is essentially that of an adopted son. ‘I want to talk to him like a mother,’ says Mrs George who tells Hotchkiss that ‘Sonny is just the name I wanted for you’.
So Shaw provides another scenario for the Dublin ménage à trois, now that his mother, merged with the figure of Charlotte, has returned to him in his dreams. His sense of the incompleteness of his marriage pervades this play. It was an incompleteness for which Charlotte was to compensate with mystical hoverings comparable to Mrs George’s Blakean ‘inspirations’; and from which Shaw escaped by taking on the authority of the Bishop who wants to ‘make divorce reasonable and decent’. From the abnormality of his own marriage he argues with the tolerant voice of the greengrocer Collins that ‘theres almost as many different sorts of marriages as theres different sorts of people’.
The cast of characters has been assembled to illustrate this observation. At one level they are the stereotypes of the Victorian theatre: crusty old general, thundering priest, dashing philanderer and so on. But there is another level where they are shown, wearing their official costumes, as representatives of the Church, the Army and the Landed Gentry. Finally Shaw removes their masks to reveal them as ourselves and the people we know. He wants to show us the varieties of human nature that must share the earth. The individual temperaments range from the enemies of marriage to the personification of domesticity; from the woman who loves children but not men, to the woman who wants lovers but is not interested in babies. From the interweaving of all these public and private voices Shaw conducts his symposium and arrives at the conclusion that marriage as a legal institution must be reformed as part of the general transformation of our society.
*
‘It will improve by keeping,’ Shaw had told Granville Barker. But Vedrenne needed a new play and Shaw was persuaded to place the action of Getting Married on 12 May 1908, the day of its first performance at the Hay-market. Five days before the opening he published in the Daily Telegraph the most extreme of his self-drafted interviews. ‘There will be nothing but talk, talk, talk, talk, talk – Shaw talk,’ he promised.
‘...Shaw in a bishop’s apron will argue with Shaw in a general’s uniform. Shaw in an alderman’s gown will argue with Shaw dressed as a beadle. Shaw dressed as a bridegroom will be wedded to Shaw in petticoats. The whole thing will be hideous, indescribable – an eternity of brain-racking dulness. And yet they will have to sit it out... they will suffer – suffer horribly... I am not a vindictive man... We shall not be altogether merciless. The curtains will be dropped casually from time to time to allow of first-aid to the really bad cases in the seats allotted to the Press.’
Getting Married was greeted with what Shaw called a ‘torrent of denunciation’. Desmond MacCarthy was to question how we could take seriously characters who are presented to us merely as knockabout figures of farce: why should we be attentive to their opinions or moved by the absurdity of their passions? The ‘scenes between Hotchkiss and Mrs George seem to me deplorable,’ MacCarthy was to write; ‘too funny to be serious, and too serious to be funny’. Lord Alfred Douglas, under the heading ‘For Shame, Mr Shaw’ in The Academy, called for the censor to put a stop to such insidiously feminine work making ‘serious inroads on the British home’. Shaw challenged anyone to name a play that was not all talk, and enquired whether they had expected ballet. ‘The cast finds out more every time of what it is all about; and so, consequently, does the audience.’
Yet he was uncertain about Getting Married. ‘Poor people!’ exclaims the Bishop. ‘It’s so hard to know the right place to laugh, isnt it?’ Max Beerbohm and Desmond MacCarthy judged that he had orchestrated the laughter in the wrong place. And J. T. Grein believed that the play traded on Shaw’s peculiar weakness: ‘His loquacity is literally torrential.’ In the play he makes Reginald Bridgenorth impatiently exclaim: ‘It’s no good talking all over the shop like this. We shall be here all day.’ In a work aiming to preserve all the unities of time and place, this spasm of impatience articulated a genuine qualm which he submerged in a battle with the critics.
I am a slave of that car and of you too. I dream of the accursed thing at night.
Man and Superman
‘I shall take to motoring presently,’ Shaw threatened in the summer of 1908. He had already studied at the National Motor Academy and subjected himself to lessons from a professor of driving, H. E. M. Studdy, from whom Charlotte also took tuition. By the end of 1908 the household at Ayot St Lawrence stood ready to receive the Shaws’ first automobile, a 28-30 hp Lorraine-Dietrich. ‘It is a double cabriolet, with detachable hind part,’ reported The Autocar. ‘...The lines of the car are uncommon and graceful.’ They became a little more uncommon after the first day when Charlotte, attended by Mr Studdy, crashed it mildly into a local obstruction, scattering the splashboards and other impedimenta; and Mr Studdy, accompanied by Charlotte, knocked off the paddle-box against the gate on their way back.
Since Charlotte’s career as motorist was brief and Shaw was rather too fond of reading in the car, a trained chauffeur, Albert James Kilsby from Notting Hill, was employed. In Kilsby’s opinion the De Dietrich was ‘a proper bugger’ to start. But the car was also, Shaw reckoned, awkward to stop, the accelerator pedal being placed on the left with the brake to the right of it. He never lost the habit of treading on the right pedal to arrest a vehicle.
The two men, dividing the fun-and-labour of it, would swap driver and passenger positions fairly evenly. After three weeks, it was reported that G.B.S. was seriously disabled. ‘Say I’m dead,’ he cabled the Daily Mail. He was extraordinarily chivalrous to the injured, especially when the fault was theirs. He was also shockingly reckless at the wheel, sometimes (when Charlotte was not travelling) giving lifts to tramps, and presenting them with money. The De Dietrich was a car for all seasons and subjects: a philosophical vehicle. He reported on its capacity to penetrate Swiss avalanches and its place in the future of Ireland; on its moral claims versus the road dog, its tax-generating properties, and the lessons it gave (such as ‘How to Narrow a Road by Widening It’) in Shavian engineering. Of the detachable wheels, movable hood and electric klaxon horn, its cork and brass, the invisible locks and variable speed dynamo, Shaw grew pedantically fond. For a man entering his mid-fifties this was more appropriate than the bicycle. He still used the train for long political journeys, but for serious holiday-making the car was essential.
