The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and American following.
Shaw defned the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism that arose in the wake of World War 1.
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Joan Templeton Shaw’s Ibsen
A Re-Appraisal
Joan Templeton New York, NY, USA
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
ISBN 978-1-137-54341-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54044-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7
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For
Eric Bentley, The Mentor of Us All
Preface
The Quintessence of Ibsenism is perhaps the most famous book ever written by one author about another. Published in 1891 and revised and enlarged in 1913, it has been reprinted over and over and is regarded as a classic. But the book’s value is usually considered to lie less in what it reveals about its subject—Henrik Ibsen—than about its author—Bernard Shaw. For many readers, this is not much of a detriment. Shaw’s latest British biographer, Michael Holroyd, fnds that the joy of reading the Quintessence “is that of feeling Shaw’s agile and ingenious mind working with such vitality on material so sympathetic to him.” Although Shaw’s conversion of Ibsen “into a wholesale warrior does involve distortions to some of the plays,” Holroyd notes, Shaw’s purpose, after all, was to present his own “credentials as a man who was carrying on Ibsen’s business of ‘changing the mind of Europe’” (H 1:199). The Quintessence is considered to be the most important of Shaw’s nondramatic works for explaining his view of the world and a “blueprint,” in Christopher Innes’s term, for understanding his plays.1 In a recent statement on the book’s usefulness, Matthew Yde notes that the Quintessence “has usually been understood as a good indicator of Shaw’s own thinking, rather than a reliable guide to understanding Ibsen’s dramaturgical strategy and philosophy of life; the quintessence of Shavianism rather than the quintessence of Ibsenism.”2 Eric Bentley was blunter; although he appreciated Shaw’s understanding of Ibsen, nevertheless, in his classic Bernard Shaw (1947), he directed readers of the Quintessence to substitute the word “Shaw” for the word “Ibsen” throughout.3 Blunter still was Charles Carpenter,
over twenty years later, who noted: “Despite its subject (and its value as an analysis of Ibsen), the book is still an uncamoufaged piece of Shavian propaganda.”4
A considerably more critical view of Quintessence is that whatever it tells us about Shaw, it is a seriously misleading book about Ibsen. Shortly after Shaw read a frst version—a lecture to the Fabian Society—in 1890, he was accused of transforming Ibsen into a socialist like himself. This false charge, which still lingers, is the crudest version of the popular notion that Shaw wrongly regarded Ibsen as a reformer rather than an artist. A month after the Quintessence appeared, Shaw’s great friend William Archer, Ibsen’s devoted champion in England, published what was essentially a review of the book, “The Quintessence of Ibsenism: An Open Letter to George Bernard Shaw.” In it, he noted that Shaw’s argument would “strengthen the predisposition . . . to regard Ibsen, not as a poet, but as the showman of a moral wax-work.” He noted, however, that this “cannot be helped” because “it is a drawback inseparable from expository criticism” (A 31). By 1905, fourteen years later, Ibsen, now established as a great dramatist, had been the subject of a number of books in several languages that heralded his plays as arguments for women’s rights and other causes. Greatly irritated, Archer took it upon himself to respond in a lengthy essay, “Henrik Ibsen: Philosopher or Poet?,” in which he vehemently denounced the irksome critics who read Ibsen as “primarily a thinker, and only in the second place a poet”; he briefy named “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant little study, The Quintessence of Ibsenism” as “the type of this method of criticism” (A 81). Other critics, who found the Quintessence less than “brilliant,” blamed Shaw outright for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of social protest. In the same year as Archer’s essay, 1905, the American critic James Huneker published his landmark survey of early modern drama, Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists, in which he claimed that in the Quintessence, Shaw had transformed Ibsen into “a magnifed image” of himself, “dropping ideas from on high with Olympian indifference,” with the result that “we are never shown Ibsen the artist, but always the social reformer with an awful frown.”5
As Shaw became famous as a dramatist in the frst decade of the twentieth century, his plays infuenced his reputation as a critic, and he was accused of being a didactic writer incapable of understanding the artist Ibsen, and even, in one well-known instance, of having been Ibsen’s “butcher.”6 By the 1930s, George Orwell could remark in passing in a
letter to a friend that Shaw “had slandered Ibsen in a way that must make poor old I[bsen] turn in his grave” (W 3), and Edmund Wilson, in The Triple Thinkers (1938), declared that Shaw, in turning Ibsen into a social reformer, creates “a false impression” and “seriously misrepresents him.”7
In the 1940s and 1950s, Shaw became a whipping boy of the New Critics as a foremost example of the unpoetic soul. The movement’s most famous arbiter of taste, T. S. Eliot, famously and somewhat nastily attacked Shaw in his imaginary conversation, “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” in which “B,” one of the participants, explains that “Shaw was a poet—until he was born, and the poet in Shaw was stillborn. Shaw has a great deal of poetry but all stillborn; Shaw is dramatically precocious and poetically less than immature.”8 Following Eliot, Raymond Williams took on the task of saving Ibsen from the offcially unpoetic Shaw in his infuential Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1953). Explaining that his book is intended to be literary criticism in the manner of “Mr. Eliot,” Williams offers a “revaluation of Ibsen.”9 He seems almost to be holding his nose as he regrets that Ibsen’s mode was realism, “a tradition which was acutely inimical to art”; in spite of this impediment, however, Ibsen somehow managed to achieve “work as valid and as permanent as our century has” (97). But because of the pernicious infuence of The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which “has to do with Ibsen only in the sense that it seriously misrepresents him” (138), Ibsen has been mistaken for sixty years as a writer who focused on moral issues that were incidental to his art. For having committed this blunder, Williams believes, Shaw and the other “Ibsenites” deserve to be blamed as “the disintegrators of Ibsen” (43). Williams is especially indignant at what he claims is the Ibsenites’ dismissal of Ibsen’s last four plays, and he cites as proof the subtitle of Shaw’s essay on them in the Quintessence: “‘Down among the Dead Men,’ said Shaw, and Down, Down, Down was the estimate of the last plays as they appeared” (86). But while some of the Ibsenites were puzzled by the late plays, others praised them, most especially Shaw himself, whose “Down Among the Dead Men” is among the most laudatory of all his writings on Ibsen. Here, Shaw writes, Ibsen passes “into the shadow of death, or rather into the splendor of his sunset glory; for his magic is extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more powerful” (Q2 136). Clearly, Williams did not bother to read past the subtitle of the essay he was denigrating.
Seven years later, in 1960, James Walter McFarlane, editor of The Oxford Ibsen, the standard scholarly edition of Ibsen’s works in English,
reiterated Williams’s general gripe against Shaw as a reader of Ibsen, although in a politer tone. McFarlane scolded Shaw for having claimed that Ibsen’s plays are “frst and foremost the embodiment of a lesson, illustrations of a thesis, exercises in moral persuasion.” To “ask for the quintessence of Ibsenism” is specious because it is “to formulate a wholly misleading question; there is nothing to be got by boiling down, there is no extract of wisdom that would allow us to regard [Ibsen’s] drama as a linctus for the ills of mankind.”10
Three years after this, the American drama scholar Maurice Valency, in his survey of modern drama, The Flower and the Castle (1963), blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s “reputation as primarily a social dramatist” and claimed that “a brilliant rhetorician and a wit” like Shaw could not understand Ibsen, “an artist.”11 Another well-known American writer on the modern theater, Robert Brustein, in The Theatre of Revolt (1964), takes the same viewpoint: “The Ibsen who tried so hard to disassociate himself from any consistent position would not have recognized himself in the ‘social pioneer’ of The Quintessence, whose ‘gospel’ is designed to save the human race.”12
Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen, appearing from 1967 to 1971, consolidated the anti-Shaw tradition. Castigating Shaw several times over, Meyer dismissed the Quintessence as “one of the most misleading books about a great writer that can ever have been written. Had it been entitled Ibsen Considered as a Socialist, or The Quintessence of Shavianism, one would have no quarrel with it” (M 636). Like Archer, Huneker, McFarlane, Williams, Wilson, and Valency, Meyer blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of thesis plays, complaining that Shaw was responsible for the notion that A Doll’s House was “a play about the hoary problem of women’s rights” (M 457). In 1972, Michael Egan, editor of Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, followed Meyer, noting that in the Quintessence, “the defnition of Ibsenism implicitly offered (a literary campaign for moral reform through the exposure of middle-class hypocrisy) was the quintessence of Shavianism. It tells us more about Shaw and the way he used and misunderstood Ibsen than it tells us about the complexities of, say, Hedda Gabler or Little Eyolf.”13
By 1975, the notion of Shaw’s distortion of Ibsen was so widely accepted that Daniel Dervin could write: “As we know [my italics], after a certain point when Shaw scrutinized Ibsen, he began to see what Narcissus saw in the pool.”14 For Dervin, Shaw’s own plays are enough to condemn him as a bad reader of Ibsen: the famous confrontation
scene between wife and husband in the third act of A Doll’s House “is not intended to provoke thought and reform by educating the audience to social realities as Shaw’s plays increasingly attempt to do” (185). Ten years later, in 1985, in Ibsen and Shaw, Keith May claimed that Shaw was wrong about Ibsen because his own optimism prevented him from understanding that Ibsen, who believed in “timeless human weakness,” was a skeptic: “All that mattered fundamentally to Ibsen was the noble spirit which fickered here and there in every generation.”15
The notion that Shaw’s “Ibsenism” is merely “Shavianism” in disguise is curiously ahistorical. In 1891, when he wrote the Quintessence, Shaw had not yet found his way as a writer. He had been an art critic and a music critic and had written fve unknown novels. If this work were all he produced in his lifetime, he would deserve some notice in the history of English criticism for his brilliant writing on music, but what we know as “Shavianism” would not exist. The Shaw of 1891, even with all his brilliance, could hardly set out to make Ibsen’s works contain the quintessence of a way of thinking embodied in an oeuvre as yet unwritten.
