Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Delays were often caused by Tree’s brainwaves for taking over other roles (such as Doolittle) or filling the theatre with philosophical dustmen and flower girls. To Shaw’s businesslike mind it seemed miraculous that any production ever took place at His Majesty’s. Tree had with dignity assured him that ‘I will not place myself in the position of receiving a rebuff’, and was taken aback when Mrs Campbell hurled a slipper bang in his face. His morale shattered, he collapsed into a chair while the cast tried to get him to understand that this was part of the play. The worst of it was, Shaw wrote, that ‘it was quite evident that he would be just as surprised and wounded next time’.

  Shaw was strangely convinced that Tree was a tragedian and Stella a comedian. ‘I am sending a letter to Tree which will pull him together if it does not kill him,’ he informed Stella. But Tree reflected in his notebook: ‘I will not go so far as to say that all people who write letters of more than eight pages are mad, but it is a curious fact that all madmen write letters of more than eight pages.’

  In her fashion, Stella worked hard at Eliza Doolittle. Her prompt copy of Pygmalion was pencilled with encouraging scribbles: ‘My hand is held out Joey... I’ll do my level best... Your delicious play needs real greatness... gentle Joey.’

  But Shaw was not always so gentle. Though often maddened by Tree, ‘I could never bring myself to hit him hard enough,’ he regretted. But on Stella he believed that ‘no poker was thick enough nor heavy enough to leave a solitary bruise’. He had been partly persuaded of this by the knowledge that she thrived on conflict. She would put out her tongue, turn her back on Tree (‘But it’s a very nice back, isn’t it?’) and finally drive him screaming from his own stage.

  Stella’s tantrums masked a lack of confidence. She had never played in comedy before and she was thirty years too old for the part. ‘Dreadfully middle-aged moments,’ Shaw observed in his rehearsal notebook. Occasionally he did not keep such observations to himself. At one moment, as he knelt before Stella imploring her to speak the lines as he directed, she told the actors: ‘That’s where I like to see my authors, on their knees at my feet.’

  Opening night was set for 11 April 1914. The week before was marked by two spectacular disappearances. Instead of going to the theatre on Monday 6 April, Stella took off for the Kensington Registry Office where she married George Cornwallis-West two hours after his decree absolute came through. From there they went on a three-day honeymoon to a golfing resort near Tunbridge Wells, returning in time for Stella to take part in the dress rehearsal at His Majesty’s on Friday evening. ‘Of course I knew about the marriage,’ Tree lied to the press assembled in the dress circle bar, ‘and I’m very happy for both of them, but naturally I was sworn to secrecy... contrary to popular rumour there have been no quarrels between us, in fact rehearsals have progressed with the most delightful smoothness & harmony.’

  Shaw could reflect now on the consequences of his own timidity. The day before the news of Stella’s marriage appeared in the papers, Charlotte had sailed for the United States. She did not know that her husband’s affair with Mrs Pat was over – how could you ever tell such things? The long rehearsals of Pygmalion had been agony for her. She did not want to witness their first night climax. On 8 April she left England with her friend Lena Ashwell to join their guru James Porter Mills and his wife. These last months, while G.B.S. occupied himself at His Majesty’s, Charlotte had been preparing an abstract of Mills’s ‘Teaching’ which he persuaded her to publish as a business prospectus entitled Knowledge is the Door: A Forerunner. It was a comfort to her that Dr Mills was not brilliant or literary. She felt calmed by his assurance that ‘there is no need to give way to human feeling... we can gradually quiet the waves of emotion.’