They took it first to Algeria and Tunisia for five spring weeks: Kilsby and Shaw jostling up front; Charlotte and her sister Mrs Cholmondeley occupying the back. Among the luggage they had room for the Koran, but no spare parts. ‘Now I come to think of it, it’s a wonder we got anywhere,’ Shaw remarked. At Biskra he rode for two hours on a camel and ‘my seat on this most difficult of mounts was admitted to be superb’. Next day he was stiffly back in the driver’s seat and, careering a hundred miles north into Constantine, achieved a dramatic change of climate (something inconceivable on a camel): ‘rain in colossal blobs instead of drops; and a wind against which I had to hold the car straight by main force’. Kilsby’s time was much filled with repairing burst tyres and then veering melodramatically away from wonderful seas with islands rising out of mirror-like waters and other mirages in which he could not bring himself to disbelieve.
For the summers of 1909 and 1910 they accompanied the car on holidays to Ireland, parking at an extraordinary turreted hotel, the Great Southern, by the woods of Parknasilla on the Kerry coast. It was a place of long sea views and intricate walks between ferns and fuchsias, rock and rhododendron, to burnt-out castles, and along the various fingers of land that pointed south-west into the Atlantic. Sometimes they would try out the Irish roads with an expedition to Lady Gregory at Coole or, on Shaw’s fifty-fourth birthday, an exploration of the Giant’s Causeway where ‘I sat under my umbrella in my aquascutum, like a putrid mushroom,’ he told Barker, ‘whilst a drenched mariner rowed me round the cliffs and told me lies about them’. Further out to sea he was rowed by ten men in an open boat and landed on the legendary Skelligs. ‘At the top amazing beehives of flat rubble stones, each overlapping the one below until the circles meet in a dome – cells, oratories, churches, and outside them cemeteries, wells, crosses, all clustering like shells on a prodigious rock pinnacle... An incredible, impossible mad place.’
Upon this cathedral of the sea, the man who generally seemed a stranger on the planet felt at home. Standing in the graveyards at the Skellig summit, he recalled the summers of his early years when Sonny roamed over the rocks and goat-paths of Dalkey, and gazed across the blue waters to Howth Head; or had lain on the grassy top of the hill above the bay – then raced down to the shore known as White Rock and plunged into the waves. Sonny had been a product of Dalkey’s outlook: there was little place for him in the bustling world where G.B.S. moved. But he breathed again in the magic climate of this island. ‘I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have ever lived and worked in,’ Shaw wrote next day to Frederick Jackson, a political journalist and solicitor: ‘it is part of our dream world.’
They rowed him back in the dark, without a compass, the moon invisible in the mists: two and a half Atlantic hours. Then he drove to Parknasilla, to Charlotte, and the world he lived in.
During April 1910, in more orthodox style, the car had taken them for a spin in France, Shaw having undertaken to write reports for the Royal Automobile Club. In the first five and a half days they whizzed along 660 miles, going for all they were worth despite Shaw’s view that, owing to the lethally cambered roads, it was unsafe to pass anything without first slowing to a halt. ‘I am already twice the man I was when I left,’ he reported to Barker. Charlotte felt less cheery. ‘G.B.S. does not allow us one moment of peace – we are harried from place to place!’
From their cards Barker could feel a struggle developing between Shaw and Charlotte. ‘I drive half the day,’ Shaw exulted; ‘lie deliciously awake half the night; and am visibly waning towards my grave.’ At each shattering explosion of the exhaust, his spirits soared. His plan appears to have been to cure Charlotte for ever of their compulsory holidays. ‘Charlotte positively loathes me, and is, as usual pathetically unable to dissimulate,’ he told Barker at the end of the month.
Back in England, Charlotte diverted some of her loathing from her husband to his car. Their next holiday abroad would be, not yet apart, but separated from his roving machine. As for Shaw, he reported to the Royal Automobile Club that motoring in France was rather like driving along the roof of St Pancras Station.
People like to back a winner... However, nothing succeeds like failure... Even nonsense is sometimes suggestive.
Shaw to Ensor Walters (1 November 1903), to Trebitsch (20 July 1903), to Lady Gregory (16 April 1920)
‘The villagers all thought he was a rum one – a very rum one,’ remembered his neighbour Mrs Reeves. Sitting bolt upright in his car, he would career very fast (over 20 miles per hour) through the village, leaving behind him a wake of grumbling. But Edith Reeves never heard of him knocking anyone down. Living so near, she had got to know the Shaws quite well. They would put the mown grass over the wall as fodder for the Reeves’s livestock, and give them cabbages and other vegetables from the garden. And Mr Reeves sold the Shaws raspberries and cherries.
Mr and Mrs Reeves named one of their sons Bernard. Shaw and Charlotte took great interest in the small Reeveses. During Mrs Reeves’s confinements, while Mr Reeves was out with his sandwiches working in the fields, they would send cooked meals in to her – chicken or fish with fresh vegetables from their garden. Charlotte confided that she would have liked children of her own: and Mrs Reeves was given to understand that it was on account of her asthma that she had none.
Shaw’s fondness for animals was notorious. Mr and Mrs Reeves would feel quite uncomfortable loading their squealing pigs into the cart for market – though Shaw never said anything. He had a pigeon-cote and several hives of bees in the garden; and there was an erratic little white dog, Kim, which would streak in and out of the house, sometimes barking, sometimes rolling on its back. Shaw never bought a dog, though ‘I always own a dog in the country’. He was glad there had been a dog in his home in Dublin since this put him on easy terms with what was often a pleasant extension of human society. ‘I have no lies to tell about dogs,’ he declared. He had a fellow feeling for them, as well as for cats: any species of animal in fact. But he did not claim to like all dogs and cats.
