Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  How much of this impassioned letter could Ellen afford to understand? In her autobiography she was to advise her readers that ‘it doesn’t answer to take Bernard Shaw seriously. He is not a man of convictions.’ Here certainly were the methods of Lady Cicely Waynflete, but used for the opposite ends: to keep out the truth. Yet Shaw’s letter unsettled her. She did know what he meant: ‘the horridness of it all is, that all the time I think exactly as you do!’ But to convert his words into her actions would mean emerging from the womb of the Lyceum and becoming independent – and it was too late. ‘Of course I know it’s me all the while... What is the good of words to me?’ But words were all Shaw had to give her: the power of words to change our lives. And she could not change. All Shaw had done was to force her to recognize this fact.

  So Captain Brassbound’s Conversion went back on the shelf. As a consolation, Irving allowed Ellen to go through the copyright ceremony with the Lyceum company at the Court Theatre in Liverpool before they sailed for the United States in the autumn of 1899. But nobody liked Lady Cicely. ‘It’s because I read it wrong,’ Ellen reasoned. But her daughter Edy, sitting out in front, remarked that she couldn’t have read the lines differently, and that it seemed Shaw had thought his Lady Cicely one sort of woman but had written another.

  The other woman was Charlotte. When she commanded him to go travelling, he went as obediently and unwillingly as Sir Howard Hallam and Captain Brassbound and his crew followed Lady Cicely into the Atlas Mountains. Robbed of his Old Testament religion of revenge for what he imagined had been done to his mother, the idealistic Brassbound proposes to fill this emptiness with love. ‘I want to take service under you,’ he tells Lady Cicely. ‘And theres no way in which that can be done except marrying you. Will you let me do it?’ But love is rejected as the solution as it had been earlier by Caesar and by Shaw himself in The Perfect Wagnerite. It is not Ellen Terry or Charlotte or any other woman who gives Lady Cicely’s answer to Brassbound: ‘I have never been in love with any real person; and I never shall. How could I manage people if I had that mad little bit of self left in me? Thats my secret.’ By forestalling their marriage with warning gunfire (‘Rescue for you – safety, freedom!’), Shaw is asserting his own ‘mad little bit of self, and his intellectual isolation from Charlotte.

  In Brassbound’s saturnine features, grimly set mouth, dark eyebrows, his wordless but significant presence, we may also see something of Henry Irving – and the imaginary conversion of Irving to Shavianism. Ellen had pretty well decided to leave Irving – but not quite. She was frightened of poverty – and then Henry could always weaken her resolve when she was most determined to go by appealing for her help. ‘I appear to be of strange use to H, and I have always thought to be useful, really useful to any one person is rather fine and satisfactory.’ So Shaw was persuaded to give up the struggle.

  ‘Now for one of my celebrated volte-faces. I hold on pretty hard until the stars declare themselves against me, and then I always give up and try something else... now I recognize that you and I can never be associated as author and player – that you will remain Olivia, and that Lady Cicely is some young creature in short skirts at a High School at this moment. I have pitched so many dreams out of the window that one more or less makes little difference – in fact, by this time I take a certain Satanic delight in doing it and noting how little it hurts me. So out of the window you go, my dear Ellen; and off goes my play to my agents as in the market for the highest bidder.’

  This letter reveals in what depth of disappointment Shaw lit his candle of optimism and converted its spectral shadows into a world of solid reality. In the open market only Charrington’s Stage Society was interested in presenting his play with (the final shuddering irony) Ellen’s role given to Janet Achurch. Ellen had had to choose: and she had chosen Henry. Was it loyalty or lack of courage? ‘Ah, I feel so certain Henry just hates me!’ she wrote to Shaw.

  Here was Shaw’s consolation. Into his love for Ellen had been poured a hatred of Irving. Like two stage monsters, Dracula and Svengali, they had fought with all their magical powers over the leading lady, both claiming victory at the final curtain. ‘Of course he hates you when you talk to him about me,’ Shaw burst out. ‘Talk to him about himself: then he will love you – to your great alarm.’

