Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  In fact Shaw’s heroes are his realists from the Quintessence in disguise; they are Wagner’s blond warriors, raised out of recognition into a higher organization of man ready to do their work in the twentieth century. Wagner’s cycle of music dramas had told a story of love lost and regained; Shaw’s commentary is a retelling of the story as love lost and replaced by something else. His ‘frightful & loveless’ childhood, followed by his years of poverty and social unacceptability in London, made him immediately sympathetic to Wagner’s view of human history. There is no mistaking his personal involvement. Man, he writes, ‘may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you.

  ‘In that case you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold?’

  From Shaw’s reading of the Ring we see human beings in loveless desperation as giant philistines succumbing to the corrupt millions of the Rhinegold. He also portrays them as dwarf philistines exploiting the malign systems of capitalism. These systems displace the need for human love with a love for the machinery of power. They establish their dominion over the world through the majesty and superstition of the Church, and guard them with the terrifying powers of the law. Only one quality can defeat this tyranny of religion and law, and that is the quality of fearlessness. The redemption of mankind therefore depends upon the appearance in the world of a hero or the spirit of heroism.

  Wagner’s Siegfried is a symbol of love, the original deprivation of which had been the genesis of man’s tragic story. For Shaw, love was not a romantic solution to social difficulties because it could have little place in the down-to-earth conflict between humanity and its gods and governments. Love belonged to heaven where Wagner transported us once the Ring changed with Götterdämmerung from music drama into opera – which Shaw regarded as a decline, almost a betrayal. Shaw does not seek to lead us from earth to heaven, but to conduct a marriage of heaven and earth, religion and politics. He was to supplant Siegfried as a dramatic symbol with a succession of eccentrically inspired common-sense figures from Julius Caesar to St Joan and to experiment with ways of substituting the Shavian Life Force for Wagnerian resurrection. ‘The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The Ring is not in love,’ he wrote, ‘but in life itself as a tireless power which is continually driving onward and upward.’ From this faith emerged the creed of Creative Evolution Shaw was to explore in the dream sequence of Man and Superman. It is a moral commitment to progress through the Will, answering the need for optimism in someone whose observation of the world was growing more Pessimistic.

  Concurrently with The Perfect Wagnerite he had been creating his own Puritan hero. His Caesar was more directly descended from Parsifal than Siegfried, a protagonist conventionally seen less as a hero than a fool: ‘one who, instead of exulting in the slaughter of a dragon, was ashamed of having shot a swan. The change in the conception of the Deliverer could hardly be more complete.’

  *

  Shaw’s Caesar was born from his longing that such men should exist and be thought great; and that in our better liking of them might lie a seed for our advancement. Caesar is a man of words – an author rather given to preaching – a politician, financier and administrator who, in middle age, has turned his hand to ‘this tedious, brutal life of action’ because public expectation has made it necessary. His battles are like Christ’s miracles: ‘advertisements for an eminence that would never have become popular without them’. At fifty-four he is ‘old and rather thin and stringy’ to Cleopatra’s eyes. But his victories (particularly his paradoxical knack of turning defeat into victory) have given a sheen of heroic idealism to his pragmatic nature. He is plainly dressed, drinks barley water, works hard (‘I always work’) and rules ‘without punishment. Without revenge. Without judgment.’ He is rather vain, wears an oak wreath to conceal his baldness and is ‘easily deceived by women’. Yet he ‘loves no one... has no hatred in him... makes friends with everyone as he does with dogs and children’. This indiscriminate kindness is part of his avuncular superiority – what Shaw called his ‘immense social talents and moral gifts’. Such was the man whom Shaw believed might initiate evolutionary progress for mankind.

  He had come initially from Mommsen’s History of Rome, from the fifth volume of which Shaw made extensive notes. ‘I stuck nearly as closely to him,’ he wrote, ‘as Shakespeare did to Plutarch or Holinshed.’ Shakespeare was a contributory influence in the shaping of the play. In his appraisal of Julius Caesar for the Saturday Review Shaw had expressed his indignation ‘at this travestying of a great man as a silly braggart’. Lifting Caesar from Plutarch, Shakespeare had added the qualities of vacillation and conceit from his general knowledge of dictators and his particular observation of Queen Elizabeth. Shaw replaced this Elizabethan stage tyrant by adding to Mommsen’s Caesar something of Christ – a paraphrase, for example, at the climax of the play of the Sermon on the Mount.

