Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd

Author:Michael Holroyd [Holroyd, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2015-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

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Beatrice had wished for closer intellectual intimacy with Shaw through the New Statesman. But his ‘big brain’, she became convinced, had been spoilt by Mrs Patrick Campbell. ‘He is the fly and the lady the spider.’

Shaw had been unusually subdued during the autumn of 1913 as he flew round France on what Stella called his ‘honeymoon’ with Charlotte. ‘I am horribly unhappy every morning,’ he wrote to her, ‘...you have wakened the latent tragedy in me.’ On his return he tried to keep hidden from their friends the memory of Stella that ‘tears me all to pieces’. Now that the affair had ended, Beatrice began to feel more sympathetic towards him. Instead of hanging around Mrs Pat’s bedroom he ‘has attended every one of our six public lectures, and taken the chair twice,’ she approved. It was not wholly displeasing to Beatrice that Shaw’s recent plays, of which she did not think much, had been unsuccessful. The Music-Cure was presented for just seven performances at the Little Theatre; Great Catherine ran for thirty performances at the Vaudeville and had not been very well reviewed. More surprisingly, Barker’s production of Androcles and the Lion, with shimmering Post-Impressionist designs by Albert Rothenstein, had come off after fifty-two performances at the St James’s Theatre. The play had puzzled people. ‘An English audience has not as a rule sufficient emotional mobility to follow a method which alternates laughter with pathos, philosophy with fun, in such rapid succession,’ explained Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman.

Everyone had loved the lion, a delicious beast with the most alluring howls and pussycat antics, and ‘the one character in the whole range of Shavian drama,’ commented A. B. Walkley warmly, ‘who never talks’. But it was the lion’s evening rather than the playwright’s. The Manchester Guardian’s critic reported that the words ‘vulgarity’, ‘blasphemy’, ‘childish’ were to be heard at the end of the performance, and predicted that ‘Mr Shaw’s new play will scandalise... the most characteristic part of the English public [which]... cannot understand being passionately in earnest about a thing and in the same breath making fun of it.’ And so it proved.

For Christmas and the New Year he went to Devon and Cornwall for a fortnight’s tour with the Webbs. The scenery had ‘an almost Irish charm’. Each day they would set off walking over ten or thirteen miles of researched country, with the car panting in attendance to take them, when exhausted, to the most luxurious hotel in the neighbourhood. ‘Our old friend and brilliant comrade is a benevolent and entertaining companion,’ Beatrice allowed. But he was ‘getting rapidly old physically, and somewhat dictatorial and impatient intellectually, and he suffers from restlessness,’ she observed. ‘We talked more intimately than we have done for many years.’

Shaw’s life was changing – everything was changing – from comedy to tragedy. From Cornwall he wrote to Charlotte: ‘I miss you, as you would be happy here, and I like to be with you when you are happy.’ From Devon he

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