A second troubling aspect of the argument against Shaw is the notion that because he reads Ibsen as an anti-idealist like himself, he is ipso facto wrong. Apart from the odd implication that all writers possess a sensibility that is wholly sui generis—which denies the notion of infuence, let alone movements, like Realism, or Symbolism—the assumption is that Ibsen did not share Shaw’s anti-idealism. No critic has felt it necessary to offer any biographical or textual support for this position, which is presented as self-evident, but the critical logic is clear: Moral and social questions are not concerns of art; Ibsen’s work is art; therefore, Ibsen’s work is not concerned with moral and social issues.
My aim in this book is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that the Quintessence is not about its subject, but its author, and that Shaw misunderstood Ibsen and misread his works. The notion that Shaw attempted to turn Ibsen into a socialist is surely one of the most egregious errors in the literary criticism of the twentieth century, and I have tried to establish the record of inattention, fawed scholarship, and bias that resulted in this widespread misconception. I have also tested Shaw’s claim that Ibsen was an anti-idealist against Ibsen’s own idea of himself as a writer, expressed over many years in speeches and in letters, the most important of which were written to his friend and fellow fghter for modernism, the great Danish critic Georg Brandes. I aim to show that writers who are determined to save Ibsen the poet from the taint of social and
cultural history ignore Ibsen’s own interests and concerns, as well as his strong conviction that his work was a “calling” through which he could speak truth to lies.
But, as Inga-Stina Ewbank has written of Ibsen in another context, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,”16 i.e., in the text itself, and my main subject is Shaw’s analyses of Ibsen’s plays. The Quintessence is the frst book on Ibsen in English, and of all the early books on Ibsen, both inside and outside of Norway, it is the most ambitious, examining Ibsen’s dramas both as an oeuvre—a collected body of works—and as individual plays. I consider Shaw’s readings both in the context of what his contemporaries wrote about Ibsen, in England and elsewhere, and on their own terms. Shaw as an actual reader of Ibsen has been buried under the idea of a Shaw who saw Ibsen as a social critic and a lecturer on morals. I present the “other Shaw” of the Quintessence, the Shaw who had so thoroughly absorbed Ibsen’s plays that they were as much a part of his mental and spiritual universe as were the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Bunyan, and the King James Bible. Shaw’s great quarrel with the nineteenth-century theater—in his journalism, in the Quintessence, and in his columns as drama critic for the Saturday Review—was that it was irrelevant to actual life. For Shaw, one of the chief glories of Ibsen’s “new drama” was its scrupulously detailed characters: living, breathing people who were the opposite of the stock characters of the contemporary stage. Shaw was one of the frst writers on Ibsen to offer detailed analyses of his characters, including astute psychological studies of Nora Helmer of A Doll’s House, Mrs. Alving of Ghosts, Rebecca West and John Rosmer of Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, Halvard Solness of The Master Builder, and Rita and Alfred Allmers of Little Eyolf. I want to show that Shaw read Ibsen’s plays not from the outside in, but vice versa, and read him perceptively and often brilliantly. The number of Shaw’s observations and analyses about Ibsen’s plays that have become standard, though unacknowledged, in the literature on Ibsen, is an interesting phenomenon. Equally interesting is that many of Shaw’s harshest critics echo his analyses in their own readings of Ibsen’s plays.
Another goal, both historical and biographical, has been to trace Shaw’s personal response to Ibsen from his lukewarm initial opinion to his epiphanic reading of Peer Gynt, with William Archer, to his awakening, through A Doll’s House, to a new, modern drama that he himself would help to create. I have tried to shed light on Shaw’s and Archer’s deep friendship, their shared love of Ibsen, and their agreements and
disagreements regarding both his work and the “new drama” in general. I have also tried to establish a record of Shaw’s participation in the Ibsen campaign in London. While Michael Holroyd repeats the popular notion that when Shaw joined the campaign, he assumed its “generalship” (H 200), Michael Egan, editor of a 500-page anthology of pieces from Ibsen’s early English reception, claims that Shaw was “far less important than Archer, [Edmund] Gosse, or even Philip Wicksteed” [an economist who was one of the frst English writers on Ibsen]” (Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, 21). Using Shaw’s diaries and letters, as well as the letters of his friends and fellow “Ibsenites,” along with other records, I have tried to clarify Shaw’s important role in the campaign, not as its “general”— Archer has the right to that title—but as a journalist and drama critic who used his columns as a bully pulpit for Ibsen, and as a man of the theatre who tirelessly gave his support—and his criticisms—to the valiant men and women who introduced Ibsen to the English stage, the most important of whom were producer J. T. Grein of the Independent Theatre, actor-managers Charles Charrington, Elizabeth Robins, and Florence Farr, and actress Janet Achurch.
The discussion of Shaw as a reader of Ibsen has been dominated by the Quintessence. But Shaw is the author of other signifcant work on Ibsen that merits attention, including his exuberant reporting on early Doll’s House performances and his vehement defense of the play against its English abusers. Among his most interesting and lively commentaries on Ibsen’s plays are those in his Saturday Review columns, collected in Our Theatres in the Nineties, a neglected body of work that is among the best dramatic criticism in English (and hands down the wittiest). It is hugely entertaining to follow Shaw through three and a half years of a personal campaign in which Ibsen serves as a battering ram to attack the “claptrap” and the “twaddle” of the London theatre, including the stagey spectacles of Shaw’s favorite target Henry Irving. Among Shaw’s columns are also reviews of eight productions of Ibsen’s plays that are historical and critical gems, among which are his delightful account of the landmark 1896 French premiere of Peer Gynt, directed by LugnéPoë, his skewering of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the Independent Theatre’s calamitous 1896 production of Little Eyolf, and, in a column of 1897, his brilliant juxtaposition of the Independent Theatre’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
While it has been widely recognized that the dramaturgy, i.e., the play-making, of Shaw and Ibsen is very different, it is the custom to
consider Shaw’s frst dramas, written in the 1890s, during the Ibsen campaign, as his “Ibsenite” plays. It has been fascinating to try to identify infuence and affnity—or lack of them—in the themes and the dramaturgy of Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Candida—the Shaw play most associated with Ibsen—and to elucidate a drama long deemed a puzzle, the “topical comedy” The Philanderer, Shaw’s only direct dramatization of “Ibsenism.”
Throughout my study, I have tried to engage Shaw critically. Famous for taking up the roles of devil’s advocate and agent provocateur, Shaw habitually used his analytical genius in the service of polemics, and he does not hesitate to exaggerate to bolster his positions. This is especially marked in his arguments against Shakespeare worship, or “Bardolatry,” as he called it, in which he habitually holds Ibsen up as a writer superior to Shakespeare. It has been a very interesting task to examine these arguments, warts and all.