  There was a great swell of excitement round the first night. Shaw sat by himself in the teeming theatre: not far off was the other George, Stella’s ‘GOLDEN man’. The curtain lifted on the first act. All went smoothly and well. In the second act Edmund Gurney, who had been listening to Lloyd George’s speeches in the House of Commons to pick up the right tone of contempt for the aristocracy, scored a colossal success as Doolittle. Stella ‘ravished the house almost to delirium’ throughout the third act, and ‘Tree’s farcical acting was very funny’. But Eliza’s sensational exit line, ‘Not bloody likely,’ nearly wrecked the play. The audience gave a gasp, there was a crash of laughter while Mrs Pat perambulated the stage, and then a second burst of laughing. The pandemonium lasted well over a minute. ‘They laughed themselves into such utter abandonment and disorder,’ Shaw wrote to Charlotte in the United States, ‘that it was really doubtful for some time whether they could recover themselves and let the play go on.’

  Tree had been in a pitiful state of nerves, begging Shaw to substitute ‘blooming’ or ‘ruddy’ for Eliza’s dreadful word. Now he felt frightfully pleased. He relaxed. He expanded. ‘He was like nothing human.’ Much of the dialogue between Higgins and Eliza held special meanings for Shaw – echoes from the controlling influence of his mother (‘I cant change my nature’) and overtones of his unhappy romance with Stella (‘I hadnt quite realised that you were going away... I shall miss you Eliza’). Tree made it all absurd; ‘For the last two acts I writhed in hell,’ Shaw wrote to Charlotte. ‘...The last thing I saw as I left the house was Higgins shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo. I went straight home to bed and read Shakespear for an hour before going to sleep to settle myself down.’

  Stella had followed his directions as if she were Eliza imitating Higgins. To thank her, and because he could not endure going backstage after the performance, Shaw invited her and her new husband down to Ayot next day. ‘You must consent to receive Cornwallis-West in the country,’ he wrote to Charlotte that night. ‘He has a dog Beppo, a huge black retriever, who plays hide & seek, distinguishes between right & left when he is given instructions, takes people’s hats off when ordered, and is withal a grave & reverend signor. I believe you would ask them both to stay for a month on condition that Beppo came too... They treat me as a beloved uncle.’

  Shaw doubted if Pygmalion could succeed. Once its success became apparent, Tree chivvied him to come back and see it. But Shaw was adamant. ‘Come soon – or you’ll not recognize your play,’ Stella appealed. But he would not. ‘Never no more.’ But at last he relented and came to the hundredth performance on 15 July.

  It was awful. It was appalling. It was worse than anything he had imagined. His directions had been wonderfully circumvented. Instead of flinging the ring down on the dessert stand at the end of Act IV, Eliza on her knees clutched and gazed on it feelingly – there were no words because the emotion was obviously too deep. In the brief interval between the end of the play and fall of the curtain, the amorous Higgins threw flowers at Eliza, a theatrically effective gesture, as Nicholas Grene has observed, ‘reversing the image at the end of Act I where Eliza threw her flowers at Higgins’.

  Tree claimed that his improvements delighted the audience: and it was this public that Shaw really blamed. What had happened to its serious instincts, its sense of proportion? During these hot summer months there had been turmoil in Ulster over Asquith’s Home Rule Bill, and hunger strikes among the militant suffragettes in London. Then on 28 June, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who had been at the première of Pygmalion in Vienna, was shot: and Europe moved to the edge of war. But for much of this time ‘all political and social questions have been swept from the public mind by Eliza’s expletive,’ Shaw reported. The Bishop of Woolwich cried out for it to be banned; Bishop Weldon felt saddened that such a vulgar word had to be uttered by a married lady with children. Scholars and intellectuals duelled in the columns of The Times over the origin of ‘bloody’. The Oxford Union met and voted in favour of a motion declaring ‘a certain sanguinary expletive’ to be ‘a liberating influence on the English language’, but the Debating Society at Eton deplored ‘the debasement and vulgarization of the
commercial theatre’. The Daily Express got hold of an authentic Covent Garden flower girl called Eliza, took her to the play and reported her as being shocked. At 10 Downing Street the Prime Minister received a letter of protest from the Women’s Purity League.

  The summer days persisted hot and sunny; the public continued to come to Pygmalion: but Tree was bored. He wanted a holiday and took off the play late that July. He had attributed the bloody rumpus over Pygmalion to ‘the flatness of the political situation’. ‘Triviality,’ Shaw wrote, ‘can go no further.’