The Shaws were good neighbours but they minded their business; and, since they were often away, the villagers regarded them as ‘characters’ rather than native people. They attached little importance to Shaw’s literary fame.
*
This fame, though it stopped short at Ayot, had been spreading round the world with the publication of several books about him. Eighteen critical and biographical volumes appeared before the war. The most brilliant of them was by G. K. Chesterton; the most persistent of his biographers was Archibald Henderson.
Henderson was twenty-five and an Instructor in Mathematics at the University of North Carolina when, early in 1903, he had been ‘electrified’ by a performance of You Never Can Tell in Chicago. He spent the next year studying Shaw’s writings and then sent Shaw a letter threatening to write his life: ‘it never occurred to me,’ he afterwards admitted, ‘that perhaps I was wholly unfitted for the job.’ Shaw added Henderson’s name to an extensive card index marked ‘Disciples’ and wrote a postcard asking him to ‘send me your photograph!’ Henderson put himself to a good deal of bother over this, all of which amounted to placing himself in line for a kindly Shavian joke: ‘You look like the man who can do the job.’
‘I began making notes,’ Henderson noted. For the next fifty years he continued making notes that Shaw orchestrated into a semi-Shavian melody. Henderson’s first book on Shaw (His Life and Works) appeared in 1911. By 1932, in his blockbuster Playboy and Prophet, he reported having published ‘the eighth book of mine devoted, in part or in whole, to interpretation of your life, character and significance’. He reached his apotheosis six years after Shaw’s death and seven years before his own in Man of the Century, when the century only had forty-four declining years to run. Of Henderson it may literally be said that no man could have done more. But why had G.B.S. encouraged him to do so much?
He wanted to use his biographer to re-create the life of G.B.S. ‘who is up to the chin in the life of his own times’. In his fashion G.B.S. was a truth-teller; but the fashion was far from literal. It needed ingenious interpretation and independent checking – and neither temperamentally nor geographically was Henderson able to supply these. He was a ‘disciple’ rather than a scholar, who manufactured what Shaw himself was to call ‘a colossally expanded extract from Who’s Who’, and then went on manufacturing it. The surviving galley proofs of Playboy and Prophet reveal how large a part of this narrative was actually drafted in the third person by G.B.S. himself. He did not do this for facile self-aggrandizement, but to provide his ideas with the endorsement of biographical authority. If his childhood had been ‘rich only in dreams, frightful & loveless in realities’ this was because the social and economic conditions of those times were frightful. After leaving Ireland, Shaw believed he had turned his back on dreams and set out through the body of his literary and political work in England to make the realities of his times less frightful. He feared that if his instincts, like a compass, were seen as having been eccentrically affected by his early experiences, then his thinking itself might be regarded as eccentric. He used biography therefore as adjustments to the rudder, keeping his work in the mainstream. From these secret collaborations he learned how to ghost his own life through later biographers until he became the very author of himself.
‘You are threatened with more than one competitor,’ Shaw had written to Henderson in 1907. The chief competitor seemed to be G. K. Chesterton. Shaw completed the comic circle by reviewing Chesterton’s book in The Nation, describing it as ‘the best work of literary art I have yet provoked’. This compliment was not all it appeared to be. Shaw separated art from information rather as he divided feeling from thought. Henderson had the information; Chesterton was the literary artist: one book complemented the other. He was reasonably happy with Chesterton’s Shaw because, despite its title, it ‘has little to do with me’. ‘My last word must be,’ Shaw concluded, ‘that gifted as he is, he [Chesterton] needs a sane Irishman to look after him.’ In other words, Chesterton needed Shaw to write the book for him. Reviewing it was the next best thing.
‘I have found that if I invent all my facts on a basis of my knowledge of human nature I always come out right, whereas if I refer to documents and authorities they weary me and set me wrong,’ Shaw was to write to another biographer, St John Ervine. ‘Trust to your genius rather than to your industry: it is the less fallible of the two.’ This is what Chesterton did – and what Shaw complained of his having done. He represented Chesterton’s commentary as a washing-line on which hung all manner of crucified shirts and dancing trousers. But none of them fitted him. Indeed, some more nearly fitted G.K.C. For biographers, like portrait painters, ‘put something of themselves into their subjects and sitters when there is anything of themselves to put in,’ Shaw explained.
‘The truth is I have a horror of biographers,’ Shaw admitted to Frank Harris. Chesterton had loaded his gun with guesses, but from time to time his aim was true. In his review, Shaw gave a wonderfully clownish performance, trying on all the conjectures that were ‘madly wrong’. On others he turned his back, leaving them strung out along the line of Chesterton’s impressions:
‘quick-witted [and]... long-winded... the very forest of the man’s thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare... if there is anything that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible. The responsibility in him rings like steel... a kind of intellectual chastity, and the fighting spirit... Shaw is like Swift... in combining extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness... benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt... sincere, unsympathetic, aggressive, alone... He never gives his opinions a holiday... Socialism is the noblest thing for Bernard Shaw; and it is the noblest thing in him... he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private thing... This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious optimism – even a tragic optimism...’
Shaw recognized in Chesterton, as he had in Wells, a quality absent in himself. Wells, who claimed to ‘have got Great Britain Pregnant’, had the power of sexual attraction; Chesterton, as champion of the common people against intellectuals and politicians, could magically elicit affection. People adored him for his wit and extravagance, his whacking style. His creation of the jolly toby-jug Chesterton had similarities with Shaw’s invention of the pantomime ostrich. These cheery images displaced for both what Chesterton called ‘the morbid life of the lonely mind’.
