Robertson and Shaw: An "Unreasonable Friendship"

Ml A Robertson and Shaw: An "Unreasonable Friendship" Odin Dekkers Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen THE MANUSCRIPT DEPARTMENT of the British Library houses a small collection of letters which throws an interesting light on the relationship between two extraordinary literary figures of the latenineteenth -early twentieth century: John Mackinnon Robertson and George Bernard Shaw.1 While their present reputations could not be further apart—the one virtually unknown and the other the centre of a vast literary industry—for several years their careers ran parallel, and even when they later went quite separate ways, they maintained a friendship that finally lasted over forty years. It was, admittedly, a relationship that was often far from harmonious, and Robertson himself , a rationalist to the core, described it somewhat uneasily as "unreasonable ."2 On political, literary, and personal grounds the two men had much to disagree about, but it seems that they both found, as we shall see, that disagreement could be as stimulating as it was often exasperating . This principle sustained their friendship over quite a few more years than an outsider might find plausible. The Robertson-Shaw relationship has not been one that Shaw's biographers have particularly bothered about. Hesketh Pearson does not mention Robertson at all, while St. John Ervine devotes about half a paragraph to him. With its ten lines on Robertson, Michael Holroyd's monumental modern biography does little better, even though Holroyd did have access to the Robertson-Shaw correspondence, which was acquired by the British Library in 1980.3 On the one hand, this lack of interest is not altogether surprising, since Robertson is hardly a household name in the present-day scholarly world. After his death in 1933, it did not take long for Robertson and his 431 ELT 39:4 1996 work to sink into oblivion. There is no full-length biography, nor did Robertson himself choose to write an autobiography, unlike so many of his contemporaries. As far as his personal life was concerned, Robertson was an extremely reticent man, and the many thousands of pages he wrote contain very few autobiographical references. For the most part, Robertson's life will have to be pieced together from a few appreciations by friends, his surviving correspondence, passing references in the works of contemporaries, and accounts of his various exploits in the many periodicals for which he wrote.4 On the other hand, even though Robertson does not provide potential biographers with ample material, his life and career are not lacking in distinction. An immensely prolific and erudite writer and controversialist , there seem to have been few subjects on which Robertson did not touch. As a literary critic, he made an impressive attempt to create a scientific system of literary criticism,5 and as an accepted authority on Elizabethan drama, he did much work to establish, as he saw it, the real authorship of Shakespeare's plays.6 As an historian, he wrote a massive four-volume history of Freethought through the ages,7 as well as several other large-scale historical-sociological works, such as The Evolution of States and A Short History of Morals.8 He was an expert on the history of Christianity, and wrote several books in which he tried to prove that the existence of Jesus was as mythical as that of the Greek and Roman gods.9 In the thousands of articles he wrote for the periodical press he commented on all major contemporary issues, whether in the field of politics, where he spoke out against Imperialism and the Boer War, or economics, where he was one of the last to wholeheartedly defend free trade. Nor did Robertson limit himself to writing: he was a particularly active MP for the Liberal Party from 1906 to 1918. In 1911, Asquith appointed him secretary to the Board of Trade, while in 1915, he was made a Privy Councillor. In the Commons, he was feared and respected as a debater who could crush any opponent with the immense knowledge he had at his fingertips.10 Throughout his life and work, Robertson never wavered from the stern rationalist philosophy he had adopted early in life. His chosen enemy was religion, against which he crusaded...