Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  It was the Majority Report that got the better press. But from the Fabian point of view, the political situation appeared to have improved. After Campbell-Bannerman suffered a heart attack in April 1908, a new Government was formed with Asquith its Prime Minister – a man ‘inclined to carry out our ideas,’ Beatrice thought. But Asquith left much of this work to Winston Churchill (President of the Board of Trade) and Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer): and neither of them was sympathetic to the Webbs. Sidney and Beatrice therefore decided to deploy the Fabian Society on a national campaign. This was the sort of enterprise Wells had been urging on the Fabians before his resignation – it was ‘quite after my own heart,’ he told Beatrice. Here was the ‘new start’ Beatrice had promised the Fabians: a missionary crusade of ‘raging tearing propaganda’ to change the mind of the country about destitution.

  ‘As a preparation I practise voice presentation between 6.30 and 8 a.m. every morning on the beach – orating to the Waves!’ she wrote after the Fabian Summer School. ‘...It is rather funny to start on a new profession after 50!’ The turmoil rather thrilled her. Yet it was a ‘curiously demoralizing life’. She spurred herself on to be an itinerant agitator. ‘It is no use shirking from this life of surface agitation, from this perpetual outgiving of personality.’

  Beatrice had published her Minority Report in two volumes totalling 946 pages. Though it was extraordinarily far-seeing, it proved difficult to expound to electors; and it was impossible to convince governments that a complex bureaucracy would not be needed to set it up. After the last Liberal election win in 1910, people preferred Lloyd George’s simple National Insurance Bill.

  ‘Lloyd George and Winston Churchill have practically taken the limelight,’ Beatrice conceded. She had needed the talents of Wells and Shaw to combat such brilliantly effective slogans as Lloyd George’s ‘Ninepence for fourpence’ advertising contributory social insurance. But Wells, though he joined the campaign ‘very much as a drop of water, when it encounters a pailful, lines up with the rest’, was too busy working at his caricatures of the Webbs in The New Machiavelli; whilst Shaw seemed to have ‘lost the power of doing anything except in imperative emergencies’.

  Beatrice’s Minority Report had a formative influence on Shaw’s political thinking. It broke from the commercial tradition of the nineteenth century and went straight to the issue of public welfare. It was not enough, the Report stated, to secure every man a minimum wage for the work he found to do. ‘You must provide the wage anyhow, and enable him to find all the work that exists, and if there is no work available you must still spend the wage on him in keeping him fit for work when it does come,’ Shaw wrote in a review of the Report. ‘His right to live, and the right of the community to his maintenance in health and efficiency, are seen to be quite independent of his commercial profit for any private employer. He is not merely a means to the personal ends of our men of business; he is a cell of the social organism, and must be kept in health if the organism is to be kept in health.’

  From the Webbs’ national minimum wage, Shaw’s mind moved on to an annual salary that would in effect be an equal share of the national product. Then, in or about December 1910, he came up with a new definition of socialism. Ideally it meant equality of income – ‘a state of society in which the entire income of the country is divided between all the people in exactly equal shares, without regard to their industry, their character, or any other consideration except the consideration that they are living human beings... that is Socialism and nothing else is Socialism.’

  Though Shaw did not have much confidence in imposing this ‘remoter solution’ on the Fabians, he felt that Lloyd George’s plans for pensioning the elderly and taxing unearned income made it imperative for socialists to regain the initiative in radical thinking about the redistribution of income. Equality was fundamental to socialism, he argued, and without it all Lloyd George’s schemes to take from the rich and give to the poor would seem predatory. For without equality nothing could be done except to organize capitalism on a more commercially profitable basis. Shaw replaced Lloyd George’s old age pension with a life pension, substituting social service for private profit as a motive for human action. ‘We must proceed by taxation as Mr Lloyd George does,’ he told the Fabians: ‘but our object should [be]... the reduction of all excessive incomes to the normal standard.’