  Captain Brassbound’s Conversion was first presented by the Stage Society at the Strand Theatre on 16 December 1900. Ellen came, and after the performance, on her way to the dressing-room of Laurence Irving (who played Brassbound), passing under the stage, she spoke to Shaw for the first time. They had been corresponding with each other for more than five years, and had feared that a meeting would rub the bloom off their romance. And now, having met briefly and parted, they apparently did not send each other a loving letter for almost a year and a half. ‘They say you could not bear me, when we met, that one time, under the stage,’ Ellen went on to explain in December 1902. Her self-esteem, undermined and exploited (with her own co-operation) by Irving, had to be fed by the persistent reassurance of her usefulness. What Shaw had said that could have reached her in this form and who carried such words to her is unknown. But it is difficult not to suspect that her daughter Edy was involved: Edy who had watched their long-running romance while two of her own had been ended by Ellen; Edy whose jealous gossip (Ellen went on to warn Shaw that same December) needed a ‘little salt’.

  It was at the end of this silent period that Ellen began to separate from Irving. ‘She broke loose from the Ogre’s castle,’ Shaw wrote, ‘...only to find that she had waited too long for his sake, and that her withdrawal was rather a last service to him than a first to herself.’

  Ellen’s last service to Shaw was to play Lady Cicely at the Royal Court Theatre in 1906, eighteen months after Irving’s death. ‘Sooner or later I know I’ll play Lady C.,’ she had promised him. It had been a hope: and finally it was a fact. She was fifty-eight, could not remember her lines, felt easily demoralized. Shaw made certain that the producer treated her with gentleness and to Ellen herself he wrote: ‘Behave as if you were more precious than many plays, which is the truth... The only other point of importance is that you look 25; and I love you.’

  When the play opened on 20 March, The Times drama critic noted that ‘Miss Terry is, as always, a little slow, the victim of a treacherous memory’; and Desmond MacCarthy in The Speaker observed that ‘there was a hesitation in her acting sometimes, which robbed it of effect’. She recognized this herself. ‘You try to keep up your illusions about me,’ she wrote to Shaw, ‘about my acting, altho’ you know all the while – ’ But Shaw refused to know. He had no time for this ‘saintly humility’. The marriage of her acting with his playwriting had at last taken place and its beauty was manifest. ‘She is immense, though she is 58, and cant remember half my words,’ he wrote. ‘...now that she has at last actually become Lady C, and lives the part, saying just what comes into her head without bothering about my lines, she is very successful.’

  The following year Ellen took Captain Brassbound’s Conversion on her farewell tour of the United States. On 22 March, in Pittsburgh ‘of all places in the world’ she married James Carew, the American actor who played Captain Kearney in the play. Though Dame Ellen would never become Lady Cicely, ‘her history has become your history,’ Shaw acknowledged. ‘...Why could you not have been content with my adoration?’ But most people preferred conventional romance to Shavian adoration and would attempt to infiltrate it into his plays. When in 1912 Gertrude Kingston acted the role of Lady Cicely, she replaced in rehearsal Shaw’s final line – ‘How glorious! And what an escape!’ – with her own: ‘How glorious! And what a disappointment!’ But the disappointment, brilliantly concealed, was Shaw’s. ‘Lady Cecilys [sic] no longer exist,’ he conceded in a letter to Gertrude Kingston, ‘ – if they ever did.’

  *

  Shaw was developing into an ingenious ‘Ladies’ Tailor’. But what was the use of this if no lady would wear his clothes? The late Victorian theatre
was so different from any living world, that he could see ‘no real women in the plays except heavily caricatured low comedy ones,’ he later wrote to Edy Craig; ‘and what the leading actresses had to do was to provide an embodiment of romantic charm... without having a single touch of nature in the lines and gestures dictated by the author’s script... unless they could smuggle in something of their own between the lines.’

  Shaw had been at this smuggling game now for ten plays and was almost always caught, either by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, or by the male actor-manager’s régime of the West End. Together, they policed a theatre-going public that was not yet ready for the New Drama as a vehicle for the New Woman. Shaw’s huntresses and persons ‘exactly like myself peopled the army he had called up to invade the fin de siècle theatre, topple the womanly women from their stage pedestals, then march down from the boards to the stalls and out into the world. But finding the doors of the theatre heavily barricaded, his regiment veered off instead to the offices of Grant Richards. Having failed as a novelist and, it seemed, also as a dramatist, from these two failures Shaw proposed to manufacture success with a literary genre composed of essay, play and novel.