Finally, a note on method: In 1913, in the second edition of the Quintessence, Shaw’s additions and revisions were incorporated into the original book of 1891, as though they had been there all along, and it is this combined version that constitutes the text as we know it. But the Shaw of 1913 was no longer the Shaw of 1891. I have studied the two texts separately in order to establish the critical record, and, more importantly, to show how Shaw’s revisions and additions, including three new chapters, reveal his deepened vision both of Ibsen’s dramas and Ibsen’s revolutionary transformation of the theater.
New York, USA
Notes
Joan Templeton
1. “‘Nothing but talk, talk, talk—Shaw talk’: Discussion Plays and the Making of Modern Drama,” The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 163.
2. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 26.
3. Bernard Shaw (1947; New York: Applause Books, 2002), 139.
4. Bernard Shaw and the Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 9.
5. (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 243.
6. Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in Drama and Art (London: Frank Palmer, 1912), 36–37.
7. (New York: Farrar-Straus, 1977), 185.
8. Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 38.
9. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 95.
10. “Ibsen and Ibsenism,” from Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), reprinted in James McFarlane, Ibsen and Meaning: Studies, Essays, and Prefaces 1953–1987 (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1989), 61.
11. (New York: Schocken, 1963), 386.
12. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 187.
13. (London: Routledge, 1972), 21.
14. Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1975), 184.
15. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 120, 123. May’s book of ninetyeight pages on Ibsen and a hundred and eight pages on Shaw is not the comparative study its title suggests. May repeats the conventional contrast between Ibsen the poet and Shaw the moralist, but after arguing that Shaw misunderstood Ibsen, he offers a “reminder” that “Shaw’s analysis of Ibsen’s plays was far ahead of his contemporaries, including the shrewdly appreciative William Archer” (124).
16. “Ibsen on the English Stage: ‘The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating,’” Ibsen and the Theatre: The Dramatist in Production, ed. Errol Durbach (London: New York University Press, 1980), 27–48.
ackNowledgemeNts
The greatest joy of fnishing a book lies in thanking those who have contributed to it, and it is with immense pleasure that I express my gratitude to fve Shaw scholars and friends who have made this book far better than it would otherwise be. Richard F. Dietrich urged me long ago to take up the subject of Shaw and Ibsen, and when I fnally had time to do it, he gave me great help along the way. Thank you, Dick, for encouraging me to plunge into the fascinating waters of the world of GBS; it has been a splendid swim. I also express my deep gratitude to Martin Meisel, who was kind enough to offer to read my manuscript and who did so painstakingly, offering helpful emendations and suggestions, and, most of all, saving me from errors. A thousand thanks to you, Martin. To Michel Pharand goes my heartfelt appreciation for two different kinds of services: his fne copy-editing skills and his support and encouragement during a trying time. Merci infniment. I am also very happy to thank Ellen Dolgin for many conversations about Shaw and his plays that were immensely helpful to me in clarifying my ideas (and a lot of fun, besides). Finally, I express my gratitude to my editor, Peter Gahan, for his enthusiasm, his corrections, his excellent suggestions about organization, and his help with the cover.
I would also like to thank my Palgrave Editor, Tomas René, and Palgrave Assistant Editor Vicky Bates, for their enthusiastic support and help. It was a pleasure to work with them.
My thanks go also to Michael O’Hara, President of the International Shaw Society, and his organizing committee for the 2015 Shaw
conference at Fordham University, Manhattan, and to Frode Helland, Director of the Ibsen Center, University of Oslo, for inviting me to speak on occasions at which I could test my argument of Shaw as a reader of Ibsen before knowledgeable audiences. The responses I received from both groups were immensely important to me.
Once again, I have the pleasure of acknowledging the singular importance of my “home away from home,” the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where I did much of the work on this book in the quiet confnes of the Wertheim Room; I thank Jay Barksdale, librarian extraordinaire, for his help. I would also like to thank the librarians of the National Library, Oslo, and the British Library, London.
For help with photographs, I am grateful to Patricia Perez of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Susannah Mayor of Smallhythe Place, the Ellen Terry Museum; the curators of the Fales Library archives, New York University; and the rights and images departments of the Senate House Library, University of London, the National Trust of Great Britain, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.
I would like to signal my great debt to four exemplary collections that were essential to my work: Dan R. Laurence’s Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, Stanley Weintraub’s Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, Evert Sprinchorn’s Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, and Jonathan Wisenthal’s Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings
I gratefully acknowledge the Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from his works.
Lastly, I would like to thank all the members of the International Shaw Society who welcomed a newcomer and made her feel at home.
abbreviatioNs
A William Archer on Ibsen The Major Essays, 1889–1919. Ed. Thomas Postlewait. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984.
CA Charles Archer. William Archer Life—Work—and Friendships. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931.
CL Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874–1897; 1898–1910. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985, 1988.
D Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, 1885–1897. 2 vols. Ed. Stanley Weintraub. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.
H Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw. 3 vols. New York: Random House, 1988, 1989, 1991.
I Henrik Ibsen. Samlede Verker [Collected Works]. 3 vols. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1978.
LS Ibsen Letters and Speeches. Ed. and trans. Evert Sprinchorn. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
M Michael Meyer. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.
OTN Bernard Shaw. Our Theatres in the Nineties. 3 vols. London: Constable, 1932.
P Margot Peters. Bernard Shaw and the Actresses. Garden City: Doubleday, 1980.
P Bernard Shaw: Prefaces. London: Constable, 1934.
Q G. Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Walter Scott, 1891.
Q2 Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen. New York: Brentano’s, 1913.
W Shaw and Ibsen Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings. Ed. J. L. Wisenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.
list of figures
The Road to the Quintessence
Fig. 1 George Bernard Shaw at 35. 1891. The National Portrait Gallery, London 8
Fig. 2 William Archer at 35. 1891. The Elizabeth Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 9
Fig. 3 Theatre Program. A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London. 1889. Author’s personal collection 14
Fig. 4 Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer and Charles Charrington as Doctor Rank in A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London. June, 1889. Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 15
Fig. 5 Florence Farr. 1890. The Senate House Library, University of London 29
Fig. 6 Elizabeth Robins as Hedda Gabler. London, 1891. The Elizabeth Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 34
The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891
Fig. 1 Title page of the frst edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. 1891. Author’s personal collection 56
Fig. 2 William. T. Stead. Ca. 1910. The W. T. Stead Resource Site. http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk 64
Fig. 3 Marie Bashkirtseff. Self-Portrait with Palette. 1883. Oil on canvas. 92 × 72 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice 65
Fig. 4 Henrik Ibsen at the age of 35. 1863. Author’s personal collection
73
Fig. 5 Georg Brandes. 1870s. Frontispiece. Georg Brandes, Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Rasmus Anderson. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1886 79
The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898
Fig. 1 Elizabeth Robins. Early 1890s. The Elizabeth Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 162
Fig. 2 Janet Achurch. Early 1890s. Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 171
Fig. 3 Henry Irving. Late 1880s. Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo 197
Fig. 4 Ellen Terry. Ca. 1890. The National Trust, Great Britain 201
Fig. 5 Edvard Munch. Theatre Program for Peer Gynt. Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, Paris. 1896. Lithographic crayon on paper. 250 × 298 mm. The Munch Museum, Oslo 216
The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen, 1913
Fig. 1 Bernard Shaw. 1913-14. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C 262
author’s Note
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations, including those from Ibsen’s Collected Works, are mine. In quoting from Shaw, I have left his spelling and punctuation intact, except for silent corrections of very rare misspellings of Norwegian names and occasional additions of commas in brackets; to avoid confusion, I have also italicized the titles of works.
The Road to the Quintessence
1 becomiNg aN ibseN critic: shaw, archer, aNd the New drama
It is sixty years since Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House, and ffty since it reached England. Few people now alive can remember, as I do, the force of its impact.
. . . We had to revalue all our values; and it is this revaluation that gives Ibsen his supreme rank as a playwright who changed the mind of Europe. (Shaw, Nordisk Tidene [The Nordic Times], Brooklyn, June 2, 1938)
By the mid-1880s, when news of Ibsen’s dramas began to reach progressive circles in London, Shaw had written fve ignored novels and was pursuing a thwarted career as a journalist. He was also following an assiduous program of self-education—in political theory, economic theory, literature, art, music— in the Reading Room of the British Museum. An active member of a host of organizations, both political and cultural, he was a deeply committed socialist and Fabian Society member who worked hard for the cause, speaking whenever and wherever he was needed.