  When, after their crusade, Beatrice arranged to take Sidney on a sabbatical voyage round the world, G.B.S. saw an excellent opportunity for retirement. He had always intended to resign, he reminded Edward Pease, ‘when I had completed my quarter of a century service; but what with Wells and one thing and another the moment was not propitious... if we do not resign now, we shall never resign.’ Neither Bland, nor he himself, nor Stewart Headlam would stand again. The clearing out of the Old Gang would be pretty well complete – so why not make it complete and simultaneous? ‘I think Sidney must retire,’ Shaw advised. ‘We must all go together, with the limelight on, and full band accompaniment.’

  At the executive elections in April 1911, Webb came top of the poll and stayed on: Shaw, Bland and three other members resigned. Looking back some years later, Shaw wondered whether the Old Gang should not have left half a dozen years earlier and taken the risk of handing everything over to Wells. ‘In a way he [Wells] was fundamentally right in seeing that he could do nothing unless The Society would definitely accept him and trust him, and get rid of us,’ he wrote.

  3

  Skits and Farces

  I confess I am getting old and childish and easily amused.

  Shaw to Greenhaugh Smith (29 December 1904)

  In the half-dozen years before the war Shaw whipped up more than half a dozen one-act skits, farces, extravaganzas for the stage written mostly in a style which Virginia Woolf described as that of ‘a disgustingly precocious child of 2 – a sad and improper spectacle to my thinking’. The event-plots of these pieces tell the story of Shaw’s contribution to magic and absurdity, and rearrange fragments of his life into revealing patterns.

  The Fascinating Foundling was knocked off early in August 1909 for a charity performance at the request of Elizabeth Asquith, daughter of the Prime Minister. Shaw provided the piece with a subtitle – ‘A Disgrace to the Author’.

  The story revolves round the destiny of orphans. A smart and beautiful young man forces his way into the ante-room of the Lord Chancellor’s office, and engages his elderly clerk in a broadsword combat (fire tongs versus poker). This parody of a Shakespearian duel is interrupted by the indignant appearance of the Lord Chancellor. The young man explains that he is Horace Brabazon, a foundling, and has come to the Lord Chancellor as ‘father of all the orphans in Chancery’ to ask for a wife – ‘someone old enough to be my mother,’ he explains, ‘...not old enough to be your mother... I attach some importance to that distinction... One mustnt overdo these notions.’ After he leaves a second caller arrives. She is Anastasia Vulliamy, a superior foundling who had been discovered ‘on the doorstep of one of the very best houses in Park Lane’. She too wants the Lord Chancellor ‘to be a father to me’ and find her a husband, ‘someone I can bully’. Horace Brabazon returns for his walking-stick, and she proposes to him, recommending a three-week engagement: ‘You are only on approval, of course.’ He agrees because she is a foundling and will bring no family to make him miserable.

  The Glimpse of Reality was a more sombre tomfoolery which took Shaw nearly eighteen months to complete and eighteen years to see performed, chiefly because he kept mislaying it. It is set in the fifteenth century and takes place at an inn on the edge of an Italian lake. A devout friar aged one hundred and thirteen is hearing the confession of a young girl, Giulia. He urges her to press close to him as he is deaf. She does so, telling him that in order to win a sufficient dowry for her to marry a fisherman she is to decoy young Count Ferruccio (‘a devil for women’) to the inn. The Count will then be killed by her father who will claim the reward. The venerable friar flings off hi
s gown and beard and reveals himself as the young Count. Giulia’s father, the innkeeper, and her fiancé, the fisherman, appear, and all four of them sit down to supper. The Count negotiates for his life, but in a complicated tactical game is defeated. ‘There is nothing like a good look into the face of death,’ he says, ‘...for shewing you how little you really believe and how little you really are.’ With this glimpse of reality his terror of death falls away. He speaks so fearlessly that the innkeeper and fisherman, believing him mad and therefore under the protection of God, refuse to murder him.

  Among the other playlets of this period were ‘An Interlude’, ‘A Thumbnail Sketch of Russian Court Life in the XVIII Century’, ‘A Piece of Utter Nonsense’, and ‘A Demonstration’. The ‘Interlude’, which was Shaw’s subtitle for The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, is a miniature work of art composed between 17 and 20 June 1910, to support the appeal for a British National Theatre.