Shaw developed a proprietary interest in Chesterton. In a discarded segment of Back to Methuselah, he pictures him as Immenso Champernoon, ‘a man of colossal mould, with the head of a cherub on the body of a Falstaff... friendly, a little shy, and jokes frequently enough to be almost always either still enjoying the last or already anticipating the next’. Shaw thought of Chesterton as a marvellous boy who never grew up, a political innocent who, by prodigious literary journalism, had taken the position created in the eighteenth century by Dr Johnson. In short: he was ‘the greatest publicist we possess’. For over a quarter of a century, Shaw struggled to convert him to socialism and creative evolution.
Their debates began in 1911. On 29 May, in the Victoria Assembly Rooms at Cambridge, Shaw addressed the Heretics Society on ‘The Religion of the Future’. He told his audience that superstitious religion had died in the Middle Ages, though it was artificially kept in existence by the stimulants of idolatry and intimidation. The English, he declared, had no fundamental religion: they simply made idols of people who were capable of giving orders and resorted to the stage management of them. Such people were given crowns, or gold lace on their collars, a certain kind of hat, a different income and a particular kind of house to live in. Their sons and daughters could not marry common people: and we pretended to believe that they were agents of a loftier idol. But in our democratic age we were gradually getting rid of idols. ‘As for my own position, I am, and always have been, a mystic,’ Shaw announced. ‘I believe that the universe is being driven by a force that we might call the life-force.
‘We are all experiments in the direction of making God. What God is doing is making himself, getting from being a mere powerless will or force. This force has implanted into our minds the ideal of God. We are not very successful attempts at God so far, but... there never will be a God unless we make one... we are the instruments through which that ideal is trying to make itself a reality.’
‘The Religion of the Future’ was one of a series of heterodox sermons Shaw had started to give after the writing of Major Barbara. His new theology redefined the terms and vocabulary of Christianity. God was impersonally reshaped into the Life Force; the Trinity was interpreted as ‘You are the father of your son and the son of your father’; and the Immaculate Conception made an everyday happening: ‘I believe in the Immaculate Conception of Jesus’s mother, and I believe in the Immaculate Conception of your mother.’
The effect of Shaw’s addresses on the public was extraordinary. They sat appalled, fascinated, squirming and twisting in their seats. ‘The sight of his tall, tense figure in the pulpit, electrical in its suggestion of vital energy completely under the control of his will... compelled a similar intensity of interest and attention from his hearers,’ wrote a reporter on the Christian Commonwealth. ‘...Several times I looked round upon my fellow-auditors to mark the effect of his words. I saw consternated faces, hostile faces, faces which bore an expression of alarm and even horror.’
Many who heard him were convinced that here was the finest public speaker in England. He was admired, especially by the young; but he was not loved. His intellectual authority on the platform provoked extreme reactions from the press. The Academy, which described his lecture as a ‘Detestable Outrage... vile and blasphemous ravings’, protested against his ‘dissemination of poisonous theories amongst young persons’ and regretted that Shaw had not been ‘kicked out of the window, or... thrown into the Cam’.
When they invited Chesterton to reply with a speech entitled ‘Orthodoxy’, the Heretics at last found a Christian champion capable of standing up to Shaw. Chesterton delivered his reply on 17 November at the Guildhall, Cambridge, and the first thing he did was to defend his adversary from newspaper attacks. The Academy report had been ‘not merely written by an idiot but by an idiot who had no belief in the Christian religion,’ he pronounced. ‘...How could Mr Shaw blaspheme by saying that Christ or the Christian religion had failed in England when the remark is obviously true.
‘The majority of the governing classes believe in no religion. I have known many editors and newspaper proprietors but I have yet to meet one who believed in religion... Mr Shaw is living in a comparatively Pagan world. He is something of a Pagan himself and like many other Pagans, he is a very fine man.’
This was characteristic of the intellectual magnanimity existing between the two men. ‘I enjoyed him and admired him keenly,’ Shaw was to write of Chesterton in the late 1930s; ‘and nothing could have been more generous than his treatment of me.’ And at about the same time Chesterton was saluting Shaw in his autobiography. ‘I have never read a reply by Bernard Shaw that did not leave me in a better and not a worse temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of inexhaustible fountains of fair-mindedness and intellectual geniality.’
When they moved from religion to politics, the contest was between Shaw’s socialism and Chesterton’s distributism, of equality of income against peasant proprietorship. Shaw defined socialism as ‘that state of society in which the income of a country would be divided exactly equally amongst all the people of that country, without reference to age, sex or character’. Chesterton warned against the totalitarianism and artificiality within socialism.
‘You cannot draw the line across things and say, You shall have your garden hose, but not your garden; your ploughshare, but not your field; your fishing rod, but not your stream; because man is so made that his sense of property is actually stronger for such things as fields or gardens or water than for such comparatively unnecessary things as garden hoses or rakes or fishing rods... if you want self-government apart from good government you must have generally distributed property. You must create the largest possible number of owners.’
Shaw conceded that collectivism without socialism might indeed be a system of tyranny – the tyranny that was later to emerge as fascism. He suggested therefore that the difference between Chesterton and himself appeared to be that one wanted distribution of property and the other equal distribution of property. ‘This is not the normal definition of the term [socialism],’ Chesterton objected. ‘That the State should be in possession of the means of production, distribution, and exchange was always called Socialism when I was a Socialist.’
It was a good and serious contest. Their jousting over the years developed into a perfect balance of contrasting styles, with breathtaking displays of analogy and tricks of paradox. Chesterton’s bulky swaying presence matched the immense range of illustration he gave his ideas, lit up by a spirit of enjoyment and comic inventiveness. Shaw was more incisive, his emphatic eyebrows like two supplementary moustaches, an assured and wiry figure standing with arms folded who could speak with a force thrilling to all who heard it. But to Chesterton’s eyes, Shaw’s strengths were limited in their humanity. ‘Shaw is like the Venus de Milo,’ he declared: ‘all that there is of him is admirable.’