Ibsen was very much in the air in the leftist circles Shaw moved in. In 1884, Henrietta Frances Lord’s translation of Ghosts appeared in the
J. Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7_1
socialist magazine To-Day, along with the frst installment of a goodnatured debate on Marxist value theory between Shaw and Philip Wicksteed, a noted economist who was on his way to becoming one of England’s frst writers on Ibsen. Wicksteed and Shaw, fellow members of the English Land Restoration League, an organization devoted to promoting the ideas of the political economist Henry George, were friends and frequent companions. Shaw called Wicksteed his “master in economics”1 and was an active member of his prestigious “Economic Circle,” a club which met twice a month to discuss economic reform. Shaw undoubtedly knew about the futile attempts of Wicksteed, a popular lecturer, to speak on Ibsen, whose reputation was so pernicious that even Wicksteed’s own alma mater, University College, London, refused him their premises.
Shaw was also friends with another Ibsen admirer, Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, who was the frst translator in English of two of Ibsen’s plays, An Enemy of the People (her title was An Enemy of Society) and The Lady from the Sea. In 1886, Shaw participated in her Bloomsbury lodgings in a private reading of Nora, the frst full English translation, by Henrietta Frances Lord, of the play now known as A Doll’s House. 2 Eleanor Marx read the role of Nora, her common-law husband Edward Aveling, the role of Helmer, and Shaw, the role of Krogstad. Afterwards, Shaw took pains to establish his indifference to this event, noting that he participated only to please Eleanor Marx and had “a very vague notion of what it was all about.” What he mostly remembered was eating caramels back stage. His own radicalism had made him, in his word, “immune” to “the shock of Ibsen’s advent,” which “did not exist for me, nor indeed for anyone who was not living in the Victorian fools’ paradise. All the institutions and superstitions and rascalities [sic] that Ibsen had attacked had lost their hold on me.”3
Shaw also liked to point out that he had been working along the same lines as Ibsen before he heard of him. In 1905, when Shaw’s dramas had begun to arouse interest in his novels, The Irrational Knot, his second novel (1880), which had appeared serially, was published as a book; in the “Preface,” Shaw claimed that the novel shared a great affnity with A Doll’s House. When he was introduced to Ibsen’s play at Eleanor Marx’s reading, he wrote, “its novelty as a morally original study of a marriage did not stagger me as it staggered Europe. I had made a morally original study of a marriage myself, and made it, too, without any melodramatic forgeries, spinal diseases, and suicides” (P 657). Emphasizing his “fnal chapter, so close to Ibsen,” Shaw declared: “I seriously suggest that The
Irrational Knot may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the Life Force to write A Doll’s House in English by the instrumentality of a very immature writer aged twenty-four.”
The Irrational Knot focuses on a misalliance between Marian Lind, a beautiful, intelligent, and sensible upper-class lady, and Edward Conolly, a self-made, American electrical engineer grown rich through a mechanical invention. He seems effcient at everything, including playing Bach’s fugues for organ; Marian’s best friend calls him “a cast-iron walking machine.”4 Marian admires him greatly and marries him in spite of her father’s horror at his working-class origins. Intellectually, Conolly is a staunch anti-Victorian, but in his marriage, he falls short; the unhappy Marian complains to her friend: “A courtier, a lover, a man who will not let the winds of heaven visit your face too harshly, is very nice, no doubt; but he is not a husband. I want to be a wife and not a fragile ornament kept in a glass case. He would as soon think of submitting any project of his to a judgment of a doll as to mine” (254). Marian runs away from Conolly with an old suitor who swears adoration but turns out to be a spoiled bore who loves only himself. They separate, after which she fnds herself pregnant. In the end, her stalwart husband crosses the ocean to New York to rescue her, but she refuses to go back to him. She would shame him, she argues, and she fnds him “too wise” (421). Although Marian, unlike Ibsen’s intrepid Nora, undergoes no epiphany of the self, as a pregnant “fallen woman” who chooses disgrace over security, she is Nora’s partner in courage. The imperturbable Conolly insists that he would raise her child as if it were his own, but he is so coolly imperious that Marian’s refusal to remain his wife seems, in spite of her circumstances, understandable; although Shaw called the anti-Victorian Conolly the “Nora” of his novel, he also wrote that “long before I got to the writing of the last chapter I could hardly stand him myself.”5 The novel trails off, open-ended, with the exit of Conolly, who gets the last word: “It is impossible to be too wise, dearest” (422). Shaw had written himself into an impasse in a genre that was uncongenial to him, but the “very immature writer” he called himself had indeed, like Ibsen, written “a morally original study of a marriage.”
“
The Magic of the Great Poet”: William Archer and Peer Gynt
In 1888, about two years after he read the role of Krogstad, Shaw was re-introduced to Ibsen in an entirely different way, with consequences so important that he would write, forty-three years after the fact, in a
slip, that he had frst “heard of Ibsen from William Archer” (“An Aside,” 2). A polyglot journalist and critic who would become one of the closest friends of Shaw’s life, Archer began his career at the London Figaro, making trips to Paris to cover the Comédie Française. He then wrote for a variety of newspapers, including the World, the Nation, the Tribune, and the Manchester Guardian. Whenever he could fnd the time, he worked on his own project of translating Ibsen’s plays into English. He had been devoted to Ibsen since adolescence, encountering his works on visits to the branch of the Archer clan that lived in Norway, where he learned to speak Norwegian. In love with the theatre since childhood, on his sixteenth birthday he wrote to a friend from Copenhagen that he had seen eight performances in the nine days he had been there, mostly at the “house of Holberg,” the Royal Theatre (where the fedgling dramatist Ibsen had gone on a study trip). He also mentioned that he was looking forward to the next night’s performance in Hamburg (CA 37).
In December of 1881, in Rome, the twenty-fve-year-old Archer met the ffty-three-year-old Ibsen. Archer’s friends teased him that he had gone to Italy precisely toward that end, and not as a much needed holiday from a work schedule that had exhausted him. The verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) had made Ibsen famous in Scandinavia; now, thanks to the prose dramas Pillars of Society (1877) and, especially, A Doll’s House (1879), he was famous in Europe. Archer described his frst meeting with Ibsen in a letter to his brother, future biographer, and sometime co-translator of Ibsen, Charles Archer: he had bravely asked to be introduced to “the great Henrik” one evening in Rome’s Scandinavian Club, presenting himself as the English translator of Pillars of Society, the only Ibsen play to have been performed in England thus far (in a single, mostly unremarked matinee in London the preceding year). Archer undoubtedly did not tell Ibsen that he had agreed to abridge the text for actor-manager W. H. Vernon and had added an enticing title: Quicksands; or The Pillars of Society. Archer reports to his brother with great satisfaction that his and Ibsen’s conversation was convivial and that Ibsen invited him to call (CA 101-02).
Ibsen liked the deferential and erudite Archer, and by the end of Archer’s Roman holiday, they had become friends. Over the years, Archer would pay Ibsen occasional visits, and their correspondence lasted until Ibsen’s fnal illness almost twenty years later. An indefatigable
champion of Ibsen for four decades, Archer was the leader of the English Ibsen campaign and the frst major translator of Ibsen’s plays into English. Correcting the proofs of the fve volumes of Ibsen’s Prose Dramas, brought out by Walter Scott in 1890-91, Archer wrote to his brother, making, as was his habit, a literary allusion, that they were “on the whole the most satisfactory job of my life, even with all their imperfections on their heads” (CA 186). Later, Archer would provide most of the translations for the frst English edition of Ibsen’s complete works, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, brought out by William Heinemann in eleven volumes (1906-08). Besides his reverence for Ibsen as a writer, Archer was fond of him personally, and called him, affectionately (and privately), in a Scots accent, “the old min.”
In 1883, Archer went to Christiania (later Oslo), where he saw A Doll’s House, returning night after night to marvel at the last scene, the confrontation between wife and husband. He also saw the Norwegian premiere of the even more scandalous Ghosts, the great Swedish actormanager August Lindberg’s landmark production in which Lindberg played the syphilitic Oswald. Both productions confrmed Archer’s conviction that the strict censorship exercised by the Lord Chamberlain’s Offce would make performance of both plays impossible in England.
