Like the Kite: George Bernard Shaw

“Even after twenty years London has hardly caught my tone yet,” said George Bernard Shaw, as he curled himself up in my arm-chair and looked placidly at the ceiling, stroking meanwhile a somewhat unkempt beard.

That sentence expresses shortly and accurately the attitude of Shaw to London, as well as that of London to Shaw. For Shaw has undoubtedly a tone peculiar to himself, Shawism being, as he himself avers, distinctly and fundamentally a religion. Now London has never been able to comprehend completely what Shaw has been about. It has gaped at him, shrugged its shoulders, smiled with a passing amusement, and gone its way, wondering vaguely if the religion of the future involves the apotheosis of the absurd. Shaw, on his side, takes courage when men call him a fool. “All human progress,” he replies, as in a recent article in Cosmopolis, “involves, as its first condition, the willingness of the pioneer to make a fool of himself. The sensible man is the man who adapts himself to existing conditions. The fool is the man who persists in trying to adapt the conditions to himself.”

Now Shaw has always taken the extraordinary course of thinking out every question—from the Deity to mutton-chops—for himself, and, furthermore, of publishing his conclusions whenever he could find a hearing, and finally of acting upon them. This is a tone which London is still very far from catching. When, at the Shelley Society’s first big meeting, Shaw announced himself as, like Shelley, “a socialist, an atheist and a vegetarian,” London shivered, but understood. A socialist is a man who deals in dynamite, an atheist is a man who will steal your spoons, and a vegetarian is a man who has not the pluck of a louse. So far, so good. We have our Shaw in a nutshell, and his vegetarianism will protect us from the dreadful consequences of his atheism and his socialism.

But it presently appeared that Shaw by no means answered to his label. The atheist began writing articles which advocated the free and open use of churches at all times by all men. The socialist laughed at the impossibilities of anarchism and gently chaffed the futilities of the International Socialist Congress. The vegetarian who neither smoked nor drank alcohol was found to be as intellectually full-blooded as the scribblers who gather in bars where the wild asses quench their thirst. And when it was found that the agitator who wanted to invert the social order was a brilliant critic of music, of pictures and of plays, wishing no more than the Archbishop of Canterbury to eliminate art from life, London began to reconsider the label.

When, finally, Shaw was found to be preaching revolt to the grimy East from a tub in the afternoon and tickling the cultured West with Arms and the Man in the evening, London gave up the endeavour to place him. It decided to regard him as a disturbing element—the pinch of powder that causes the draught of life to effervesce. And certain it is that whenever Shaw pokes his pen into a matter or finds his feet at a meeting, there will be a fizz. For the average man believes in institutions; Shaw believes only in himself.

And how did you acquire your tone? Tell me something of your parentage and education.

I was born in Dublin in 1856. The great point about my family was its respectability. I had unlimited uncles and aunts, and myriads of cousins. Without disliking them personally, I had a theory that they were snobs and humbugs, a conception which I extended later to the whole class to which I belonged. Besides their respectability, their chief merit was a remarkable aptitude for playing all sorts of wind instruments by ear. Thus, for example, my father, the most unlucky, incompetent and impecunious of mortals, played ‘Home, Sweet Home’ upon the flute. His post in the Civil Service was abolished by 1850, which will give you a notion of how surpassingly useless a sinecure it must have been. He sold his pension and embarked the proceeds in a wholesale corn business—we were too respectable for retail trade—and spent the rest of his life in contemplating his warehouse and wondering why he became poorer year by year. As to education, I had none.

But you can write?

“Ah—but the word education brought to my mind four successive schools where my parents got me out of the way for half a day. In these crèches—for that is exactly what they were—I learnt nothing. How I could have been such a sheep as to go to them when I could just as easily have flatly refused, puzzles and exasperates me to this day. They did me a great deal of harm, and no good whatever. However, my parents thought I ought to go, and everybody else thought I ought to go, and I thought I ought to go, being too young to have any confidence in my own instincts. So I went. And if you can in any public way convey to these idiotic institutions my hearty curse, you will relieve my feelings infinitely.

I expect you were rather unpopular with your masters.

As a schoolboy I was incorrigibly idle and worthless. And I am proud of the fact. After allI did get an education. My mother was a very active musician, and we had rehearsals of a choral and orchestral society in our house. So before I was fifteen, I knew at least one important work by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Gounod from cover to cover, and whistled the themes to myself as the street-boy whistles music-hall songs. Moreover there is a modest National Gallery in Dublin where boys may prowl. I prowled. Whenever I had any money, which hardly ever happened, I bought volumes of the Bohn translation of Vasari; and at fifteen I knew enough of a considerable number of Italian and Flemish painters to recognize their work at sight. On second thoughts I must conclude that I was really a very highly educated boy—thanks to Communism in pictures.

What brought you to London and literature?

