Shaw and the Edwardian Age

I approached the reading of this volume “with an auspicious and a dropping eye.” (Claudius must have been a critic!) Yet another biography of Shaw—more twice-told-times-ten tales of Sonny transforming himself into G.B.S. or in this case metamorphosing from a failed novelist into a relatively successful dramatist. How could any writer revitalize this yawning terrain? However, the auspicious eye came to the fore, as it were, when I recalled Professor Leon Hugo’s stimulating articles, helpful, knowledgeable reviews, adept interviews over the decades in this annual; recalled too his volume, Bernard Shaw: Playwright and Preacher, the work of a writer focused, in command of his material, crisply economical. In the present work I am particularly taken by that authoritative, crisp efficiency. Aside from an “Introduction” that sets the stage with a summary of Shaw’s dramatic writings and doings in the 1890’s and a “Postscript” on Fanny’s First Play (1911) that nicely recapitulates Shaw’s decade-long battle with the drama critics, this study, true to its title, limits itself to the years of Edward VII’s reign, January 22, 1901, to May 6, 1910. Let me report, both eyes fully open now, critical monocle dangling, that the familiar has come alive and the terrain affords brave new vistas.

As Leon Hugo presents the case, Shaw was a Nobody in 1901 and

. . . emphatically a Somebody in 1910. It was a remarkable transformation, and this study is an attempt to depict it; to depict Shaw the Fabian, the revolutionary public man, the subversive playwright, the controversialist, the wit—the entity that can be described only as the Shavian phenomenon—confronting a deeply entrenched conservative age, trying to mould it into his likeness and being, and winning his way to become the dominant radical voice of the age. It was no easy rite of passage. There were triumphs, there were setbacks; success and crashing failure. By 1910, when there could be no gainsaying the irresistible force of his personality and his works, there were many who continued to resist him. This is paradox, but Shaw and paradox were synonymous.

That passage from the first page of the “Preface” gives us a precis of what Hugo intends to do—and does so admirably—in this work. I quote at length because I want you to savor his style. There is vigor here—clarity and authority combined—that you will find throughout; there is momentum—onward propulsion; some variation of that fanfare on paradox at the close will be heard at all chapter endings, most closings of chapter segments, and at the curtain of each of the three major sections: “1901-1904 Educate, Agitate”; “1904-1907 The Court Theatre”; “1907-1910 Confront”. Note the long second sentence—the semi-colons, commas, dashes, the parallel constructions, the rephrasings in those constructions, all holding the passage together. And this is followed by short to somewhat longer sentences with a minimum of transitions. The struggle between the establishment and “the Shavian phenomenon” that will be the substance of this work is caught in the give and take of these constructions. I am not attempting a critique of Hugo’s style (although I do think of Dixon Scott on Shaw: ascetic becoming aesthetic). I am just suggesting that, like Shaw himself, Hugo knows how to make his style reflect the contents; and, above all, knows how to hold a reader and propel him forward. Such style has much to do with the lifting of my dropping eyelid and the revitalization of the familiar that I experienced.

Professor Hugo states that in his study “there is no pretence at superseding any standard biographies of the subject; little attempt to scratch beneath the public surface of the personality.” As he sees it, he has written a study in sociology, a history of ideas in a pivotal decade featuring the struggle, as the subtitle has it, of “The Writer and His Age.” I think him a tad too modest. There is another reason why the volume is so readable: it takes Shaw seriously and casts him in a new light. Return to the paragraph quoted above. “Transformation” is the central word followed by a listing of five facets or modalities of “the entity . . . confronting a deeply entrenched conservative age,” an entity that has become a paradox: the dominant, although resistible voice of his age. Hugo is presenting us with a public Shaw and private Shaw who have merged in some sort of transformation around about 1910, the same year as Hugo notes that Virginia Woolf proclaimed that human nature changed. There is no need to scratch Shaw’s surface; what is private has become public; where Id and Super-Ego were, Ego is. I think that may be why I am more taken by this study of public and historical Shaw than I have been by so many of the other more recent standard biographies. Hugo cites as a precedent for this work Stanley Weintraub’s Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw 1914-1918 (1971), which centers on Shaw and the First World War, another biographical work I found refreshing. Perhaps we could have a series of such intensive public biographies on Shaw.