The next London season saw a performance meant to make Ibsen acceptable to the British playgoer. The young playwright Henry Arthur Jones, fresh from his frst success, the melodrama The Silver King (1882), was asked by a West End manager to produce a “sympathetic” Nora, and, with the help of his collaborator Henry Herman, Jones transformed Ibsen’s disturbing play into the innocuous Breaking A Butterfy. Harley Granville Barker, the actor, director, critic, and playwright who would become Shaw’s beloved friend and important collaborator at the Royal Court Theatre, called the adaptation a “perversion” and gave the following account of it in his delightful essay, “The Coming of Ibsen”:
Nora becomes Flora, and, to her husband, rather terribly, Flossie. . . . The morbid Dr. Rank is replaced by Charles his-friend, called, as if to wipe out every trace of his original, Ben Birdseye! He is not in love with Nora, of course; that
would never do. . . . [T]he tarantella is left intact, of course.
But the third act sees the parent play stood deliberately on its head, and every ounce of Ibsen emptied out of it. Burlesque could do no more. Torvald-Humphrey behaves like the pasteboard hero of Nora’ doll’s-house dream; he does strike his chest and say:
“I am the guilty one!” And Nora-Flora cries that she is a poor weak foolish girl, “no wife for a man like you. You are a thousand times too good for me,” and never wakes up and walks out of her doll’s house at all.6
In his review of Breaking A Butterfy, in a quip that is often quoted, Archer noted that the phrase in the playbill “founded on Ibsen’s Nora” should have read “founded on the ruins of Ibsen’s Nora”; Jones and Herman had “trivialized” Ibsen’s play. But he also added a caveat to this judgment, one that has been largely ignored: “I am the last to blame them for doing so. Ibsen on the English stage is impossible. He must be trivialized, and I believe that Messrs. Jones and Herman have performed that offce as well as could reasonably be expected.”7 (To his credit, Jones later apologized for Breaking A Butterfy.)
Shaw and Archer, both born in 1856 (Shaw was two months older), met during the winter of 1882-83 in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where both were habitués. Archer’s description of Shaw is now iconic: “I frequently sat next to a man of about my own age (twentyfve) [actually, twenty-six] who attracted my attention, partly by his peculiar colouring—his pallid skin and bright red hair and beard—partly by the odd combination of authors whom he used to study—for I saw him, day after day, poring over Karl Marx’s Das Kapital [in French] and an orchestral score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. How we frst made acquaintance I have forgotten; but one did not need to meet him twice to be sure that George Bernard Shaw was a personality to be noted and studied.” He adds: “At any rate, we became fast friends” (CA 119).
Recognizing Shaw’s brilliance and wanting to help him out of his poverty, Archer was of primary importance in Shaw’s belated start as a journalist. He passed on to him a number of book reviewing assignments,
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THE BICENTENARY OF GRAY.
BORN DECEMBER 26, 1716.
.
It is a mere chance, but none the less suggestive, that Shakespeare’s commemoration this year should be followed by that of Gray. Shakespeare, of course, would cut up into many poets, but one of them would have been not unlike Gray; a man of a fastidious and somewhat melancholy temper but with a rare affectionateness, and a sincere love of his kind, which mingled with his critical faculty to produce a fresh and very delightful humour. However this may be, the lesser poet was drawn to the greater by a sure instinct from school-days. In a letter to Horace Walpole, written when he was just eighteen, he finds it natural to disguise his boyish affection in terms borrowed from Mrs. Quickly: ‘I have born and born, and been fub’d off and fub’d off,’ &c.; and he does so again later: ‘If I don’t hear from you this week, I shall be in a thousand Tyrrits and Frights about you.’
To his more literary friend, Richard West, another member of the ‘Quadruple Alliance,’ whose early death he was to mourn in the most exquisite of elegies, he writes with enthusiasm about Shakespeare’s language.
‘Every word in him is a picture. Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern Dramatics:
“But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass: I, that am rudely stampt, and want love’s majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph: I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up”—
and what follows. To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the case our language is greatly degenerated.’
‘Every word in him is a picture.’ He said the same thing in a fine quatrain of the poem to Richard Bentley, contrasting the great masters of old with the poets of his own day, especially with himself, whose poems Bentley was illustrating:
‘But not to one in this benighted age Is that diviner inspiration giv’n That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page, The pomp and prodigality of heaven.’
In another letter to West of the same year he defends the practice of ‘judiciously and sparingly’ inserting phrases from Shakespeare into modern poetry because of their greater energy; a practice which he himself was to adopt in his later odes. Gray’s Shakespearian borrowings are always judicious, but it may be questioned whether the effect of such quotations from a greater writer by a less is not to create an impression of poverty in the borrower. It is more important to inquire how far Gray was successful in emulating the Shakespearian ‘pomp and prodigality’ of imagination. The prodigality clearly was beyond even his ambition. His Pegasus always required the spur rather than the reins. But the pomp, it must be admitted, he did not infrequently achieve. No one can be blind to the magnificence of the lines about Pindar in the ‘Progress of Poesy’:
‘Oh! Lyre divine, what daring Spirit Wakes thee now? Tho’ he inherit Nor the pride, nor ample pinion, That the Theban eagle bear Sailing with supreme dominion Thro’ the azure deep of air.’
And in the ‘Elegy’ we have many imaginative pictures that have the true Shakespearian quality:
‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’
‘And shut the gates of Mercy on mankind.’
‘Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death.’
‘Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.’
‘Left the warm precincts of the chearful day, Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind.’
‘Even in our Ashes live their wonted Fires.’
It will be remembered that in the ‘Progress of Poesy’ English poetry is represented by three names—Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Dryden is praised for the energy of his heroic couplet, symbolised by the
‘Two coursers of ethereal race
With necks in thunder cloath’d and long-resounding pace,’
who draw his car, and also for his one great lyrical achievement, the Ode on St. Cecilia’s day. Gray’s admiration for Shakespeare and Milton as models was tempered by his recognition of what Dryden had done for the English language, in rendering it more ‘refined and free.’ To Beattie he wrote, ‘Remember Dryden and be blind to all his faults,’ and he told him in an interview (according to Mason) that ‘if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet; and pressed him with great earnestness to study him, as his choice of words and versification were singularly happy and harmonious.’ If Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’ be compared with the ‘Progress of Poesy’ we can see how successfully Gray has blended the qualities he most admired in his several masters. From Dryden he has caught the smoothness and strength of his line; but Gray’s rhythm owes more to ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Comus’ than to the commonplace movement of Dryden’s ode; while the imaginative beauty of its many pictures was part of his debt to the greatest of them all. There is one other great English poet to whom Gray was ready to acknowledge a debt. He told Norton Nicholls that
he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously. I do not remember that Gray ever incorporates a Spenserian phrase in his own verse; his instinct would have told him that the two styles would not agree. But his instinct would also tell him that to bathe himself in Spenser before entering the temple of his Muse was a sure way of freeing himself from any pollution of mind or spirit.
The ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ was composed at intervals between 1746 and 1750, and sent to Walpole in June of that year. Walpole showed it to many friends and in some way it got into the hands of a publisher, who wrote to Gray announcing his intention of printing it, and begging his ‘indulgence.’ Gray wrote at once to Walpole desiring him to let Dodsley print it without delay from his copy, and it accordingly appeared in February 16, 1751, in a quarto pamphlet, priced sixpence, and entitled ‘An Elegy wrote in a Country Church Yard.’ The fashionable solecism must be attributed to Walpole, who saw the poem through the press, and prefixed this short ‘advertisement’:
‘The following Poem came into my hands by Accident, if the general Approbation with which this little Piece has spread, may be call’d by so slight a Term as Accident. It is this Approbation which makes it unnecessary for me to make any Apology but to the Author: As he cannot but feel some Satisfaction in having pleas’d so many Readers already, I flatter myself he will forgive my communicating that Pleasure to many more. The Editor.’
In his letter thanking Walpole for his ‘paternal care’ of the poem Gray speaks of the advertisement as ‘saving his honour’; which can only mean that he thought the poem unworthy of being offered to the public by its author. That this was not a mere affectation is shown by his annoyance at its instant popularity, which he thought to be due to its subject. He said it would have been equally popular if written in prose. He writes to his friend Dr. Wharton, after speaking of ‘A Long Story,’ which had been ‘shew’d about in Town, and not liked at all’:
‘On the other hand the Stanzas have had the Misfortune by Mr. W.’s fault to be made still more publick, for wᶜʰ they certainly were never meant, but is too late to complain. They have been so applauded, it is quite a Shame to repeat it. I mean not to be modest; but I mean it is a Shame for those, who have said such superlative Things about them, that I can’t repeat them.’