  3

  What He Did in the Great War

  As for going mad, dont you wish you could? The trying thing is to be sane with everyone else (except the rogues who are taking advantage of it) as mad as hatters.

  Shaw to Rowley (7 January 1916)

  The Fabians were unprepared for war. Most of them believed that modern war was caused by the capitalist struggle for markets and could be discouraged by means of the General Strike. Besides, as Sidney Webb said, ‘it would be too insane’.

  Shaw also thought it insane – and all the more likely for that. Militarism in all countries had developed, he argued, ‘not from the needs of human society, but because at a certain stage of social integration the institution of standing armies gave monarchs the power to play at soldiers with living men instead of leaden figures’. German culture in particular had got stuck in this obsolete Roi Soleil system. This was why Shaw did not favour unilateral disarmament. ‘All nations should be prepared for war,’ he was to write. ‘All houses should be protected by lightning conductors.’ Until there existed a European police force, Britain must be prepared ‘to make war on war’ if she wanted to exercise an effective foreign policy. Sidney Webb’s pacifism was that of the sane man. But at a time of war ‘sanity is positively dangerous’.

  Europe was ready for fighting, as if surfeited with the material gains of the previous hundred years. Germany’s militarism was apparent. Thomas Mann was to speak of the hearts of poets standing in flame ‘for now it is war!... Nothing better, more beautiful, happier could befall them in the whole world.’ In England, where Rupert Brooke was to thank God for matching us with His hour, romantic militarism was dressed up to fit the righteous Christian, the hard-headed businessman, travelling adventurer, puritan character-builder. In a letter to The Times Lord Roberts had written: ‘“My country right or wrong and right or wrong my country”, is the sentiment most treasured in the breast of any one worthy of the name of man’ – which Shaw paraphrased as ‘teaching a Christian to disobey Christ at the commands of a non-commissioned officer’. His Preface to Androcles and the Lion, written late in 1915, amounted to a denunciation of war as a method of solving international disputes.

  Once war started, countries surrendered every other consideration except victory. ‘It is one of the horrors of war,’ he reminded Carl Heath, secretary of the National Peace Council, ‘that both parties abandon the ground of right and wrong, and take that of kill or be killed. That is a reason for making an end of war, and in the meantime keeping political power out of the hands of bellicose persons.’ He hated the silence of diplomacy. Laughter was one of his devices for shattering this silence: the mystique that in the public interest the public must know nothing. Preparation for war necessitated so much lying on the part of belligerent Governments as to develop an unthinking habit: ‘if anyone remarks at noon that it is twelve o’clock, some minister automatically articulates a solemn public assurance that there is no ground for any such suspicion,’ Shaw later wrote, ‘and gives private orders that references to the time of day are to be censored in future.’

  The secret of Britain’s foreign policy was that there was no foreign policy. In an article for the Daily Chronicle on 18 March 1913 he proposed one: a triple alliance against war by England, France and Germany, the terms being that ‘if France attack Germany we combine with Germany to crush France, and if Germany attack France, we combine with France to crush Germany’. From that starting point, he continued, the combination might be added to from Holland and the Scandinavian kingdoms ‘and finally achieve the next step in civilization, the policing of Europe against war and the barbarians’. He repeated this formula, which was another magical trinity for achieving self-integration, in an article on the comity of nations entitled ‘The Peace of Europe and How to Attain It’ in the Daily News on New Year’s Day 1914. ‘I want international peace,’ he stated. Those barbarians within our frontiers, who advocated war as a tonic, should not be let loose on foreigners but rather sent for annual war sports to Salisbury Plain, he suggested, to ‘blaze away at one another’ until the survivors (if any) felt ‘purified by artillery fire’.

