It was Pigott who had told the Royal Commission in 1892 that all the characters in Ibsen’s plays were ‘morally deranged’ and that William Archer’s praise of Ibsen had been a device to make money out of him. Pigott it was who had banned the centenary performance of The Cenci. Shaw’s ‘obituary’ was a plea for the appointment of a censor prepared to take responsibility for licensing those plays on which the growth and vitality of the theatre depended. It made an excellent impression on Frank Harris – and none at all on the Lord Chamberlain. Pigott’s successor as his Examiner of Plays was G. A. Redford, an ex-bank manager, who, during his sixteen years in the post, refused licences to Mrs Warren’s Profession, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and the original version of Press Cuttings.
Several battles in Shaw’s long war against this ‘Malvolio of St James’s Palace’ were fought out in the Saturday Review. It was clear to Shaw that if his post were abolished, the theatre would revert to being the social and political power it had been before Walpole instituted censorship, and stopped Fielding’s stage exposure of parliamentary corruption. From the ‘idealistic’ point of view, which regarded new opinions as dangerous, almost everything written by Shaw, whose instinct was ‘to attack every idea which has been full grown for ten years’, strengthened the case for censorship. So he continued firing off brilliant salvoes at the enemy – though with the suspicion that he was armed with chocolates rather than real ammunition.
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The censor became a symbolic figure in Shaw’s imagination. When in 1886 a licence had been refused for The Cenci, the Shelley Society had taken over the Grand Theatre in Islington to give a ‘private’ performance for its members, headed by Robert Browning. Technically, since no money was taken at the door, no licence was needed for what was in law a meeting of a society rather than the public representation of a play. But the censor was not to be so easily cheated. When the annual licence of the Grand Theatre came to be renewed, the lessee found himself obliged to accept a new clause forbidding performances of unlicensed plays on the premises. This warning had been well understood by other managers. After that, the blockade had been run chiefly by the Independent Theatre, which was technically ‘private’ like the Shelley Society and which operated mainly by using various halls for its theatrical ‘At Homes’.
In addition to Grein’s Independent Theatre Shaw reported on such academic-revolutionary bodies as the New Century Theatre, started in 1897 by an aspiring combination of enthusiasts – Archer and Massingham, Alfred Sutro and Elizabeth Robins. These painfully evolved little organs were free both from actor-managership and censorship. Indifferent to public demand, yet wishing to create a taste for the work of those playwrights who seemed to be the most advanced of the time, these enterprises functioned like laboratories where experiments could be tried out on a particular audience. ‘The real history of the drama for the last ten years,’ Shaw wrote, ‘is not the history of the prosperous enterprises of Mr Hare, Mr Irving, and the established West-end theatres, but of the forlorn hopes led by Mr Vernon, Mr Charrington, Mr Grein, Messrs Henley and Stevenson, Miss Achurch, Miss Robins and Miss Lea, Miss Farr, and the rest of the Impossibilists.’
Shaw argued for the infiltration of the experimental stage repertory into the repertory of the fashionable theatres. It was useless to appeal to Augustin Daly or Henry Irving, who seemed ‘fit for nothing but to be stuffed and mounted under glass to adorn the staircase of the Garrick Club’; but if more imaginative actor-managers – George Alexander, for instance, or Herbert Tree at the magnificent new Her Majesty’s Theatre – were to insert a series of matinees of serious plays into their popular farce-and-melodrama seasons, they might lay the foundations of a genuine classic theatre. It was in the context of this need for artistic and financial co-operation that he fashioned his own plays and judged the work of contemporary dramatists.
Shaw the dramatist continued to make use of the rickety mechanisms he ridiculed as a critic: Widowers’ Houses had derived from Ceinture Dorée; for Mrs Warren’s Profession he had borrowed the plot of Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray; the mechanics of Arms and the Man were Gilbertian; The Man of Destiny, which he wrote during his first summer as dramatic critic, was ‘an old-fashioned play, as completely pre-Ibsen as Sardou or Scribe’; while You Never Can Tell he described as ‘a frightful example of the result of trying to write for the théâtre de nos jours’. What Shaw objected to were the limitations imposed by these theatrical constructions, but he reluctantly accepted some of this machinery as being unavoidable for those who wanted their plays produced commercially. He valued such work by how skilfully it permeated the commercial theatre with social and artistic truth.