  The play was composed for Forbes-Robertson, ‘the only actor on the English stage capable of playing a classical part in the grand manner without losing the charm and lightness of heart of an accomplished comedian’. What he looked for, and eventually received from Forbes-Robertson, Shaw was to set out in an article written at the time of the play’s first presentation in London. Caesar and Cleopatra was ‘an attempt of mine to pay an instalment on the debt that all dramatists owe to the art of heroic acting...

  ‘We want credible heroes. The old demand for the incredible, the impossible, the superhuman, which was supplied by bombast, inflation, and the piling of crimes on catastrophes and factitious raptures on artificial agonies, has fallen off; and the demand now is for heroes in whom we can recognise our own humanity, and who, instead of walking, talking, eating, drinking, sleeping, making love and fighting single combats in a monotonous ecstasy of continuous heroism, are heroic in the true human fashion: that is, touching the summits only at rare moments, and finding the proper level on all occasions.’

  Shaw was engaging the best Shakespearian actor of the time to help him make obsolete Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and undermine Antony and Cleopatra, His Caesar is a hero for the realists: Shakespeare’s Antony is the idealistic hero created for the philistines. ‘You are a bad hand at a bargain, mistress,’ Rufio tells Cleopatra at the end of the play, ‘if you will swop Caesar for Antony.’

  Between the attractions of love and power Antony seems perpetually divided. Caesar is subject to no such struggle. By reducing Cleopatra’s age from twenty-one to sixteen and ignoring Caesarion, the legendary child of Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw is able to write off the threat of sex. ‘It is extremely important that Cleopatra’s charm should be that of a beautiful child, not of sex,’ he wrote years later. ‘The whole play would be disgusting if Caesar were an old man seducing a child.’ Shakespeare’s Cleopatra was a physically mature woman drawn from life, a dramatic portrait of the ‘black’ mistress of the Sonnets from whom he created a role so consummate, Shaw judged, ‘that the part reduced the best actress to absurdity’. Shaw’s Cleopatra is based on his observation of ‘an actress of extraordinary witchery’, Mrs Patrick Campbell. It is a part conceived from the stalls, yet with some faint foreknowledge perhaps of their emotional involvement to come. That involvement, which was to impair the Shavian Will in his mid-fifties, offers an ironic comment on Caesar’s untroubled control of his sexual susceptibility.

  Whatever was taken from Mommsen, anticipated as Christ, or dressed up as Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Caesar is Shaw: a figure to promote his way of life and dramatize his philosophy. Caesar is as fearless in life as Shaw was on the page, and becomes a fantasy image of Shaw himself upon the Fabian stage and in the theatre of politics.

  The ancient Briton of the play, Britannus, Julius Caesar’s loyal secretary, is like a modern Englishman. Shaw never wrote costume drama for its own sake: his plays were always addressed to the present.
The figure of Britannus keeps the audience imaginatively half in the present (which was one of the ways Shaw became a model for Brecht). Since there had been such little progress through generations of sexual reproduction we are left with example as the stimulus for improvement. But Caesar’s example is not followed by anyone in the play and will lead, we know, to ‘his assassination by a conspiracy of moralists’. His schoolmastering of Cleopatra is easily defeated by her egocentricity (‘But me! me!! me!!! what is to become of me?’). At the beginning she is a child full of fear (‘She moans with fear... shivering with dread... almost beside herself with apprehension’). ‘You must feel no fear,’ Caesar instructs her. But when he leaves her at the end she is, he acknowledges, ‘as much a child as ever’. All she has added to herself is the trick of imitating Caesar and this trick (unlike a similar trick learned by Eliza Doolittle) has not altered her.

