Shaw the Reviewer and James's Guy Domville

SI-IA\y/ THE REVIEWER AND JAMES'S GUY DOMVILLE SHAW'S INITIAL INTRODUCTION TO THE London public came about through his work as a reviewer and critic. The most important critical post he held was with Frank Harris's Saturday Review, and the articles he wrote for Harris are readily accessible in a three volume collection entitled Our Theatres in the Nineties. In Harris Shaw found an editor who would give him a free rein, who would allow him to say what he wanted to about the plays, and who was not afraid of the controversy that was almost inevitable when Shaw began in earnest his campaign to change the nature of the theater of his day. In the pieces that Shaw wrote for Harris between 1895 and 1898 there are dozens of enjoyable critical assessments-a review of Henry James's Guy Domville being one of them. This article reveals many of the characteristics typical of most of the Saturday Review pieces. It shows us a Shaw, who, in spite of a general conception of him as dogmatic and intractable, was able to see value even in works that did not do what he wanted done. It shows us that he could recognize a piece as being good for the purpose for which it was intended even if he didn't like the purpose. It demonstrates that he was capable of recognizing valid perceptions of human experience even if those perceptions were clothed in a method abhorrent to him; it reveals Shaw's inherent tendency to support the underdog, to take up the cudgels in defense of anyone under attack; it reveals his impatience with bad manners and that Shaw was much more than a reviewer, that he was writing as a literary critic. The review of Guy Domville came early in Shaw's work on Harris's magazine, appearing on January 12, 1895. Though James had had little success as a dramatist to this point, the Haymarket Theatre produced Guy D'omville on January 3, 1895, in hopes of a success equal to that enjoyed by the novels. The opening night audience behaved deplorably, interrupting the play and finally literally hooting the author off the stage. The story is that of a young aspirant to the priesthod whose progress along that path is interrupted by an unexpected legacy and a plan to marry him off in order to preserve the Domville name, since he is the sole surviving male of the family. Though he is tempted by marriage on two occasions, he ultimately rejects love (and the control over his will that has been implied in the scheme to get him 331 332 MODERN DRAMA December married) in favor of the priesthood, and at the end of the play is seen going off to continue his training for the priesthood. Shaw's response to the play is typical in that it is characterized by pyrotechnics, exaggeration, and clearly stated opinion. Shaw rarely equivocated. But Shaw displays also considerable sympathy for the J ames play though Shaw and James were, as Shaw himself put it, in different camps. (OTN, 1,6)1 Certainly Henry James's work is based on a premise very different from that from which Shaw worked. Shaw remarked, in a summary review of the season's work, Mr. Henry james's intellectual fastidiousness remains untouched by the resurgent energy and wilfulness of the new spirit. It takes us back to the exhausted atmosphere of George Eliot, Huxley, and Tyndall, instead of thrusting us forward into the invigorating strife raised by Wagner, Ibsen, and Sudermann. (OTN, I, 194-195) In spite of this difference in attitude, however, and in spite of Shaw's firm commitment to the "new spirit," much about the review is complimentary . Shaw, accounting for the audience's adverse reaction, pointed out that the only real problem with the play, from their point of view, was that it was "out of fashion," i.e. it had no "squalid intrigues." James had failed, unlike most of the dramatists of the period , to "keep well aloof from art and philosophy." (I, 6) But Shaw's position, typically, is complicated. He went on to comment...