Again return to our exemplary paragraph—others on almost any page would do as well, but this microscoping of the one reflects the organic unity of the work, like a strand of DNA carrying the genome’s message—return to the paragraph and find still another aspect of the work’s readability: it is sustained by dramatic conflict. “Revolutionary,” “subversive,” “controversialist,” “triumphs—setbacks,” etc. It’s Shaw “confronting a deeply . . . conservative age” and in subsequent chapters that age takes on the identities of friends as well as critics. William Archer could not see the drama in Shaw’s symposiums; Beatrice Webb could not see the “earnest” in Shaw’s jibes; A. B. Walkley, the all-powerful drama critic for The Times (London), tediously sought for the Aristotelian unities in Shaw’s circus. We Shavians know all about this blinkered chorus, but Hugo returns to them time and again (twenty-eight lines to Archer in the Index; ten to B. Webb; nineteen to Walkley), until they become understandable and even sympathetic—in one way or another they are their age. And they made their point too: we might not have had Saint Joan in its present form without a Shaw who had outraged a war-time England calculatedly conforming to the capacities of his entrenched—or just out of the trenches—audience. This is my surmise, but in the last paragraph of his book Professor Hugo offers some support when he observes wryly that [in 1911 Shaw] “seems to have shrunk his personal horizon the better to enable his near-sighted contemporaries to see what he was getting at.”

The plays are not analyzed. Professor Hugo’s focus is on their impact in Shaw’s campaign against the values, the prejudices, the habits of his age. What he does in chapter after chapter is take one letter, one preface, one article and spotlight it in the way I’ve been doing with that quoted paragraph above as a way of getting into Shaw’s mind at the moment of writing it and of elucidating his strategy. Thus in the second division, while covering the Stage Society of 1902, a prelude to the Court Theatre productions, Hugo takes up the “Author’s Apology,” Shaw’s preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession, and traces GBS’s tactics. First come the critics including his friend Archer who see him wallowing in filth, then the censorship that would prevent the public from such wallowing. Shaw tilts the picture: it is our age that is wallowing and only art that is also propaganda can clean us. I am tempted to quote the long passage that Hugo cites from the preface, for it comes through so sincerely, so persuasively in the frame Hugo provides that Shaw seems again alive. Another example of spotlighting: in the last chapter of the last division, “Confront,” Hugo features Shaw’s Receipt Book “in his fine and precise hand, entering all sums of money earned in the pursuit of his profession, down to the last penny.” It becomes a dramatic way of chronicling the emergence of the celebrity Shaw while evoking the private pathos of the penny-pinching Sonny’s journals. The Receipt Book is prominent through most of the chapter until one is almost prepared to accept Shaw’s admonition at face value: “You should never think of anything else but money: I never do.”

I realize that my “spotlighting” has left a vital part of this work untouched—the vision Shaw was motivated by and which provided him with a plan for his—how shall I say—creation of a larger-than-life self. No, I’m not talking about the Life Force or at least not talking about it directly. Professor Hugo has a more original approach than that. Let me backtrack for a moment. The first division of the work entitled “Educate, Agitate” (without the third imperative of the Fabian triad “Organize”) devotes five chapters to Shaw’s self-advertising in penny papers and prefaces, his anti-vaccination, anti-medical-establishment campaigns, his Fabianism, his efforts to reach an audience in Europe and America. Professor Hugo might well have included “Organize” in the section title because the chapters point to Shaw doing all three in his campaign to merge his personality into his celebrity persona GBS: Shaw had become one with his work. Maybe the organizing was subconscious at first, but the foundation is established by the time we come to the last chapter, “Edwardian Shaw,” of the third and final division entitled “Confront”:

By 1910 the pattern is clear, if incomplete: the corpus of Shaw’s work—the prefaces, the plays and the postscripts [and I would add the articles, the columns, the letters]—amount cumulatively to a critical anatomy of the human comedy . . . grounded of course, as Shaw never tired of telling his ever-growing audience, in the most scientific of methods and sustained by the most comprehensive and coherent of philosophies. . . . This scrappy résumé fails to note the complexities and intermeshing of [Shaw’s work], the steadily widening canvas, the deepening vision, but it does suggest Shaw’s capacity for variety and his skill in exposing Edwardian England to its multifarious and deep-rooted ills.

According to Hugo “the deepening vision” Shaw experiences is literally “epic.” We have been seeing that vision developing in the second section, “The Court Theatre,” but only near the close of his study does Hugo draw things together and see the pattern they make as—for want of a better word—auspicious, or in Hugo’s words “intellectually coherent and prophetic on a large scale.” As a matter of fact, I have been thinking of the “epic Shaw” myself and have written about it, but I’ve seen that epic vision in terms of half a dozen of the larger works, not the early plays, with the exception of Caesar and Cleopatra, and certainly not in terms of Shaw’s whole psychic self-construct in his battle with a tenaciously resistant age. In this penultimate section, Professor Hugo links Shaw’s aspirations with those of Ben Jonson, Dryden, and Milton. In the light of the pattern he has presented so authoritatively and engagingly, he has won the right to make such claims. I see a Shaw of new dimensions.