  It is a midsummer night on the terrace of the Palace at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames, in the spacious times of Elizabeth I. A Beefeater is approached by a ghost. ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’ he cries. The cloaked figure stops and writes, then speaks. He is no ghost, but a man come to keep tryst with his Dark Lady. The Beefeater relaxes: he knows this dark lady well enough. She is always making trysts with men. ‘You may say of frailty that its name is woman,’ he casually remarks. The man turns pale at this information, yet luxuriates in the phrase and makes a note of it – at which the ‘well-languaged’ warder dubs him ‘a snapper-up of such unconsidered trifles’: and down that goes too on the man’s tablet.

  The Beefeater moves discreetly off and a sleepwalking lady wanders along the terrace cursing the cosmetics that have peppered her with freckles: ‘Out, damned spot... All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this Tudor hand.’ The man, enchanted by this word-imagery, mistakes her for his mistress, the mysterious ‘woman colour’d ill’. He wakes her but discovers that she is a stranger. By way of introduction he tells her that he is ‘the king of words’, and rhapsodizes over her own word-skill – he has so bad a memory, he adds, he must catch them on his tablets. He puts his arms round her, but the two of them are knocked sideways by the Dark Lady who has been jealously listening. During this falling-about the three characters are revealed as Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth and Mary Fitton.

  Mistress Fitton is terrified. Only fear strikes any words out of her that Shakespeare finds worth taking down and she is eager to leave the scene of danger. But Queen Elizabeth is a femme inspiratrice and practically every word she utters is Shakespearian. ‘I am not here to write your plays for you,’ she eventually rebukes him. Prospero-like, Shaw has called her there, together with Shakespeare, as history’s two most commanding witnesses to plead the cause of endowing a National Theatre.

  To the play Shaw attached a Preface warning readers against using the past as a refuge from the present. Shakespeare lives in each of us and all Shakespearian criticism is a form of autobiography. Shaw’s Shakespeare makes comedy out of his own misfortunes, is inspired by his love of music, grows immune to the weaknesses of passion and becomes superhuman. He is also a master of irony. ‘I am convinced,’ Shaw concludes, ‘that he was very like myself.’

  The ‘state of levity’ which Shaw insists buoyed up Shakespeare’s life floats through almost all these playlets whose subtitles have a similar mutinous tone to Shakespeare’s popular comedies – Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, What You Will. His ‘Piece of Utter Nonsense’, otherwise called The Music-Cure, is a topical skit written as a curtain-raiser for the play he had finally persuaded G. K. Chesterton to write. Chesterton’s drama, which shows love miraculously conquering diabolical evil, was called Magic. Shaw’s variety turn is a piece of magic realism suggesting that this miracle of love is a hallucination, like the concept of evil.

  Lord Reginald Fitzambey, Under-Secretary in the War Office, cannot stand very much reality. ‘I am not fit for public affairs,’ he confesses. ‘...I have a real genius for home life.’ But because his father is a Duke he has been obliged to enter Parliament, and is suffering from a breakdown. A doctor gives him some opium and he ‘sees’ a laughing crocodile about to play the piano with its tail – which is Shaw’s unconvincing version of evil. The doctor concludes that he should double the dose after which ‘if anything comes it will be something pretty this time’. He leaves, and a lovely lady pianist, Strega Thundridge, appears. She tells Reginald that his mother has engaged her for a terrific fee to play the piano in his room for two hours. There follows, as she plays Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat, an optimistic essay on the effects of opium upon the romantic imagination. ‘Ever since I was a child I have had only one secret longing,’ declares Reginald, ‘and that was to be mercilessly beaten by a splendid, strong, beautiful woman.’ Strega Thundridge, whose natural strength has been marvellously expanded by her playing of left-hand octave passages, is that splendid creature. She too has a dream: ‘It is a dream of a timid little heart fluttering against mine, of a gentle voice to welcome me home... of someone utterly dependent on me, utterly devoted to me’ whom she would beat sometimes to a jelly, before casting herself into an ecstasy of remorse. They play the Wedding March, embrace fiercely and confront their terrible destiny together.