  Lunching with the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky, Shaw asked what he thought of his peace proposals and was told that such problems were better left to politicians and diplomats – which might have been a better answer if politicians and diplomats were required to do the fighting. ‘Can anybody suggest an alternative policy?’ Shaw had asked. But there seemed no alternative. ‘Complete failure of my campaign,’ he noted. This failure, together with his feeling of isolation from other Fabians, contributed to the somewhat aggrieved tone and massive outpouring of Shaw’s writings on the war. A war symposium published by the Daily Citizen on 1 August he described as ‘about as timely and sensible as a symposium on the danger of damp sheets would be if London were on fire’. But, he added: ‘it is important that our statesmen and diplomatists should understand that there is a strong and growing body of public opinion to which all war is abhorrent, and which will suffer it now only as a hideous necessity arising out of past political bargains in which the people have had no part and the country no interest... We muddled our way in and we may have to fight our way out.’

  *

  Shaw and Charlotte were at a hotel at Salcombe in Devonshire on 4 August. Shaw first heard of the declaration of war on coming down to breakfast. A middle-aged Englishman ‘after a fairly successful attempt to say unconcernedly “I suppose we shall have to fight them” suddenly changed “them” into “those swine” twice in every sentence’. It was an early symptom of the epidemic that was soon covering the country: ‘the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad.’ People rejoiced at the prospect of a first-rate fight. The excitement, the dread of being thought unpatriotic even by fools with white feathers for brains, was to leave the country at the mercy of anyone in authority. ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian religion,’ the Bishop of London declared, ‘...a choice between the nailed hand and the mailed fist.’ Kitchener’s finger was to point at everyone. The upper and the upper-middle classes were exhorted to sacrifice their butlers, chauffeurs, gamekeepers and grooms for service at the front. Old men postdated their births, dyed their hair, and lined up at the recruiting offices; old women lamented that their ineligibility to serve as nurses would prevent their killing the German wounded; mothers hustled their sons into uniforms and off to the trenches; a fifteen-year-old cadet at the Royal Naval College was publicly flogged when he tried to go home.

  People needed enormous doses of self-righteousness to endure the shock of war. A chauvinistic industry, manufacturing foreign monsters, quickly expanded. A general in France, writing to a journalist, apologized that ‘there has been only one atrocity lately and that was not a good one’. Not everyone was so meticulous. Newspapers competed for German atrocities to answer the clamour of their readers – ‘like the clamor,’ Shaw reported, ‘of an agonizingly wounded combatant for morphia’. The whole country buzzed with stories of Germans tossing babies on the points of their bayonets; Germans burning field hospitals full of British wounded; Germans going into battle driving crowds of women before them; Germans making collections of fingers. Shaw searched for some practical line of reasoning to set against this hell. Would it really encourage recruitment? Surely it was kinder to those who had sons and husbands at the front not to insist that they must be horribly mutilated if they fell into enemy hands? ‘Since you expect to go o
ut soon, I really refuse to leave you troubled in spirit by that man with his eyes gouged out,’ he reassured George Cornwallis-West. It was amazing how this totally blinded refugee careered around – he was far too quick for anyone to have seen, though all had heard of him. Elsewhere, a number of Belgian nurses whose hands everyone knew to have been scissored off by the Huns had, he was glad to see, grown new ones.

  Among the baying patriots were the British disciples of Dr Mills. They could not tolerate Charlotte’s refusal to assist this righteous war in any capacity ‘except that of a reluctant taxpayer’. Worst of all in their eyes were her anxieties over poor Trebitsch. She felt a spring of joy on hearing that he had failed his medical examination. ‘You will die prematurely,’ G.B.S. assured him, ‘at the age of 98 in a hotel lift, from ascending too rapidly.’

  Shaw felt concern for all his translators – those other selves shredded in conflict. ‘YOU AND I AT WAR CAN ABSURDITY GO FURTHER,’ he had wired Trebitsch on 4 August. ‘MY FRIENDLIEST WISHES GO WITH YOU UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES.’ Next day he and Charlotte went on to Torquay where they were to stay for a couple of months at the Hydro Hotel. ‘This suits me pretty well too, as I have a lot of work in hand,’ he told Beatrice Webb.