Chesterton’s conversion to Catholicism in 1922 showed how far he was from agreeing with Shaw. ‘If I wandered away like Bergson or Bernard Shaw,’ he wrote at the end of his life, ‘and made up my own philosophy out of my own precious fragment of truth, merely because I had found it for myself, I should soon have found that truth distorting itself into a falsehood.’ Chesterton’s truth seemed to Shaw a blind alley up which he had been led by Hilaire Belloc, ‘with the odd result,’ Shaw wrote to Wells, ‘that he is now dreadfully in earnest about beliefs that are intellectually impossible’.
The two warriors met for their last public exchange at Kingsway Hall in the final week of October 1927. Tumultuous crowds struggled in the corridors, burst open the doors, flowed round the building like hot lava. Belloc presided and the British Broadcasting Corporation relayed their words through the country. ‘Do We Agree?’ was the question they debated. Both spoke well. They spoke of socialism and distributism, income and property – of all they had spoken about sixteen years and one world war earlier in the Memorial Hall. And they said similar things. The change was in the audience, baying for good sport. ‘This is not a real controversy or debate,’ Chesterton admitted. What they said was what they could most effectively perform as actors. ‘I suspect that you do not really care much what we debate about,’ Shaw said, ‘provided we entertain you by talking in our characteristic manners.’ This they did. ‘Obviously we are mad,’ remarked Shaw, taking what seemed a good embarkation point for a voyage of agreement. But it was when Shaw drew on his reservoirs of optimism that Chesterton felt dispirited, Shaw insisted on agreement. ‘I find that the people who fight me generally hold the very ideas I am trying to express.’ He tried to wrap Chesterton up in a jacket of agreement. The agreement of two mad people (in the East they would be reverenced) was important.
‘If you listen to them carefully and find that at certain points they agree, then you have some reason for supposing that here the spirit of the age is coming through, and giving you an inspired message. Reject all the contradictory things they say and concentrate your attention on the things upon which they agree, and you may be listening to the voice of revelation.’
And did they agree? ‘Ladies and gentlemen. The answer is in the negative.’ Chesterton did not agree with Shaw and ‘nor does Mr Shaw’. And the people watching and listening did not experience a voice of revelation. The spirit of the age had moved from the platform to themselves: it would be heard in their interruptions, their urging for disagreement to flourish, and their belief that none of it any longer mattered. ‘In a very few years from now,’ Belloc concluded, ‘this debate will be antiquated.’
Success in the theatre is very largely a matter of being able to flirt with the public.
Shaw to Maud Churton Braby (18 May 1908)
Shaw had joined a society ‘for the Prevention of Cruelty to Authors’ in 1897 when deciding to publish his plays as books. Soon afterwards he started making his views and experiences known through the Society of Authors’ Journal. He paid The Author the compliment of treating it as a serious business paper. He wrote there of the beauties of phonetic spelling and simplified punctuation; warned schoolmasters against inflicting literature compulsorily on children; described the pathos of British bookselling, calculating that ‘the average man wears out over fifty pairs of boots whilst he is reading a single book’; and he gave advice on publishers: ‘Whenever a publisher gives me literary advice I take an instant and hideous revenge on him. I give him business advice... and I urge him to double his profits by adopting my methods.’ Some of these contributions to The Author – such as his recommendations to novice playwrights on the submission of manuscripts – were printed as circulars.
In most matters of negotiation, it seemed to him, authors presented themselves as a flock of sheep bleating to be fleeced. ‘Nothing will save the majority of authors from themselves,’ he declared, ‘except a ruthlessly tyrannical Professional Association.’
He had been elected to its committee of management in February 1905, and joined its dramatic subcommittee the following year. He took this work seriously, believing that the literature of a country created its mind since each country largely took its ideas from what it read. What he looked for within the Society was the creation of a corporate consciousness. In Shaw’s perfect world there would have been no law of copyright, no advances or retreats, no giving or receiving of royalties (the very word sounded dreadful to a republic-minded person). Pending this, authors were necessarily capitalists and literature a sweated trade. As an artistic and learned profession, it had to be defended against the presumption that its interests must give way to the most trivial political consideration.
Authorship was a good example of a profession that was helpless without collective action. A writer who was poor, Shaw argued, had no means to defend himself; and when, suddenly, he became famous, his time was so valuable that it was not worth his while wasting it on bad debts. It was pitiable to see these ‘professional men on whom the Copyright Acts have conferred a monopoly of enormous value unable to do for themselves what is done by porters and colliers and trade-unionists generally with no monopoly at all at their backs’. Although unionism was most practicable in trades where the members worked together in large bodies, lived in the same neighbourhoods and belonged to the same social class, Shaw believed that the Society of Authors should be careful how it disclaimed the idea of being unionized. He looked on trade unions as conspiracies against the public interest that would become unnecessary in a socialist society, but that acted meanwhile as a corrective to the capitalist account.
Shaw was prepared to spend hours drafting and revising documents. It was admirable: but did he succeed? On the whole, he concluded, the ten years he spent on the Society’s ‘two big committees’ might have been passed at the top of Everest. Over such matters as the model treaty with West End managers, on which he negotiated interminably, no progress was made. His frustration led him eventually to lose faith in the validity of unrefined democracy. For who, in their efforts to make improvements, had used the democratic process more thoroughly than himself? Had he not earned the right to a dissenting opinion? In the interests of getting things done much had been suppressed and little accomplished. His deepest disenchantment sounded from suppression itself: the censorship laws. What a heartbreaking business it had been. ‘I had ten years of it; and I know.’