  The Music-Cure, Shaw revealed, ‘is not a serious play’. It took him almost nine months to bring himself to complete it, during which time (between 29 July and 13 August 1913) he had also written Great Catherine. She is, he tells us in his ‘Author’s Apology’, the Catherine whom Byron had celebrated in Don Juan.

  In Catherine’s reign, whom glory still adores

  As greatest of all sovereigns and w----s.

  Shaw’s Catherine is a woman set in authority over men. There is no real plot in the play. It is an eighteenth-century encounter, spread across four bravura scenes, between some extreme personalities. There is the genial and gigantic Shavian villain Prince Patiomkin; there is a caricature Englishman, the stiff and insular Captain Edstaston of the Light Dragoons (who is Britannus escaped from Caesar and Cleopatra and now named after Shaw’s sister-in-law’s house) and his invincibly snobbish fiancée Claire – all comic stereotypes with whom Shaw felt at ease. ‘This is carrying a joke too far,’ protests the Captain as the semi-drunken Patiomkin carries him into the Empress’s petite levée and dumps him on her bed. And that is what Shaw is doing, carrying the joke as far as it will go and further. ‘This is perfectly ridiculous,’ says Claire surveying the Empress’s court which, after Shaw’s juvenile rearrangement, has been converted into a nursery. In this nursery the pain and fear of adult life evaporate. The Captain, though threatened with five thousand blows of the stick, with being skinned alive, having his tongue ripped out or his eyelids cut off, is actually trussed up and tickled by the Empress’s toe.

  That rulers behave like children is an adult observation and one that was confirmed when the Lord Chamberlain’s Comptroller recommended (besides modification to the captain’s uniform) that Patiomkin be made a teetotaller and Catherine a monogamist so as to avoid giving offence to Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, a friend of the British Royal Family. Such absurdities support Shaw’s point that ‘the fiction has yet to be written that can exaggerate the reality of such subjects’. Yet Shaw did not so much exaggerate as overrule reality. His characters behave badly out of fear, and it is this fear that these playlets replace with fun and games. But they show too, in a childlike way, the sources of his fear: physical cruelty and the dominance of death, but also infant sexuality and its bearing on the adult operation of the sex instinct. In the secret place of Shaw’s fantasies, all prescriptions against sex are inoperative. ‘The truth is that a man (or a woman) should never take his (or her) innocence for granted in matters of sex,’ he wrote to Edith Lyttelton, ‘in which ANYTHING is possible and even probable.’

  It is this guilty world of ANYTHING that these playlets invade. The role of Strega Thundridge, for example, was written for an actress who had started her career as
a talented pianist whom Shaw had encircled with erotic dreams. This affair, which virtually began by her bedside while she was ill, is comically retold in Great Catherine after the fastidious Captain Edstaston is deposited on Catherine’s bed by Prince Patiomkin.

  Shaw had given a ‘demonstration’ of this affair in another of his short plays. Its first title, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted, had been suggested by a notice posted on the gate of Edith Lyttelton’s house (she being a confidante of Shaw’s erotic actress). After three weeks’ work in the summer of 1912, he finished the play on a ‘Gt Northern train passing Holloway’, removed the warning, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted, and substituted Overruled.

  He believed his little play to be ‘really a work of some merit’. For years he had been objecting to the teasing versions of adultery presented on the stage. In Overruled he claimed to have dramatized marital infidelity and introduced the act of sexual intercourse itself (so far as this was practicable) to the theatre. Mysteriously no one noticed.

  The plot of the play explains some of the mystery. It is a summer night at a seaside hotel. A lady and gentleman are sitting together on a chesterfield in a corner of the lounge. He throws his arms round her but suddenly he discovers she is married. She too is astonished to learn that he has a wife, particularly since they have been cruising round the world each believing the other to be single. At that moment they hear the voices of a man and a woman in the corridor, and spring to opposite sides of the lounge. These voices belong to their respective husband and wife who enter, occupy the still-warm chesterfield and begin to enact a similar love scene. It transpires that both married couples had decided to enjoy a holiday away from each other and go round the world in opposite directions. The second flirtation is interrupted by the first couple, and there follows what Shaw calls in his Preface to the play ‘a clinical study’ of how polygamy actually occurs ‘among quite ordinary people’.