  Caesar is as alone at the end as when, at the beginning of Act I, he confronted the Sphinx:

  ‘I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as myself. I have found... no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day’s deed, and think my night’s thought... Sphinx, you and I, strangers to the race of men, are no strangers to one another.’

  This is Shaw’s own isolation. Caesar’s address to the Sphinx anticipates a passage from the Preface to Immaturity, written over twenty years later, in which Shaw tells of a ‘strangeness which has made me all my life a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it’. That strangeness seemed intensified by his life with Charlotte. For, as his next play would continue to protest, he was unfitted for the institution of marriage.

  *

  Lady Cicely Waynflete is the female equivalent in Shaw’s world of Caesar. ‘If you can frighten Lady Cicely,’ her brother-in-law Sir Howard Hallam tells Captain Brassbound, ‘you will confer a great obligation on her family. If she had any sense of danger, perhaps she would keep out of it.’

  Lady Cicely has walked across Africa with nothing but a little dog and put up with six cannibal chiefs who everyone insisted would kill her. In fact: ‘The kings always wanted to marry me.’ Her power lies partly in the authority of a mother over her children: ‘all men,’ she insists, ‘are children in the nursery.’ Her far-sightedness and tact being so much more effective than their conventional logic, she constantly runs rings round these men. ‘Strong people are always so gentle,’ she announces, but her own air of gentleness is an obvious imposture. Like Caesar she is surrounded by bullies whom she must constantly outwit. She re-educates them by a mixture of shrewdness and an attraction that does not depend on the erotic use of sex. She is Shaw’s ideal of womanhood.

  The interest of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion focuses upon the character and performance of Lady Cicely. She is the only woman in the play. Her adventures give Shaw the opportunity of making a statement about the policy of British Imperialism that was increasingly occupying the Fabian Society at this time. Captain Brassbound had served under General Gordon before he was killed by the Mahdi. Britain had then re-annexed the Sudan from the Mahdi and was about to annex the two Boer Republics. It was for this reason that Shaw set his play in Morocco, ‘the very place where Imperialism is most believed to be necessary’.

  Shaw wanted to contrast travellers with conquerors, to show Europe’s mission civilisatrice carried forward by the ‘good tempered, sympathetic woman’ who rules by natural authority against ‘physically strong, violent, dangerous, domineering armed men’ who shoot and bully in the name of Imperialism. In a letter to Ellen Terry, he spelled out this opposition between the male and female principles in human nature, telling her to read two books: H. M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa. ‘Compare the brave woman, with her common-sense and good will, with the wild-beast man, with his elephant rifle, and his atmosphere of dread and murder, breaking his way by mad selfish assassination out of the difficulties created by his own cowardice.’

  Lady Cicely’s historical model was Mary Kingsley; her literary model Shelley’s ‘The Witch of Atlas’; her actress model Ellen Terry; and her model from life Charlotte whose passion for tourism had persuaded Shaw to read a number of travel books and to pick up, after completing Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, his only first-hand knowledge of Morocco: ‘a morning’s walk through Tangier, and a cursory observation of the coast through a binocular from the deck of an Orient steamer’.

  It was to Ellen, he let it be known, that the play owed its existence. Lady Cicely is not a portrait of Ellen Terry but a vehicle that incorporates something of her manner and magnifies it hugely. This is how he wanted her to be; this is how he believed she might become if she grew into the part. For the motive behind Captain Brassbound’s Conversion was similar to that behind The Man of Destiny: to make one last effort to infiltrate the Lyceum with Shavian drama or, in failing, to detach Ellen Terry from Henry Irving.

  The Lyceum had in 1898 been turned into a limited liability company. It was a step that, though designed to ease Irving’s financial burdens, precipitated the end by making it more difficult for him to obtain credit. Early in 1899 Shaw approached Max Hecht, the principal investor in the new ‘Lyceum Ltd’ (‘which I understand to be a benevolent society for the relief of distressed authors & actors’), and made the ‘entirely interested suggestion’ that the newly managed theatre should put on his ‘recklessly expensive play’ Caesar and Cleopatra, with Forbes-Robertson and Mrs Patrick Campbell in the title roles. ‘On the whole, Forbes Robertson & Mrs Pat look more like the heir & heiress apparent to Irving & Ellen Terry than any other pair,’ he wrote.