This method of evaluation is most lucidly seen in his comparative criticism of Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. It was Pinero’s ‘aptitude for doing what other people have done before that makes him a reactionary force in English dramatic literature,’ Shaw asserted. To destroy the legend of his mastery of stagecraft Shaw devastatingly analysed the structure of The Second Mrs Tanqueray, concluding that it amounted to little more than ‘recklessness in the substitution of dead machinery and lay figures for vital action and real characters’. The purpose of much of his criticism of Pinero was to combat the popular belief that he embodied a new spirit in the theatre. This popularity derived from his subtle powers of flattery – he was ‘simply an adroit describer of people as the ordinary man sees and judges them’ – and a bogus reputation for courage: ‘he has had no idea beyond that of doing something daring,’ commented Shaw of The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, ‘and bringing down the house by running away from the consequences.’ Only for The Benefit of the Doubt did Shaw praise Pinero’s honesty of perception: ‘Consciously or unconsciously, he has this time seen his world as it really is.’
Pinero was a darling of the drawing-room world, while Henry Arthur Jones merely had one foot in its door – and principally for that reason, Shaw affirmed, ‘I unhesitatingly class Mr Jones as first, and eminently first, among the surviving fittest of his own generation.’ He saw in Jones’s plays, which were regularly produced in the West End, the best available chance of beginning the reformation of that fashionable theatre and making it a force for change. Jones, he wrote, was the only popular dramatist whose sense of real life ‘has been deep enough to bring him into serious conflict with the limitations and levities of our theatre’.
Shaw’s support of Jones involved much special pleading. Shaw knew that Jones’s heroines were apt to die of ‘nothing but the need for making the audience cry’; he recognized the tendency of his last scenes to collapse, and his characters to act as if hypnotized by public opinion. But there was a detachment in Jones – ‘he describes Mayfair as an English traveller describes the pygmies’ – that Shaw laboured to encourage. Yet sometimes he would feel a revulsion from all this special pleading.
‘Those safe old hands Pinero, Grundy, and Jones, cautiously playing the new game according to the safe old rules, fail to retrieve the situation... the public are getting tired of the old-fashioned plays faster than the actors are learning to make the new ones effective... The managers do not seem to me yet to grasp this feature of the situation. If they did, they would only meddle with the strongest specimens of the new drama, instead of timidly going to the old firms and ordering moderate plays cut in the new style.’
This complaint was written in the same month, July 1895, that he made an abortive attempt, with You Never Can Tell, to fashion a moderate play for the West End, cut in its new style. After the experience of having his first five plays turned down by every commercial theatre in London, he had gone to these theatres as a dramatic critic and seen productions of awful plays. Humiliation and grievance had fuelled his criticisms; he had mocked, goaded, tiraded in the Saturday Review. As a dramatic critic he was revolutionary; and as a dramatic critic he had represented himself as a revolutionary dramatist. ‘Some plays are written to please the author,’ he wrote; ‘some to please the actor-manager (these are the worst); some
to please the public; and some – my own, for instance – to please nobody.’
Yet between the author of Widowers’ Houses and The Devil’s Disciple (written in 1897), some compromise had begun to take place. In an article published in The Humanitarian in May 1895, Shaw argued that, at periods when political institutions lagged too far behind cultural changes, it was natural for the imagination of dramatists to be set in action on behalf of social reform. But despite this, ‘the greatest dramatists shew a preference for the non-political drama... for subjects in which the conflict is between man and his apparently inevitable and eternal rather than his political and temporal circumstances’. In writing this, Shaw may have had in mind his own move from ‘unpleasant’ to ‘pleasant’ plays. But Pinero also wrote pleasant plays. How then must the critic differentiate between great drama and merely professional plays? In a passage from the Saturday Review, Shaw gave his answer.