Gray’s modesty was still further tried in the autumn of the same year by Walpole’s insistence that he should allow his still unpublished odes, on Spring, on Eton College, and on Walpole’s cat, with whatever else he had to furnish a volume, to appear with illustrations by Walpole’s protégé, Richard Bentley, a son of the great Master of Trinity. The negotiations, so far as we have them in Gray’s correspondence, are diverting. Gray discovered that it was in contemplation to prefix his own portrait; this he forbade, though it was already half engraved. He objected to the proposed title and insisted that it should be ‘Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for six poems of Mr. T. Gray,’ on the ground that ‘the verses were only subordinate and explanatory to the Drawings and suffered to come out thus only for that reason.’ Lastly, he objected to Dodsley’s proposal to omit the ‘Mr.’ before the names of the poet and artist, as being ‘an uncommon sort of simplicity that looks like affectation.’ This modesty may have been excessive, but it is not ridiculous when we reflect that Gray had not yet produced his finest work, and knew that he had it in him to write something more worthy of himself and English poetry than the occasional pieces which Walpole wished to publish, or even than the deservedly popular Elegy.
In 1757 Walpole issued, as the first book from his new printingpress at Strawberry Hill, a quarto pamphlet entitled ‘Odes by Mr. Gray,’ with a vignette on the title-page of his Gothick castle, and a motto from Pindar
which Gray englished as ‘vocal to the intelligent alone.’ It contained two odes, here called simply Ode I and Ode II, ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard.’ The first of these odes is undoubtedly Gray’s masterpiece, and deserves all the study that can be given to it. The subject, that of the
great power of poetry, was one very near to Gray’s heart as well as to his mind, and the scheme is well thought out. There is no feeling of strain in any part of it. Personification, with Gray generally a sign of strain, is kept within the limits approved by the great masters. Thus we have ‘antic Sports and blue-eyed Pleasures’ just as in the ‘Allegro’ we have ‘Jest and youthful Jollity’; but there is no elaborate series of abstract figures like that in the two stanzas on the Passions in the Ode on Eton College. This fashionable personification perhaps justified itself to Gray as a combination of the imaginative method of Shakespeare with the clear definition of Dryden. What in Shakespeare would have been a metaphor, hinted at and immediately succeeded by another, becomes too often with Gray a substantial allegorical personage. There seems to us to-day something essentially unpoetical, because artificial, in the posturing groups of Furies and Graces, and we wonder that Gray with his fine critical sense did not feel this. We must recognise, however, that whenever he is deeply moved he escapes from the snare. Two consecutive stanzas in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude’ show how his verse becomes more direct as it deepens in feeling.
‘Still, where rosy Pleasure leads, See a kindred Grief pursue; Behind the steps that Misery treads, Approaching Comfort view: The hues of Bliss more lightly glow, Chastised by sabler tints of woe, And blended form, with artful strife, The strength and harmony of Life.
See the Wretch, that long has tost On the thorny bed of Pain, At length repair his vigour lost, And breathe and walk again: The meanest flowret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common Sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening Paradise.’
When the two odes were reissued they were styled Pindaric, and they justify their title, being constructed in a series of strophe, antistrophe, and epode like the odes of Pindar. Ben Jonson had furnished one example in the ode to the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison, one strophe of which is the often-quoted stanza beginning, ‘It is not growing like a tree.’ But the name ‘Pindarique’ had been abused by Cowley, who, holding the theory that ‘the lost excellences of another language’ should be supplied by others of our own, had substituted an expansive eloquence, one might almost say loquacity, for the terse musical phrase of his model, and had entirely ignored the interrelation of strophe and antistrophe. Gray recovered for the Pindaric ode both the music of phrase and the balance of its parts.
Gray’s second ode cannot be reckoned as unequivocal a success as its companion. It is founded on a tradition of the murder of the Welsh bards by Edward I, and the earlier portion, which consists of the spirited and justifiable curses of the last survivor on the king’s progeny to the third and fourth generation, is proper to the subject, and contains much fine rhetoric and a few passages of a nobler quality. But having written the first three groups of stanzas, Gray held his hand for a couple of years; and the conclusion does not carry out the scheme originally proposed. From the argument, which Mason printed from Gray’s commonplace book, we learn that the Bard was to predict that all the king’s cruelty ‘shall never extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island; and that men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and oppression.’ When Gray resumed the Ode he had changed his plan, and the present conclusion can appeal to none but Welshmen, for whom it is certain that Gray did not specially write. The consolation which the Bard finds in the future is the prospect of a line of Welsh kings, the Tudors, culminating in Elizabeth:
In the midst a Form divine
Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line; Her lyon-port, her awe-commanding face, Attemper’d sweet to virgin-grace.’
Elizabeth’s reign is to be marked by a revival of poetry in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and an unending line beyond them. It must be allowed that the skill of the poet has disguised the weakness of the argument. For to make the consolation effective the efflorescence of poetry should have occurred under the first Tudor sovereign, in which case it might poetically have been presumed to be due to him; and the Bard should not have overlooked Chaucer, who flourished under the sway of Edward’s direct descendant Richard II, of whose accession the Bard sings in the only passage of the Ode which has passed into popular currency:
‘Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows, While proudly riding o’er the azure realm, In gallant trim the gilded Vessel goes; Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway, That, hush’d in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.’
The ‘Elegy’ is an expression of the common heart, though of that common heart purified and ennobled, and therefore it is of universal appeal; of the Odes it is true to-day as in Gray’s lifetime that they are vocal only to the intellectuals. But apart from its merits all Gray’s poetry has a special interest owing to its place at the meeting-point of the Augustan and Romantic schools. On the one hand it retains the notion of poetry as a happy combination of words. Gray, in a letter to Mason, says: ‘Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry’; adding ‘this I have always aimed at and could never attain.’ Gray’s instrument was always the file; he had no taste for the verse cast at a jet; and so he could accuse Collins of having a bad ear. In the second place, there are signs in Gray of that first-hand interest in nature and that respect for the whole of human nature, and not only its intellect, which was soon to inspire Cowper and Wordsworth. Perhaps Gray is at his modernest in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude,’ and in that impromptu couplet which Norton Nicholls preserved:
‘There pipes the woodlark, and the song-thrush there
Scattering his loose notes in the waste of air’—
if not most modern of all in that quatrain of the ‘Elegy’ which Gray’s feeling for unity expunged, but which we cannot spare:
‘There scatter’d oft the earliest of the year, By Hands unseen, are show’rs of violets found: The red-breast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground.’
Leslie Stephen says happily about Gray and his friends that ‘they were feeling round vaguely for a new mode of literary and artistic enjoyment.’ This feeling after something more satisfying to the whole range of thought and emotion than was afforded by the critical school of Pope had already given evidence of itself in several ways. Thomson and Dyer, following each his particular bent, had found inspiration for poetry in country life and landscape. Gray welcomed the venture of both these poets. We know from his letters how attentive was his own observation, and how he took long journeys in search of the picturesque, especially in mountain scenery; but the evidence of this in his poetry is only incidental, as in the reference to ‘Snowdon’s shaggy side.’ Another form taken by this dissatisfaction was the revival of interest in the popular ballad literature. The discovery by Thomas Percy of his famous folio started a new form of poetry in which Goldsmith led the way. But though Gray had seen Percy’s book as early as 1761, it came too late to influence his production; and we may guess that his mind was too erudite to have found expression in the simplicity of the ballad. Of far more interest to him was Macpherson’s discovery of fragments of Highland poetry. He describes himself as ‘extasié with their infinite beauty’; on which the late Mr. Tovey, to whom a great debt is owed for his scholarly edition of Gray’s letters, makes the dry comment that some of the fragments were worked up from passages in ‘The Bard.’ We may be glad that Macpherson’s discovery came, like Percy’s, too late to influence Gray’s own poetry His interest in the early literature of the European nations has given us a few fragments from the Norse and Welch. The remark of Leslie Stephen quoted above referred to the
interest that Gray and Walpole took in Gothic architecture. This influenced Gray’s poetry only indirectly; but it had some effect in the way it was presented to the public. When Walpole undertook to convert his newly purchased house at Twickenham into a Gothick castle, the artist he employed to help him in his designs was Richard Bentley; and when Gray had sprung suddenly into fame by the ‘Elegy,’ Walpole urged him to publish his other poems with designs by Bentley. Whether these deserve the poetical encomium Gray made upon them, I will not presume to say; but they are undoubtedly very ‘Gothick.’