*
Shaw was to write more than fifty articles against the censorship, reinforced with many speeches and letters to newspapers. As late as 1950 he could still be heard objecting to the appointment of ‘an ordinary official with a salary of a few hundreds a year to exercise powers which have proved too much for Popes and Presidents’. In fact the Lord Chamberlain never read plays but delegated this job to a series of under-paid clerks. These officials fell back on making a list of controversial subjects (religion, sex) that must not be mentioned, and words that must not be used: they then worked to this list automatically. Professional pornographers soon learnt these inventories and how to get round them, with the result that the commercial theatre had become a prostitution market masquerading as theatre.
Shaw argued that the censorship was damned both by the pernicious trash it allowed, and by the good work it suppressed. Its purpose was to suppress immorality: but what it meant by immorality was deviation from custom. It was assumed that every Englishman knew the difference between wicked and virtuous conduct. But Shaw reasoned that what was wanted from dramatists, and all other writers, was a constant challenge to such accepted knowledge. The notion that everything uncustomary was wicked helped to keep people in line with their neighbours and gave Government what appeared to be a moral basis for penalizing change. But without change there could be no development. Progress depended upon the toleration of unexpected behaviour, and heresy was essential to the welfare of a community. A nation that did not permit heresy was stagnant.
Shaw realized that he must not only discredit this function of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, but also propose a better control of the stage by the community. The alternative was not anarchy, he wrote, but control by local authorities. ‘The municipality will not read plays and forbid or sanction them,’ he explained. ‘It will give the manager both liberty and responsibility... Let him manage how he pleases, knowing that if he produces utterly vile plays, he will find himself without a defender in council when the question comes up as to whether his licence shall be continued.’ It was important, Shaw stressed, to license the management, not the theatre. A manager could then pursue his business as any other professional man, while the annual licensing system would ensure that he could be struck off like a solicitor. Shaw was therefore taking a moral line more democratic than the official guardians of morality by recommending a transference of the care of the nation’s morals from a few paid clerks to the county councils and city corporations, with watch committees to warn them when managers were conducting their theatres as disorderly houses.
He was propelled into the front line when Granville Barker’s new play Waste was refused a licence late that year. This ban, and another in respect of Edward Garnett’s The Breaking Point, led to a renewed attack by the playwrights. ‘Stiffen your back,’ Shaw exhorted Gilbert Murray. Throughout 1908 he kept up this campaign, luring the censorship into a serious blunder.
*
For half a dozen years Beerbohm Tree had been prompting Shaw to write him a modern stage version of Don Quixote. As a rather startling variation on this theme, and reverting to his method in The Devil’s Disciple, Shaw dashed off The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet between 16 February and 8 March 1909. This one-act ‘Sermon in Crude Melodrama’, as he subtitled it, was commissioned for a matinée performance at His Majesty’s to benefit a children’s charity. ‘I wrote a perfect triumph of this made-to-measure art for Tree in Blanco Posnet, and he was simply shocked by it, absolutely horrified,’ he remembered. Tree was then three months short of his knighthood. What worried him were Blanco’s references to God as ‘a sly one... a mean one’, and his statement that the chief witness in the trial had had ‘immoral relations with every man in this town’, including the Sheriff. He appealed to Shaw to ‘cut that bit about God and that other bit about the prostitute’. But Shaw convinced him there was nothing to fear. If the Examiner of Plays passed the words, Tree would have obtained official blessing; and if he didn’t the actor would never have to utter them. So Tree submitted the play to the Censor: and the Censor, on the grounds of blasphemy, refused to license it.
Set in a Town Hall ‘in a Territory of the United States of America’ sometime during the nineteenth century, Blanco Posnet is pervaded with an air of unreality. ‘Let the imagination play,’ Shaw advised Martin-Harvey. ‘There never was no such place and no such people.’ His own imagination was literary and showed its derivations from Bret Harte, Dickens and Tolstoy’s play The Power of Darkness. What he wanted was a respectable provenance for a piece of moral propaganda that had as its point the protest of a horse-thief against his punishment for an admitted crime. From the consequence of this crime he would have escaped but for his yielding to the first good impulse of his life: the giving up his plunder to an unhappy woman in order to save her sick child. By using some phrases from the Lord Chamberlain’s proscribed list, he adapted this blameless drama into a ten-inch gun in the censorship war. ‘I have taken advantage of the Blanco Posnet affair to write a tremendous series of letters to The Times,’ he informed Trebitsch that summer; ‘and the result has been that the Prime Minister has promised to appoint a Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament to enquire into the whole question of Censorship.’
Shaw’s methods were to harass the enemy as a dramatist by all ingenious means: then hurry to their rescue as a responsible committee man. The opportunity of performing Blanco Posnet to the maximum embarrassment of the Censor came after a visit by Lady Gregory to Ayot. Shaw gave her the play, and she took it back to Coole where Yeats read it and agreed to put it on at the Abbey Theatre – Dublin being the one place in Britain beyond the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction.
As soon as the Abbey production was announced, the Under-Secretary of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland wrote from Dublin Castle threatening to revoke the Abbey Theatre’s patent. Lady Gregory and Yeats were summoned to the Castle by the Viceroy Lord Aberdeen, and one of the Castle lawyers warned their solicitors that if Blanco Posnet was performed, the authorities would use against the theatre all the legal powers at their command. Yeats found himself forced into a position where he had either to abandon the principle of theatrical freedom or risk, by the closure of the Abbey, the livelihood of its players and the fruit of half a dozen years’ work. He and Lady Gregory decided to confront the Lord Lieutenant’s precautionary notice with a manifesto.
‘If our patent is in danger it is because the English censorship is being extended to Ireland, or because the Lord Lieutenant is about to revive, on what we consider a frivolous pretext, a right not exercised for 150 years, to forbid at his pleasure any play produced in any Dublin Theatre... we must not, by accepting the English Censor’s ruling, give away anything of the liberty of the Irish theatre of the future... what would sooner or later grow into a political censorship cannot be lightly accepted.’