‘Vital art work comes always from a cross between art and life: art being one sex only, and quite sterile by itself. Such a cross is always possible; for though the artist may not have the capacity to bring his art into contact with the higher life of his time, fermenting in its religion, its philosophy, its science, and its statesmanship... he can at least bring it into contact with the obvious life and common passions of the streets.’
As a critic Shaw had banished the bogey of public opinion and invented a new audience to whom he addressed his plays. For this mythical public – and bypassing so far as he could the requirements of the censor – he adapted the artificial conventions of nineteenth-century theatre, eventually permeating the old traditions of the theatre with curious new sounds. ‘The present transition from romantic to sincerely human drama is a revolutionary one,’ he announced, but then added: ‘those who make half-revolutions dig their own graves.’ In the Saturday Review between 1895 and 1898 there are many passages in which the critic seems to be warning the playwright about the possible dangers of his work: ‘Let us have the new ideas in the new style, or the old tricks in the old style; but the new ideas combined with the old tricks in no style at all cannot be borne.’
Shaw’s dramatic criticism lies in the classic tradition of Hazlitt and G. H. Lewes. Shaw himself believed that ‘Lewes in some respects anticipated me’. He pointed to Lewes’s flexibility, fun and particularly ‘his free use of vulgarity and impudence whenever they happened to be the proper tools for his job.
‘He had a rare gift of integrity as a critic. When he was at his business, he seldom remembered that he was a gentleman or a scholar. In this he shewed himself a true craftsman, intent on making the measurements and analyses of his criticism as accurate, and their expression as clear and vivid, as possible, instead of allowing himself to be distracted by the vanity of playing the elegant man of letters, or writing with perfect good taste, or hinting in every line that he was above his work.’
Shaw had established a model for himself in Lewes whose ‘combination of a laborious criticism with a recklessly flippant manner’ reminded him of a certain Corno di Bassetto. Then, almost as an afterthought, he threw in one further trait: Lewes, he added, ‘wrote plays of the kind which, as a critic, he particularly disliked’.
3
Tilting with Henry Irving
I shall never be able to begin a new play until I fall in love with somebody else.
Shaw to Janet Achurch (30 March 1895)
The Fabian social critic; the anonymous literary critic of the Pall Mall Gazette; the art critic of Our Corner and The World; the variously named musical critics of the Dramatic Review, The Star and The World: all were given a voice in the dramatic opinions of the Saturday Review. It was the Fabian who called for the establishment both of a National Theatre and of local theatres supported by local government, claiming for the drama ‘as high a place in the collectivist program as municipal gas, water and tramways’. It was the Fabian, too, who campaigned for better wages for supporting actors and actresses, and who proposed a Royal College of the Drama ‘with scholarships, and a library scantily furnished with memoirs and reminiscences, and liberally furnished with technical works, including theatrical instruction and stage mechanism’.
Shaw the art critic felt able to recommend George Alexander to dye his upholstery and curtains green (a more restful colour than crimson for entertainments lasting four hours); to review King Arthur as if it were an occasion for enjoying Burne-Jones’s sets; or suddenly to surrender almost all the theatre page to the paintings of Watts and Ford Madox Brown.
But more persistent than any of these is the voice of Corno di Bassetto. As a dramatist Shaw was to claim that ‘my method, my system, my tradition, is founded upon music’. He went back to nineteenth-century opera, which contained its counterpoint of spoken sequences, and concluded that operatic music was essentially a drama of the passions. ‘Drama can do little to delight the senses: all the apparent instances to the contrary are instances of the personal fascination of the performers. The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem cold and tame... there is, flatly, no future now for any drama without music except the drama of thought.’