I was driven to write because I could do nothing else. In an old novel of mine—Cashel Byron’s Profession—the hero, a prizefighter, remarks that it’s not what a man would like to do, but what he can do, that he must work at in this world. I wanted to be another Michael Angelo, but couldn’t draw—to be a musician, but couldn’t play—to be a dramatic singer, but had no voice. It’s so very hard to discover what you can do; you may spend half your life in the search. I am quite sure I have not found out half of my own capabilities yet. Anyhow, I did not want to write, but as that was the only thing I knew I could do, I did it. I began in the office of a land agent, who honorably appreciated the fact that I was intelligent, that I did not steal his money, and perhaps also that I did not take the faintest interest in his business. At twenty I determined to plunge into London.

Had you published anything at the time?

My published works consisted of a letter written when I was sixteen or seventeen to Public Opinion, in which I sought to stem the force of the first great Moody and Sankey revival by the announcement that I, personally, had renounced religion as a delusion.

Then of course London greeted you as a prophet.

London was not ripe for me. Nor was I ripe for London. I was in an impossible position. I was a foreigner—an Irishman, the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the University Mill. I was, as I have said, not uneducated; but unfortunately what I knew was exactly what the educated Englishman did not know, and what he knew I either did n’t know, or did n’t believe. My destiny was to educate London, but I had neither studied my pupil nor related my ideas properly to the common stock of human knowledge. I was provincial—unpresentable. Now, tell me candidly—do you regard me as a well-dressed man as I sit here?

Your outward appearance suggests that you are—well—a fairly respectable plasterer.

Just so. Now, when people reproach me with the unfashionableness of my attire, they forget that to me it seems like the raiment of Solomon in all his glory by contrast with the indescribable seediness of those days when I trimmed my cuffs to the quick with scissors, and wore a tall hat and soi-disant black coat, green with decay. I wrote novel after novel, five long ones in all, and innumerable articles. No publisher would touch them; no editor would look at me. But my self-sufficiency was proof against all discouragement. For nine years there was no break in the clouds. At first I earned a little by deviling for a musical critic, whose paper died,—partly of me. He followed it to the grave. Then London absolutely refused to tolerate me on any terms. As the nine years progressed, I had one article accepted by G. R. Sims, who had just started a short-lived paper. It brought me fifteen shillings. Full of hope and gratitude, I wrote a really brilliant contribution. That finished me. On another occasion a publisher asked me for some verses to fit some old blocks which he had bought up for a school prize book. I wrote a parody of the thing he wanted, and sent it as a joke. To my stupefaction he thanked me seriously, and paid me five shillings. I was touched, and wrote him a serious verse for another picture. He took it as a joke in questionable taste, and my career as a versifier ended. In those nine years I made £6. And yet I have been called an upstart.

And then the clouds scattered?

Yes—dispelled by the sunshine of William Archer’s countenance, which broke upon me one day in the British Museum reading-room, where I was found reading Karl Marx’s Capital, with the orchestral score of Tristan und Isolde on the folding-desk. That was in 1885. Archer took my affairs in hand; got me books to review from the Pall Mall Gazette, and obtained for me the appointment of art-critic to the World. Then I began to make money—nearly £100 a year after a while. Archer also proposed collaboration in a drama which he had planned out on the ‘well-made’ lines of Scribe. I took it, and produced two acts so outrageously off the ‘well-made’ lines that Archer at once ceased to wonder that I was a failure. Some years afterwards I fished out the play, added a third act, and called it Widower’s Houses. It was produced at the Independent Theater, caused a fortnight’s violent quarrelling in the press, and gave James Welch, the young actor who made a reputation as Lickcheese, his first big chance. However, I anticipate. For the next four years I criticised every picture show in London, and reviewed heaps of books. In 1884, when the Star was founded, I joined the political staff. Here my impossibility broke out worse than ever. They simply couldn’t print my articles. Finally, as a compromise, I was given a column of the paper every week to fill with some non-political matter—say music. This column, which was signed ‘Corno di Bassetto,’ was a mixture of triviality, vulgarity, farce and tomfoolery with genuine criticism. Now that I had learned how to write and to criticise, my old knowledge of music filled my hands with weapons, and when Louis Engel, the best hated musical critic in Europe, got into a scrape with one of his pupils and had to leave the World, his post fell to ‘Corno di Bassetto.’ I wrote a page of musical criticism in the World every week until on Yates’ death in 1894, I gave up this labor of Hercules (You have no conception of what musical criticism means, done as I did it,) and was succeeded by Robert Hichens, of ‘Green Carnation’ fame. By that time I had only one more critical continent to conquer. But I wanted the right editor, one with the virtues of Yates—and some of his faults as well, perhaps. I found him in Frank Harris, who had just revived the Saturday Review, and offered me the post of dramatic critic. Then my fame went up by leaps and bounds; people began to talk about me, even to interview me. They thought it so quaint that a man who was uniformly sober should be uniformly brilliant.

By the way, why did you become a vegetarian? Wasn’t it an awful nuisance?