  By November 1900 Three Plays for Puritans had been passed for the press and in January 1901 an edition of 2,500 copies was published. ‘The effort has almost slain me,’ Shaw admitted. He had not done it for money; he had not worked sixteen hours a day with Charlotte’s approval; and he had gone directly against the advice of William Archer who predicted popularity for at least one of these plays leading to an inevitable Shaw boom if he would give it ‘a chance, by waiting at least two years for somebody to produce it before publishing it’. Why then had he done this?

  Shaw was acutely aware of the continuous current of sex in the Victorian theatre because, like the sex in his own life, it was suppressed. He argued that the sensuous conventionality of Victorian stage sex was pornographic in that it was not frank. This lack of frankness, he added, had been what ‘finally disgusted me’. With such passages – and there are many of them in his Preface – he disclaims being a prude and identifies himself as a proponent of the realistic treatment of sex in contemporary drama. But for Shaw realistic sex meant less sex. He passes in his preface almost unnoticeably from demolishing the genteel assumptions of the sex instinct as shown on the stage, to a demolition of the sex instinct itself.

  Before marriage, in his three-cornered affairs with women, Shaw’s part had been an impersonation of George Vandeleur Lee, the interloper in his parents’ marriage. In marriage he had taken on a double role, that of George Carr Shaw and George Vandeleur Lee together. He was legitimately married but it was a mariage blanc. The dominant role was that of Lee whose ‘potency’ arose from his public life – as did Shaw’s. Casting off the ambiguous skin of ‘George’, Shaw had literally ‘made a name for himself as a writer, the magnificently impersonal G.B.S. (his equivalent of Lee’s ‘Vandeleur’). His frustration at not getting the work of G.B.S. performed manifested itself as an impotence. From this impotence came his impatience – his inability to take Archer’s advice to wait – and his confusing paradoxes in the Preface between celibacy and pornography. He had already waited too long. His only channel for reaching the public was the book world. But this outlet was unsatisfactory since he could not put his potent words into the mouths of actresses, could not direct them on a stage, could not witness their effect on audiences, could only, with the aid of his written narrative, transport them into his imagination. It gave him only temporary relief.

  ‘No: it is clear that I have nothing to do with the theatre of today,’ he had written to Ellen Terry. To create a family of plays for future generations was still Shaw’s ultimate aim. In the short term, however, there was another theatre where he could perform: the theatre of politics. ‘It is time to do something more in Shaw-philosophy, in politics & sociology. Your author, dear Ellen, must be more than a common dramatist.’

  3

  Boer War Manoeuvres

  If I were not a politician I would be a Fabian.

  R. B. Haldane to Bernard Shaw (15 October 1900)

  Shaw was with Charlotte on board the ‘floating pleasure machine’ SS Lusitania when on 11 October 1899 the war in the Transvaal broke out. When he arrived back in England he found the country in a state of civil war over South Africa. The prosperity of the Empire, the longevity of the widowed Queen herself, seemed to have sunk Britain in the doldrums of peace and the public was more than ready to take off for some foreign adventuring. The novels of Trollope, with their solid domestic themes, were beginning to lose popularity and were being replaced in the public imagination by Kipling’s Indian stories, the adventures of R. L. Stevenson and the historical romances of Conan Doyle. Doyle shared with thousands of ‘men in the street’ an attitude that converted warfare into sport, ‘If ever England gets into a hole,’ he had declared, ‘you may depend on it that her sporting men will pull her out of it.’

  Shaw had wanted to have nothing to do with it. But the eruption of hostilities was of such violence, shifting the landscape of British politics, that non-involvement became impossible. The atmosphere in Britain of conflicting imperialist and pro-Boer passions, gathering up the vague discontents of years, was considerably less sportsmanlike than on the smoke-filled battlefields of South Africa. John Burns, ‘the Man with the Red Flag’ who ten years earlier had led the Dock Strike, was obliged to take up his cricket bat one night to defend himself against a crowd attempting to break into his home.