The issue had now been adroitly spread from blasphemy to cover almost the whole area of Anglo-Irish politics. Having defied the Castle, Lady Gregory tactfully offered the Lord Lieutenant a small face-saver in the way of two tiny omissions. It was essential, Shaw pointed out, that such concessions should be ridiculous. As he explained in a programme note:
‘To oblige the Lord Lieutenant, I have consented to withdraw the word “immoral” as applied to the relations between a woman of bad character and her accomplices. In doing so I wish it to be stated that I still regard these relations as not only immoral but vicious; nevertheless... I am quite content to leave the relations to the unprompted judgement of the Irish people. Also, I have consented to withdraw the words “Dearly beloved brethren”, as the Castle fears they may shock the nation.’
The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet opened at the Abbey, with Lady Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward and Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, on 25 August 1909. It was Horse Show Week in Dublin, the peak of the summer season, which ‘draws to the Irish capital a vari-coloured crowd, of many languages,’ wrote James Joyce. ‘...For a few days the tired and cynical city is dressed like a newly-wed bride. Its gloomy streets swarm with a feverish life, and an unaccustomed uproar breaks its senile slumber. This year... all over town they are talking about the clash between Bernard Shaw and the Viceroy... between the representative of the King and the writer of comedy... while Dubliners, who care nothing for art but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy.’ Many people now entering a theatre for the first time in their lives were offering guineas for standing-room in the wings. Foreign newspapers had sent their critics – James Joyce sent in a review to Il Piccolo della Sera. Charlotte was there with her sister but G.B.S. stayed strategically in Parknasilla. Lady Gregory’s fear was that there might be a hostile demonstration, or complaints from the Church, that would give the Viceroy an excuse for taking legal action.
The reception of the play must have disappointed many who had come looking for a disturbance. The audience took to Blanco Posnet enthusiastically, laughing at its humour, passing over the dangerous passages with sympathetic blankness, and at the curtain interrupting their applause with vain calls for the author. There was general agreement that Mr Posnet was a very mild-spoken ruffian in comparison with the reports of him; and some people questioned whether they had been victims of an Abbey hoax. ‘There is no feeling in Dublin except amusement about the more or less false pretences by which a huge audience was attracted last night to the Abbey Theatre,’ reported The Times. ‘Everybody today is enjoying the story of Mr Shaw’s cleverness and the Censor’s folly... The play is perfectly innocuous; it could not shock the most susceptible Irish feelings.’ The Churches refused to make a protest (some clergymen actually preached sermons celebrating the play); and the Irish Times commented that if ridicule were as deadly in Britain as in France, the censorship would be ‘blown away in the shouts of laughter that greeted Blanco Posnet’.
Shaw sent his congratulations. ‘You and W.B.Y[eats]. handled the campaign nobly,’ he wrote to Lady Gregory. ‘You have made the Abbey Theatre the real centre of capacity and character in the Irish movement: let Sinn Fein and the rest look to it.’ The Abbey had vanquished the Castle, but no one could tell what effect this Irish victory would have on the Censor in England.
It was this that Shaw set out to test by applying for a licence to produce Blanco Posnet at Annie Horniman’s repertory theatre, the Gaiety, in Manchester. The play was submitted in its Irish version which, as George Redford noted, was ‘practically identical’ to the text sent to him by Beerbohm Tree. Under these circumstances, Redford added, ‘there is no ground on which I could ask the Lord Chamberlain to reconsider his decision’. But Shaw was able to remind him that plays could be considered more than once. The performance in Dublin, which had elicited good opinions from critics and clergymen, was ample evidence, he contended, that an error of judgement had been made. He therefore requested a re-submission to the Lord Chamberlain. This Redford was obliged to do: but the Lord Chamberlain gave the same decision. ‘What the Censorship has actually done exceeds the utmost hopes of those who, like myself, have devoted themselves to its destruction,’ Shaw wrote in The Times.
There was one more move for him to make. He allowed Blanco Posnet to be performed in London by the Abbey Theatre Company under the protection of the Stage Society. The English could now see for themselves that his reputedly blasphemous piece was no more than a ‘sentimental tract,’ as Desmond MacCarthy was to describe it. The whole affair, including Shaw’s publication in a newspaper of the words to which the Lord Chamberlain took offence, had dramatized the full absurdity of the system. ‘Let us all dance on the prostrate body of Mr Redford as violently as we can,’ exhorted Max Beerbohm in the Saturday Review.
*
‘Mr Redford has a fixed delusion that I am a dangerous and disreputable person, a blasphemer and a blackguard,’ Shaw wrote to the manager of the Gaiety Theatre, Ben Iden Payne.
He used Payne for an extra skirmish that summer. Between the end of March and the beginning of May 1909, he had composed a one-act satirical farce called Press Cuttings. Exploiting his own fear of women and merging it with the general fear of a German war, he coupled the cause of feminism to his fight against the censorship by naming two of his characters General Mitchener and Prime Minister Balsquith (who enters dressed as a woman). On 24 June Redford returned the manuscript in order to give its author ‘the opportunity of eliminating all personalities, expressed or implied’. He called attention to the rule: ‘No offensive personalities, as representation of living persons to be permitted on the stage.’
This was what Shaw calculated would happen. In various newspapers, he assured the public that he had been ‘careful not to express a single personality that has not done duty again and again without offence in the pages of Punch’. Privately he let it be known that he had used the name Mitchener ‘in order to clear him of all possible suspicion of being a caricature of Lord Roberts’. As for the well-worn Punch figure of Balsquith, it was neither Balfour nor Asquith ‘and cannot in the course of nature be both’.