I became a vegetarian about fifteen years ago, when vegetarian restaurants began to crop up here and there and make vegetarianism possible for a man too poor to be specially catered for. My attention had been called to the subject first by Shelley, and then by a lecturer. But of course the enormity of eating the scorched corpses of animals—cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted—becomes impossible the moment it becomes consciously instead of thoughtlessly habitual. I am a teetotaller because my family has already paid the Shaw debt to the distilling industry so munificently as to leave me no further obligations, and because my mind requires no artificial stimulant. A good proportion of the artistic work of the day, I know, is born of the tea-pot, the bottle or the hypodermic syringe. But I flatly declare that a man fed on whiskey and dead bodies cannot do the finest work of which he is capable.

Do you mean to continue play-writing?

Certainly. I determined years ago that if I did not write six plays before I was forty, I would not write plays at all. My fortieth birthday is past, and the six plays are written, with a little one thrown in as a makeweight. You can only learn to do a thing by doing it over and over again. When I have written twelve plays I expect I shall be able to write a very good one. As to those already finished—of the first, Widower’s Houses, I have spoken already. It is published and is entirely unreadable except for the preface and appendices, which are good. The others are The Philanderer, which contains one or two good scenes in a framework of mechanical farce and trivial filth; Mrs. Warren’s Profession—the oldest profession in the world, you know—an appalling play which it would serve the public right to have powerfully acted at them; Arms and the Man, a romantic comedy of harmless disillusion, which, I believe, is almost popular in America, chiefly owing to Mr. Richard Mansfield’s individuality; Candida, a sort of religious play with an East End clergyman and so forth; The Man of Destiny, a one act play in which Napoleon is the chief figure, and finally You Never Can Tell, a Shawesque comedy. The Man of Destiny has just been accepted by Sir Henry Irving. Putting aside absurd hole and corner performances for copyrighting purposes, these dramas, with the exception of Widower’s Houses and Arms and the Man, have never been performed. Yes, I certainly intend to go on writing plays. But I am afraid I don’t go to work in a very methodical way. When an idea occurs to me I just work it up at odd moments—on the top of a bus or in a railway train. Arms and the Man was mostly written on a bus. I haven’t the least doubt of my own success. It may not be a commercial success. The public may fail in their part of the business. But I shall not fail in mine. And the difficulties in the way of performance will finally be overcome by the fact that I possess the art of writing parts which are very attractive to actors and actresses. Just at present I have a melodrama in hand, and shall follow that up by a light opera. Both these forms of art are in an incredibly debased and silly condition.

Do you find time with all this to peg away still at Socialism?

Well, the combination of agitation with musical criticism, especially when a general election comes at the height of the musical season, is enough to kill an elephant, and I have been forced to take things a little easier for the last year or two, so far as oratory is concerned. But, you know, I have been talking in public ever since 1879, when, being horribly nervous, I determined to master the art of public speaking. Ever since Henry George’s Progress and Poverty and Karl Marx’s Capital led me to find my feet in Socialism without altogether losing my head, I have been an agitator, and from 1883 to 1894, I delivered a harangue, with debate, questions, and so on, every Sunday (sometimes twice, or even thrice) and on a good many week-days, on all sorts of platforms, from the British Association to the triangle at the corner of Salmon’s Lane in Limehouse. Of course people talk vaguely of me as an Anarchist, a visionary, and a crank. I am none of these things, but their opposite. I only want a few perfectly practical reforms which shall enable a decent and reasonable man to live a decent and reasonable life, without having to submit to the great injustices and the petty annoyances which meet you now at every turn.

Then how do you suppose Shaw will go down to posterity—as a critic, a dramatist—

Shaw is undoubtedly both a critic and a dramatist, not to mention a novelist, an economist, a pamphleteer—

And a wag?

Ah—I think you have caught my tone. Waggery as a medium is invaluable. My case is really the case of Rabelais over again. When I first began to promulgate my opinions, I found that they appeared extravagant, and even insane. In order to get a hearing, it was necessary for me to attain the footing of a privileged lunatic, with the license of a jester. Fortunately the matter was very easy. I found that I had only to say with perfect simplicity what I seriously meant just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh. My method, you will have noticed, is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity. And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest. My friend Graham Wallas once, when somebody began to air some fancies about a biography of me, suggested that its title would probably be ‘The Court Jester who was Hung.’ And there he touched the essence of the situation.

Shaw has had a hard fight for his success. He has spent his life, so far, on the side of the Opposition, and has grown so used to the denunciations of the respectable British householder that he would feel uncomfortable if he should happen to find himself on the side of the majority. I well remember how at the first night of “Arms and the Man” at the Avenue Theatre, after the audience had been successively puzzled, tickled and delighted, Shaw stepped before the curtain to face the applause. He was tremulous, unnerved, speechless. He looked as though he had expected cabbage stalks, and was disappointed. Suddenly a man in the Gallery began to hoot. Shaw was himself again at once. He opened his lips, and amid the resulting silence he said, looking at the solitary malcontent. “I quite agree with my friend in the Gallery—but what are two against so many?” A single breath of opposition braced his energies. For Shaw is like the kite, and can rise only when the popularis aura is against him.

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The Chap-Book, Vol. V, No. 12 (Nov. 15, 1896), pp. 531–540.