  The Conservative Party, saw Englishmen riding ‘the white steed of destiny’ all over South Africa. Most socialists joined in opposition to the war – Keir Hardie, for example, picturing the Boers as pure-living, God-fearing farmers grazing peacefully under the Christ-like guardianship of President Kruger. Between the romanticism of the right and the sentimentality of the left floundered the Liberal Party with its cautious new leader Campbell-Bannerman. It was the middle ground of British politics that was torn apart by the South African war; and since the Fabian Society, with its policy of permeation, had been cultivating this middle ground, it now found itself at the centre of a crisis.

  The Webbs’ attitude to South Africa was simple. They did their best to ignore it. Beatrice, who described the war as an ‘underbred business’, was determined that the Fabians should be ‘so far removed from political influence that it is not necessary for Sidney to express any opinion’.

  It was Sidney’s lack of interest in foreign politics – despite his years at the Colonial Office – that had dictated the Fabian silence over Imperialism. But since it was impossible any longer to smother things in silence, he handed over the ‘show’ to the Fabian literary expert. Shaw’s brief was complicated. He had to discover some honourable method by which, while the war issue dominated British politics, the Fabians could legitimately continue to produce tracts on municipal bakeries, fire insurance and the milk supply.

  His attitude had begun to change over this year until, with the publication of Fabianism and the Empire, it seemed to invert the traditional socialist standpoint, supporting pacifist permeation tactics at home while tolerating a good deal of bloodshed overseas. He urged all Fabians to stick together. No party or society could entirely discharge the soul’s message of every member; and no member, he added, ‘can find a Society 800 strong which is an extension of his own self – even the society of 2 called marriage is a failure from that point of view’.

  Shaw tried to suffocate the moral issue of the war by spreading over it his theory of pragmatism. In its most negative phase Shaw’s pragmatism meant that socialism should not touch any problem that it did not have a reasonable chance of solving; more positively it meant in this case waiting for the inevitable annexation of the Transvaal, and then introducing there the social organization on which the Fabians had been working. In a letter to Ramsay MacDonald he explained, ‘I have done my best to avert the fight for which the democratic spirit and the large grasp of human ideas is always spoiling, and for w
hich the jingo spirit is no doubt equally ready. If you wont take my way, and wont find a better way, then punch one another’s heads and be damned.’

  Of what use, he asked, were ethics that were taken out of the cupboard from time to time and that led to conclusions no one could act on? ‘I am a revolutionist in ethics as much as in economics,’ he told Walter Crane;

  ‘and the moment you demand virtuous indignation from me, I give you up... the Fabian ought to be warproof; and yet Capitalism has only to fire a gun, and split a great shaving off us.’

  In fact Shaw was extraordinarily successful in keeping the Fabian peace. By the time the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in 1902 (leaving the enfranchisement of the native population to be settled in due course) 22,000 British soldiers had been killed and £223,000,000 spent – but no great shaving had been split off the Fabian Society. In steering them out of war-range, Shaw had removed the Fabians from the rest of the socialist fleet, taken them, it seemed, out of politics and stranded them on the high ground of political philosophy. He had also plucked from politics the ‘heroic’ quality he had so recently inserted into his plays.

  Shaw hated war; he hated the human beings who were attracted by war; and he felt that every human being, whatever his moral stance, was implicated. His revulsion at the Boer War, and the policy he formed based on this revulsion, is most succinctly expressed in a letter to a fellow-Fabian, George Samuel. ‘The Boer and the Britisher are both fighting animals, like all animals who live in a chronic panic of death and defeat,’ he wrote.

  ‘...Do you expect me solemnly to inform a listening nation that the solution of the South African problem is that the lion shall lie down with highly-armed lamb in mutual raptures of quakerism, vegetarianism, and teetotalism?... Let us face the facts. Two hordes of predatory animals are fighting, after their manner, for the possession of South Africa, where neither of them has, or ever had, any business to be from the abstractly-moral, virtuously indignant Radical, or (probably) the native point of view... The moral position of the Boers and the British is precisely identical in every respect; that is, it does not exist. Two dogs are fighting for a bone thrown before them by Mrs Nature, an old-established butcher with a branch establishment in South Africa. The Socialist has only to consider which dog to back; that is, which dog will do most for Socialism if it wins.’