Two ‘private receptions’ of the play were given under the auspices of the Women’s Suffrage movement at the Court Theatre early that July. Shaw then altered the names of Mitchener and Balsquith to Bones and Johnson (the ringmaster and clown of the Christy Minstrels) and Iden Payne re-submitted the play which was licensed for public performance on 17 August, and opened the following month at the Gaiety in Manchester. ‘In the crucial scene the Prime Minister forced his way into the War Office disguised as a militant suffragette,’ wrote Iden Payne. ‘...When he had removed his woman’s attire, Bones exclaimed, “Great Heavens, Johnson!” When the innocuous name was heard there was a roar of laughter, followed by loud ironic applause, which was repeated when Johnson could be heard to answer “Yes, Bones”.’
There were some who felt that Shaw was prostituting his talent in these forays against the censorship. Yet many playwrights agreed that some liberalization of the law was needed. It was important that those interviewed by the Select Committee should speak with a reasonably unanimous voice. In various multigraphed letters to members of the Society of Authors, Shaw assigned to himself the job of voice-trainer. ‘Witnesses must be careful not to put forward the contention that the freedom of the stage would be absolutely safe. The proper reply is that its risks would be no greater than the risks of the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of public meeting... they are the price of liberty and progress.’
These letters to fellow-writers were accompanied by an 11,000-word statement that Shaw had prepared as his own evidence. His examination was to consist of questions on this written evidence which, at the Committee’s invitation and his own expense, he had distributed beforehand. However, the Committee informed him that it could not admit his printed statement into the record since to do so would be acting against precedent. Shaw argued that some of the distinctions he wished to make were not easy to bring out simply in replies to questions, and he cited three precedents from the 1892 Committee which had accepted written evidence in favour of the censorship. At this the Committee cleared the room, discussed the matter in camera, and then repeated without explanation that ‘it would not be permissible to print the statement as part of the evidence’.
Shaw was completely taken aback. ‘The sudden volte face when I cited precedent, the dramatic secret conclave, the point blank refusal without reason given, are too good to be thrown away... I shall fly to the last refuge of the oppressed: a letter to The Times.’
Shaw’s letter appeared on 2 August; and three days later, when he arrived to resume his evidence, he was told that the Committee ‘have no further questions to ask you’. It was hard to conceal his resentment. He incorporated his rejected evidence, as a form of minority report, into his Preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet which Conrad judged to be ‘somewhat imbecile – in the classical meaning of the word’. Shaw had sought to inflict imbecility on those members of the Committee who supported the censorship: to embezzle them of their wits. He was acting the modern Don Quixote Tree had wanted him to dramatize in Blanco Posnet, the man who ‘is always right and always apparently wrong with smaller and more practical people round him’. He had turned his plays into the accoutrements with which the Don set out to fight his battles.
‘I saw that I had to deal with a hostile majority,’ Shaw excused himself, ‘...so I misconducted myself.’ His words spilled out all over the place. He could not stop. The Committee had treated Redford – ‘the filter that my life’s work has to pass through’ – most decorously. He felt aggrieved; he felt aggravated. He had made himself better informed on censorship than any member of the Committee. Then he had worked by the rules, won every round fairly and been counted out.
The Report was published on 8 November 1909. What comes out strikingly is the evidence of what Shaw would call the idealists. Theatre managers’ organizations argued that censorship had not inflicted any injury on serious drama in England; actors’ associations spoke of the desirability of maintaining a censorship which protected their members from taking unpleasant parts in undesirable plays; A. B. Walkley, drama critic of The Times and President of the Society of Dramatic Critics, believed the censorship to be justifiable because it reflected the common sense of the man in the street, while Lena Ashwell, lessee of the Great Queen Street Theatre and soon to play the Polish aviatrix in Misalliance, wanted the Censor as protection against the man in the street; W. S. Gilbert thought it imperative that audiences be protected against ‘outrages’ – the theatre was ‘not the proper pulpit from which to disseminate doctrines possibly of anarchism, of socialism, and of agnosticism’. Many authors too, if they were doing well, did not really want to change the system. ‘A censorship of any kind acts inevitably as a protection to the average author,’ Shaw explained. ‘He is never censored; and those who are censored are not only his commercial rivals, but are generally putting up the standard on him and changing the fashion.’
Archer, Granville Barker, J. M. Barrie, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Gilbert Murray and Pinero gave evidence against the censorship. Some of their recommendations were attached to the Report which proposed that future licensing be optional and that unlicensed plays take their chance in the courts; that music halls be treated equally at law; and that doubtful cases be referred to a special committee of the Privy Council. But no legislation was passed to implement these proposals. Instead, an advisory committee was appointed the following year to assist the Censor. So matters stayed as they were.
Shaw had tried to improve things by letter and by law: this was temperamentally the most natural way for him to act. He was a scholar-revolutionary. His tactics for changing society had not been to break its laws, but to obey them pedantically, ingeniously, literally, until by laughing consent they were finally rendered impractical. But for the first time it seemed as if all the thought and feeling of this work was issuing nowhere. He was in his fifty-fifth year; as he grew older this sense of powerlessness was to intensify. Looking back, he came to believe that it had been this Censorship Committee that altered his views on how to obtain political results. He was forced into a belief in the inevitability of violence: ‘the whole ridiculous transaction,’ he wrote, ‘...was a lesson to me on the futility of treating a parliamentary body with scrupulous courtesy and consideration instead of bullying them and giving them as much trouble as possible.’ He had forgotten how much trouble he gave.
The philosophy of violence that makes its appearance in Shaw’s later life was a product of his sexual and then his political neutering; a reaction to having been made to feel as ineffectual as his mother had believed him to be. This was the true misery of life, the being used up for no purpose. The means were not justified that brought no ends: he had no children and he had no power. Increasingly he was to find compensation in the world of his imagination. His fantasies of longevity and dictatorship, which in the actual world did harm to no one, brought some relief to his despair, acting like Prospero’s prayer
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.