As a critic Shaw was primarily a listener rather than a watcher. He was not imposed upon by Beerbohm Tree’s profusion of stage pageantry, preferring the careful readings of William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society, assisted by the authentic pipe and tabor of Arnold Dolmetsch, which could do for sixteenth-century blank verse, he believed, what conductors such as Richter and Mottl had successfully done for Beethoven and Wagner. It was to the orchestration of words, ‘a rhetorical notation based on musical pitch and dynamics’, that he was particularly attentive.
Shaw’s dramatic criticism is itself dramatic writing, supplying cries from the audience and giving contrasting transcriptions of the comedian’s technique – for example, between Coquelin and John Hare in Sydney Grundy’s Mamma, where the hero discovers that his elaborate labours to murder his mother-in-law have been in vain.
‘Coquelin clowned it, even to the length of bounding into the air and throwing forward his arms and legs as if to frighten off some dangerous animal. But he did not produce the electric effect of Mr Hare’s white, tense face and appalled stare, conveying somehow a mad speed of emotion and a frightful suspense of action never to be forgotten by any playgoer with the true dramatic memory.’
But Shaw’s imagination was most vividly awakened on the stage by women. He mocked himself for this susceptibility.’Woman’s greatest art is to lie low, and let the imagination of the male endow her with depths,’ he warned. He had transferred into the theatre his struggle to be master of himself in the company of women. For Shaw the greatest actress was Eleanora Duse.
Duse had no obvious sex-appeal. She was a plain little woman, with genius: ‘a most laborious artist hard at work, and not a pretty woman making an exhibition of herself’, was how Shaw described her. He refers to her ‘exquisite intelligence’, and represents her as the finest exponent of the new drama, where emotion existed ‘to make thought live and move us’. He uses her acting against which to measure the performances of other actresses – most famously in the beautiful passages comparing her playing of Sudermann’s Magda with Sarah Bernhardt’s. The two crucial words Shaw uses to explain Duse’s ‘vigilant sense of beauty of thought, feeling and action’ were ‘integrity’ and ‘integration’. She did not trade in flattery, solicit applause, manufacture a sham appeal for journalists. Most good actresses created themselves, Shaw believed, but were incapable of superimposing another character on top of that creation. ‘Duse’s greatest work is Duse,’ he wrote, ‘but that does not prevent Césarine, Santuzza, and Camille from being three totally different women, none of them Duses, though Duse is all of them.’ And in Magda, her face shadowed and lined (‘they are the credentials of her humanity’), it seemed to him that she spoke and acted for every woman ‘as they are hardly ever able to speak and act for themselves’.<
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In contrast to Duse stood Mrs Patrick Campbell, a magnificent animal of a woman, perilously bewitching, whose talent depended upon her ‘irresistible physical gifts’. It was away from the excitement of Mrs Pat and towards the non-sexual appeal of Duse that Shaw was trying to move Janet Achurch ‘whose playing of Alexandra, in Voss’s play,’ he wrote, ‘came nearer to Duse’s work in subtlety, continuity and variety of detail, and in beauty of execution, than anything I have seen on the English stage.
‘But Duse has been helped to her supremacy by the fortunate sternness of Nature in giving her nothing but her genius... Miss Terry or Miss Achurch, if they had no more skill than can be acquired by any person of ordinary capacity in the course of a few years’ experience, would always find a certain degree of favor as pretty leading ladies.’
This was not the first time that Shaw had slipped Ellen Terry’s name in next to Janet’s. News of Mansfield’s withdrawal of Candida reached him in April 1895. The following month, while Janet still lingered in America, he began to write a new play for Ellen Terry.
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He thought her unique. Her voice, slightly veiled, seemed to enfold herself and those to whom she spoke in a glow of happiness. Shaw described her as ‘heartwise’, meaning perhaps a little cautious since, nearing fifty, she knew where her tender heart might still lead her. He admired her for her charm and beauty, but most of all for her refusal to trade on them with the public. Her acting ‘reminds me of my imaginary violin-playing,’ he wrote; ‘she seems utterly innocent of it, and yet there it is, all happening infallibly and delightfully.’
Bernard Shaw Page 28