It is as a poet that we celebrate Gray’s bicentenary, but those persons who do not care for poetry may celebrate him as a man and a letter-writer. As a man he is secure of our affection as soon as we get to know him, and any one may know him who will read his letters, of which there is a great store; and still more have come to light lately, and have been well edited by Mr. Paget Toynbee. There are few men of letters of so attractive a nature as Gray. Perhaps he is the most lovable of all except Charles Lamb, and with Lamb, despite many obvious differences, he has many points in common. They were both solitary creatures living a recluse life, in the world but not of it, their best companions among the dead; they were both exquisite critics; they were both a prey to melancholy, or rather, as Gray said, to ‘leukocholy’; white bile not black; they had both a delicate and delightful humour; they were both the soul of gentle goodness. And so it comes about that the letters of both, in which they live to us, are among the few external goods which are necessary to happiness. The charm of a letter of Gray’s lies partly in this interest of his character, and partly in the perfect felicity with which everything is said. There is nothing slovenly, or far-fetched, or pompous, or makeshift; even in the shortest and apparently most hasty note, his touch is perfectly sure and his taste faultless; if we except some Hogarthian passages which smack of the age rather than the individual. It might not seem probable beforehand that the letters of a man whose days went ‘round and round like the blind horse in the mill’—‘swinging from chapel or hall home and from home to hall or chapel’—could have much to say that would be of general interest. Occasionally, indeed, he goes a journey—the grand
tour with Walpole, or to the Highlands, or to see his friend Wharton at Old Park, or to Stoke Poges to his relations, and then we get lively enough descriptions. But these are episodes. The main topics of his every-day correspondence are his melancholy or his indolence, Mason’s poetry, Cambridge and Church news, the British Museum, politics, criticism of current literature,—Rousseau, or Sterne, or Dodsley’s poets,—his dab of musick and prints,’ gothick, hyacinths, and the weather. Occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to slip out a little town gossip, ‘as a decayed gentlewoman would a piece of right mecklin or a little quantity of run tea, but this only now and then, not to make a practice of it.’
THE REAL THING: ‘S. O. S.’
.
Copyright, 1917, by William Hope Hodgson, in the United States of America
‘Big liner on fire in 55.43 N. and 32.19 W.,’ shouts the Captain, diving into his chart-room. ‘Here we are! Give me the parallels!’
The First Officer and the Captain figure busily for a minute.
‘North, 15 West,’ says the Master; and ‘North, 15 West,’ assents the First Officer, flinging down his pencil. ‘A hundred and seventeen miles, dead in the wind!’
‘Come on!’ says the Captain; and the two of them dash out of the chart-room into the roaring black night, and up on to the bridge.
‘North, 15 West!’ the Master shouts in the face of the burly helmsman. ‘Over with her, smart!’
‘North, 15 West, Sir,’ shouts back the big quartermaster, and whirls the spokes to starboard, with the steering-gear engine roaring.
The great vessel swings round against the night, with enormous scends, smiting the faces of the great seas with her seventy-feethigh bows.
Crash! A roar of water aboard, as a hundred phosphorescent tons of sea-water hurls inboard out of the darkness, and rushes aft along the lower decks, boiling and surging over the hatchways, capstans, deck-fittings, and round the corners of the deck-houses.
The ship has hit the fifty-mile-an-hour gale full in the face, and the engine telegraph stands at full speed. The Master has word with that King of the Underworld, the Chief Engineer; and the Chief goes below himself to take charge, just as the Master has taken charge on deck.
There is fresh news from the Operator’s Room. The vessel somewhere out in the night and the grim storm is the S.S. Vanderfield, with sixty first-class passengers and seven hundred steerage and she is alight forrard. The fire has got a strong hold, and they have already lost three boats, smashed to pieces as they tried to launch them, and every man, woman, and child in the boats crushed to death or drowned.
‘Damn these old-fashioned davits!’ says the Master, as he reads the wireless operator’s notes. ‘They won’t lift a boat out clear of the ship’s side, if she’s rolling a bit. The boats in a ship are just ornaments, if you’ve not got proper machinery for launching them. We’ve got the new derricks, and we can lower a boat, so she strikes the water, forty feet clear of the side, instead of bashing to pieces, like a sixty-foot pendulum, against our side!’
He shouts a question over his shoulder, standing there by the binnacle:
‘What’s she doing, Mister Andrews?’
‘Twenty and three-quarter knots, Sir,’ says the Second Officer, who has been in charge. ‘But the Chief’s raising her revolutions every minute.... She’s nearly on to the twenty-one now.’
‘And even if we lick that we’ll be over five hours reaching her,’ mutters the Master to himself.
Meanwhile the wireless is beating a message of hope across a hundred miles of night and storm and wild waters.
‘Coming! The R.M.S. Cornucopia is proceeding at full speed in your direction. Keep us informed how you are....’
Then follows a brief unofficial statement, a heart-to-heart word between the young men operators of the two ships, across the hundred-mile gulf of black seas:
‘Buck up, old man. We’ll do it yet! We’re simply piling into the storm, like a giddy cliff. She’s doing close on twenty-one, they’ve just told me, against this breeze; and the Chief’s down in the stokeholds
himself with a fourteen-inch wrench and a double watch of stokers! Keep all your peckers up. I’ll let you know if we speed-up any more!’
The Operator has been brief and literal, and has rather understated the facts. The Leviathan is now hurling all her fifty-thousandton length through the great seas at something approaching a twenty-two knot stride; and the speed is rising.
Down in the engine-room and stokeholds, the Chief, minus his overalls, is a coatless demi-god, with life in one hand and a fourteeninch wrench in the other; not that this wrench is in any way necessary, for the half-naked men stream willing sweat in a silence broken only by the rasp of the big shovels and the clang of the furnace-doors, and the Chief’s voice.
The Chief is young again; young and a King to-night, and the rough days of his youth have surged back over him. He has picked up the wrench unconsciously, and he walks about, twirling it in his fist; and the stokers work the better for the homely sight of it, and the sharp tang of his words, that miss no man of them all.
And the great ship feels the effect. Her giant tread has broken into an everlasting thunder, as her shoulders hurl the seas to port and starboard, in shattered hills of water, that surge to right and left in half-mile drifts of phosphorescent foam, under the roll of her Gargantuan flanks.
The first hour has passed, and there have been two fresh messages from that vessel, flaming far off, lost and alone, out in the wild roar of the waters. There has been an explosion forrard in the burning ship, and the fire has come aft as far as the main bunkers. There has been a panic attempt to lower two more of the boats, and each has been smashed to flinders of wood against the side of the burning ship, as she rolled. Every soul in them has been killed or drowned, and the Operator in the burning ship asks a personal question that has the first touch of real despair in it; and there ensues another little heart-to-heart talk between the two young men:
‘Honest now, do you think you can do it?’
‘Sure,’ says the Operator in the Cornucopia ‘We’re doing what we’ve never done at sea before in heavy weather. We’re touching within a knot of our “trials” speed—we’re doing twenty-four and a half knots; and we’re doing it against this! Honour bright, old man! I’ll not deceive you at a time like this. I never saw anything like what we’re doing. All the engineers are in the engine-room, and all the officers are on the boat-deck, overhauling the boats and gear. We’ve got those new forty-foot boat derricks, and we can shove a boat into the water with ’em, with the ship rolling half under. The Old Man’s on the bridge; and I guess you’re just going to be saved all right.... You ought to hear us! I tell you, man, she’s just welting the seas to a pulp, and skating along to you on the top of them.’
The Operator is right. The great ship seems alive to-night, along all her shapely eight hundred feet of marvellous, honest, beautiful steel. Her enormous bows take the seas as on a horn, and hurl them roaring into screaming drifts of foam. She is singing a song, fore and aft, and the thunder of her grey steel flanks is stupendous, as she spurns the mutilated seas and the gale and the bleak intolerable miles into her wake.
The second and third hours pass, and part of the fourth, in an intermittent thunder of speed. And the speed has been further increased; for now the Leviathan is laying the miles astern, twentynine in each hour; her sides drunken with black water and spume—a dripping, league-conquering, fifty-thousand-ton shape of steel and steam and brains, going like some stupendous Angel of Help across the black Desolation of the night.