  The copyright performance of Caesar and Cleopatra had taken place on 15 March 1899 at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle with Mrs Pat reading Cleopatra. But she ‘was not attracted by her part’ and did not accept Shaw’s invitation to ‘bring Caesar down to lunch’ at Hindhead. Forbes-Robertson by himself could not risk such a production and Shaw’s scheme for entering the Lyceum by the back door while Irving was abroad stuck. It was at this moment that he started ‘Ellen’s play’.

  For years Ellen had supported Irving’s romantic one-man dramas; now Shaw was presenting her with a non-romantic drama for one woman. ‘I dont think that Play of yours will do for me at all!’ she answered. Yet it was just the sort of thing she had consistently been helping Irving to produce. There was, in her abasement to him, a curious sense of superiority. She felt he depended on her far more than he could acknowledge; and she had come to rely on his dependence. After she had complicated their relationship by introducing Shaw with his Napoleon play showing how a real Man of Destiny rises above jealousy, Irving had begun to turn to Mrs Aria. He said nothing to Ellen. ‘But who is Mrs A?’ she had asked Shaw.

  Eliza Aria was a social journalist and salonnière who had contrived to make herself the perfect companion. Attractive in appearance, generous with her praise, she was able to give Irving an encouraging reflection of himself. Ellen could see how Irving was renewed by Mrs Aria – and she determined to feel pleased for him. She did feel pleased: but she also felt betrayed. For she had the power to help him more than anyone, if only he would let her. But Irving was almost impossible to help – a presence that cocooned itself in silence. She wondered how his other friends and lovers felt. ‘I have contempt and affection and admiration. What a mixture!’ He was curiously tortured: ‘a silly Ass,’ Ellen called him. Sometimes she was frankly impertinent like this: at other times in awe. He still had the power to wound her. Appearing ‘stouter, very grey, sly-looking, and more cautious than ever’, he had informed her early in 1899 that he was ruined. He intended to mend his fortunes by touring the provinces with a small company. As for Ellen she could ‘for the present’ do as she liked. Ellen was furious. She had contemplated leaving him: ‘I simply must do something else.’ But she did not leave.

  This was why she wanted something special from Shaw, someth
ing to bring back the glorious days of the old Lyceum. She had first wanted Caesar and Cleopatra: Irving, she was convinced, ‘could have done wonders with that Play’. But Shaw had not seen her as his Cleopatra: ‘She is an animal – a bad lot. Yours is a beneficent personality.’ Also Irving made it clear that he would never produce a play by Shaw – in which case, Shaw retaliated, the only feasible alternative would be to produce his next play at the Lyceum when Irving was away.

  He sent Ellen Captain Brassbound’s Conversion at the end of July 1899 and she read it with disappointment. ‘I couldnt do this one,’ she told him, ‘...it is surely for Mrs Pat.’ He was dismayed. Captain Brassbound’s Conversion had been conjured out of the last four years of their letter-writing love-affair: and she had not recognized it. ‘Alas! dear Ellen, is it really so?’ he wrote back. ‘Then I can do nothing for you.

  ‘I honestly thought that Lady Cicely would fit you like a glove... I wont suggest it to Mrs Pat, because I am now quite convinced that she would consider herself born to play it, just as you want to play Cleopatra... And so farewell our project – all fancy, like most projects.’

  It was almost the end, a divorce between her acting and his playwriting skills. But he would not let them separate without a protest. ‘Of course you never really meant Lady Cicely for me,’ she had written to him. ‘Oh you lie, Ellen,’ he answered, ‘you lie:

  ‘never was there a part so deeply written for a woman as this for you... Here then is your portrait painted on a map of the world – and you... want to get back to Cleopatra!... do you think I regard you as a person needing to be arranged with sphinxes & limelights to be relished by a luxurious public? Oh Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, Ellen. This is the end of everything.’