Incredibly far away, down on the black horizons of the night, there shows a faint red glow. There is shouting along the bridge.
‘There she is!’ goes the word fore and aft. ‘There she is!’
Meanwhile the wireless messages pulse across the darkness: The fire is burning with terrible fury. The fore-part of the Vanderfield’s iron skin is actually glowing red-hot in places. Despair is seizing everyone. Will the coming Cornucopia never, never come?
The young Operators talk, using informal words:
‘Look out to the South of you, for our searchlight,’ replies the man in the wireless-room of the Cornucopia ‘The Old Man’s going to play it against the clouds, to let you see we’re coming. Tell ’em all to look out for it. It’ll cheer them up. We’re walking along through the smother like an express. Man! Man! we’re doing our “trials” speed, twenty-five and a half knots, against this. Do you realise it—against this! Look along to the South. Now!’
There is a hissing on the fore-bridge, quite unheard in the roar of the storm; and then there shoots out across the miles of night and broken seas the white fan-blaze of the searchlight. It beats like an enormous baton against the black canopy of the monstrous stormclouds, beating to the huge, thundering melody of the roar and onward hurl of the fifty-thousand-ton rescuer, tossing the billows to right and left, as she strides through the miles.
And what a sight it is, in the glare of the great light, as it descends and shows the huge seas! A great cliff of black water rears up, and leaps forward at the ship’s bows. There is a thunderous impact, and the ship has smitten the great sea in twain, and tossed it boiling and roaring on to her iron flanks; and is treading it into the welter of foam that surrounds her on every side—a raging testimony, of foam and shattered seas, to the might of her mile-devouring stride.
Another, and another, and another black, moving cliff rises up out of the water-valleys, which she strides across; and each is broken and tossed mutilated from her shapely, mighty, unafraid shoulders.
A message is coming, very weak and faint, through the receiver:
‘We’ve picked up your searchlight, old man. It’s comforted us mightily; but we can’t last much longer. The dynamo’s stopped. I’m running on my batteries....’ It dwindles off into silence, broken by fragments of a message, too weakly projected to be decipherable.
‘Look at her!’ the officers shout to one another on the bridge; for the yell of the wind and the ship-thunder is too great for ordinary
speech to be heard. They are staring through their glasses. Under a black canopy of bellied storm-clouds, shot with a dull red glowing, there is tossed up on the backs of far-away seas, a far-off ship, seeming incredibly minute, because of the distance; and from her fore-part spouts a swaying tower of flame.
‘We’ll never do it in time!’ says the young Sixth Officer into the ear of the Fifth.
The burning ship is now less than three miles away, and the black backs of the great seas are splashed with huge, ever shifting reflections.
Through the glasses it is possible now to see the details of the tremendous hold the fire has got on the ship; and, away aft, the huddled masses of the six hundred odd remaining passengers.
As they watch, one of the funnels disappears with an unheard crash, and a great spout of flame and sparks shoot up.
‘It’ll go through her bottom!’ shouts the Second Officer; but they know this does not happen, for she still floats.
Suddenly comes the thrilling cry of ‘Out derricks!’ and there is a racing of feet and shouted orders. Then the great derricks swing out from the ship’s side, a boat’s length above the boat-deck. They are hinged, and supported down almost to the draught line of the ship. They reach out forty feet clear of the ship’s side.
The Leviathan is bursting through the final miles of wild seas; and then the telegraph bell rings, and she slows down, not more than ten or twelve hundred yards to wind’ard of the burning hull, which rises and falls, a stupendous spectacle on the waste of black seas.
The fifty-thousand-ton racer has performed her noble work, and now the work lies with the boats and the men.
The searchlight flashes down on to the near water, and the boats shoot out in the ‘travellers,’ then are dropped clear of the mighty flanks of the Mother Ship.
The Leviathan lies to windward of them, to break the force of the seas, and oil bags are put out.
The people in the burning ship greet the ship with mad cheers. The women are hove bodily into the seas, on the ends of lines. They float in their cork jackets. Men take children in their arms, and jump, similarly equipped. And all are easily picked up by the boats, in the blaze of the rescuer’s searchlights that brood on leagues of ocean, strangely subdued by the floods of oil which the big ship is pumping on to the seas. Everywhere lies the strange sheen of oil, here in a sudden valley of brine, unseen, or there on the shoulder of some monstrous wave, suddenly eased of its deadliness; or again, the same fluorescence swirls over some half-league of eddy-flattened ocean, resting between efforts—tossing minor oil-soothed ridges into the tremendous lights.
Then the Leviathan steams to leeward of the burning ship, and picks up her boats. She takes the rescued passengers aboard, and returns to windward; then drops the boats again, and repeats the previous operations, until every man, woman, and child is saved.
As the last boat swings up at the end of the great derricks aboard the Cornucopia there is a final volcano of flame from the burning ship, lighting up the black belly of the sky into billowing clouds of redness. There falls the eternal blackness of the night.... The Vanderfield has gone.
The Leviathan swings round through the night, with her six hundred saved; and begins to sing again in her deep heart, laying the miles and the storm astern once more, in a deep low thunder.
THE WAR IN PERSPECTIVE.
. . . .
The present war is the biggest event in secular history—so big indeed that its scale evades the imagination. Its cause cannot be condensed into a formula or its story told in a volume. But every war, sooner or later, finds literary expression; and the present gigantic struggle needs, and will create, a new literature of its own, beside which all the rest of secular literature will seem petty. A hundred years hence professional soldiers will be spelling out its strategy; toiling historians will be collating and recording its events; philosophers will be analysing its causes, moralists in spectacles will be assessing its spiritual elements. What a literature—strategic, scientific, political, financial, geographical, legal, medical, personal— it will be!
And when all such questions are dealt with there will yet remain that aspect of the war which has nothing to do with strategy, or politics, or finance. It deals with the purely human interests and emotions of the struggle; its picturesqueness; its dramatic incidents; the strophe and antistrophe of moral forces it reveals; its literary aspects, in a word; things in it which would have arrested the imagination of Shakespeare, and supplied the text for mightier dramas than ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Hamlet’; incidents that Scott would have woven into romance; follies which might have given Swift the text for keener satire than even his ‘Tale of a Tub’; heroisms that a greater Byron may set to more resounding music than even those famous lines which tell of Waterloo. And, it may be added, it is possible already to see in this amazing war some aspects which will do more than merely challenge the literary imagination, the sense of the wonderful.
To begin with what is nearest: the new scale of the war, the strange temper, the terrific weapons with which it is being fought, will
certainly prove, for centuries to come, an irresistible challenge to the literary imagination. When the first shot in this war was fired, the whole familiar and accepted arithmetic of battle went suddenly to wreck. It was a war, not of armies, but of nations. As a result we have to think of the contending forces in terms of millions.
Australia, for example, supplies a proof of the enormously expanded scale of this war. The standing army of Imperial Rome consisted of 260,000 men. Australia is a community of only five million people; war to it is a totally new experience. Yet it has raised, equipped, and sent to a battlefield 12,000 miles distant an army equal in number to the standing army of the Caesars, at the time the Caesars were the masters of the civilised world. Great Britain affords another example of the amazingly expanded realm of the war. She hates standing armies, hates them so much that she will only pass the Mutiny Act, which makes an army of any sort possible, for a year at a time. The British formula is a big fleet and a little army. When this war broke out the regular forces of Great Britain consisted of only 186,000 men. When the war was not yet two years old, the British fleet had taken a scale without precedent in history; in addition Great Britain had raised an army which approached 5,000,000 and in which every man was a volunteer. If the average Liberal member of Parliament had been told, say, three years ago, that Great Britain, in addition to having a fleet in scale so tremendous, would have a land force of 5,000,000, he probably would have assaulted his interlocutor. But Great Britain, having raised by voluntary effort those 5,000,000, has actually passed a Conscription Bill for the remainder of its population.
The battles of to-day take such a scale, last so long, and are fought under such strange conditions, that we have to invent new names for them. They are neither ‘sieges’ nor ‘battles,’ but a combination of both; and so we call them siege-battles. That ‘first and last of fights, king-making Waterloo,’ when set against the arithmetic of the present war, dwindles into a skirmish. The little shallow valley outside Brussels, where Napoleon and Wellington measured swords with each other, and one of the greatest soldiers in history ended his career, is in area three miles by two, and lies open
