SHAW’S IBSENA Re-Appraisal

Bernard Shaw and His

Contemporaries

Joan Templeton

Series EditorsNelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel

Massachusetts Maritime Academy Pocasset, MA, USA

Peter Gahan Independent Scholar

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and American following.

Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism that arose in the wake of World War 1.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14785

Joan Templeton

Shaw’s IbsenA Re-Appraisal

Joan TempletonNew York, NY, USA

Bernard Shaw and His ContemporariesISBN 978-1-137-54341-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54044-7 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7

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For Eric Bentley,The Mentor of Us All

vii

Preface

The Quintessence of Ibsenism is perhaps the most famous book ever written by one author about another. Published in 1891 and revised and enlarged in 1913, it has been reprinted over and over and is regarded as a classic. But the book’s value is usually considered to lie less in what it reveals about its subject—Henrik Ibsen—than about its author—Bernard Shaw. For many readers, this is not much of a detriment. Shaw’s latest British biographer, Michael Holroyd, finds that the joy of reading the Quintessence “is that of feeling Shaw’s agile and ingenious mind working with such vitality on material so sympathetic to him.” Although Shaw’s conversion of Ibsen “into a wholesale warrior does involve distortions to some of the plays,” Holroyd notes, Shaw’s purpose, after all, was to present his own “credentials as a man who was carrying on Ibsen’s busi-ness of ‘changing the mind of Europe’” (H 1:199). The Quintessence is considered to be the most important of Shaw’s nondramatic works for explaining his view of the world and a “blueprint,” in Christopher Innes’s term, for understanding his plays.1 In a recent statement on the book’s usefulness, Matthew Yde notes that the Quintessence “has usually been understood as a good indicator of Shaw’s own thinking, rather than a reli-able guide to understanding Ibsen’s dramaturgical strategy and philoso-phy of life; the quintessence of Shavianism rather than the quintessence of Ibsenism.”2 Eric Bentley was blunter; although he appreciated Shaw’s understanding of Ibsen, nevertheless, in his classic Bernard Shaw (1947), he directed readers of the Quintessence to substitute the word “Shaw” for the word “Ibsen” throughout.3 Blunter still was Charles Carpenter,

viii PREFACE

over twenty years later, who noted: “Despite its subject (and its value as an analysis of Ibsen), the book is still an uncamouflaged piece of Shavian propaganda.”4

A considerably more critical view of Quintessence is that whatever it tells us about Shaw, it is a seriously misleading book about Ibsen. Shortly after Shaw read a first version—a lecture to the Fabian Society—in 1890, he was accused of transforming Ibsen into a socialist like himself. This false charge, which still lingers, is the crudest version of the popu-lar notion that Shaw wrongly regarded Ibsen as a reformer rather than an artist. A month after the Quintessence appeared, Shaw’s great friend William Archer, Ibsen’s devoted champion in England, published what was essentially a review of the book, “The Quintessence of Ibsenism: An Open Letter to George Bernard Shaw.” In it, he noted that Shaw’s argu-ment would “strengthen the predisposition . . . to regard Ibsen, not as a poet, but as the showman of a moral wax-work.” He noted, how-ever, that this “cannot be helped” because “it is a drawback inseparable from expository criticism” (A 31). By 1905, fourteen years later, Ibsen, now established as a great dramatist, had been the subject of a number of books in several languages that heralded his plays as arguments for women’s rights and other causes. Greatly irritated, Archer took it upon himself to respond in a lengthy essay, “Henrik Ibsen: Philosopher or Poet?,” in which he vehemently denounced the irksome critics who read Ibsen as “primarily a thinker, and only in the second place a poet”; he briefly named “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant little study, The Quintessence of Ibsenism” as “the type of this method of criticism” (A 81). Other critics, who found the Quintessence less than “brilliant,” blamed Shaw outright for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of social protest. In the same year as Archer’s essay, 1905, the American critic James Huneker pub-lished his landmark survey of early modern drama, Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists, in which he claimed that in the Quintessence, Shaw had transformed Ibsen into “a magnified image” of himself, “dropping ideas from on high with Olympian indifference,” with the result that “we are never shown Ibsen the artist, but always the social reformer with an awful frown.”5

As Shaw became famous as a dramatist in the first decade of the twentieth century, his plays influenced his reputation as a critic, and he was accused of being a didactic writer incapable of understanding the art-ist Ibsen, and even, in one well-known instance, of having been Ibsen’s “butcher.”6 By the 1930s, George Orwell could remark in passing in a

PREFACE ix

letter to a friend that Shaw “had slandered Ibsen in a way that must make poor old I[bsen] turn in his grave” (W 3), and Edmund Wilson, in The Triple Thinkers (1938), declared that Shaw, in turning Ibsen into a social reformer, creates “a false impression” and “seriously misrepresents him.”7

In the 1940s and 1950s, Shaw became a whipping boy of the New Critics as a foremost example of the unpoetic soul. The movement’s most famous arbiter of taste, T. S. Eliot, famously and somewhat nastily attacked Shaw in his imaginary conversation, “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” in which “B,” one of the participants, explains that “Shaw was a poet—until he was born, and the poet in Shaw was stillborn. Shaw has a great deal of poetry but all stillborn; Shaw is dramatically pre-cocious and poetically less than immature.”8 Following Eliot, Raymond Williams took on the task of saving Ibsen from the officially unpoetic Shaw in his influential Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1953). Explaining that his book is intended to be literary criticism in the manner of “Mr. Eliot,” Williams offers a “revaluation of Ibsen.”9 He seems almost to be holding his nose as he regrets that Ibsen’s mode was realism, “a tradition which was acutely inimical to art”; in spite of this impediment, however, Ibsen somehow managed to achieve “work as valid and as permanent as our century has” (97). But because of the pernicious influence of The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which “has to do with Ibsen only in the sense that it seriously misrepresents him” (138), Ibsen has been mistaken for sixty years as a writer who focused on moral issues that were incidental to his art. For having committed this blunder, Williams believes, Shaw and the other “Ibsenites” deserve to be blamed as “the disintegrators of Ibsen” (43). Williams is especially indignant at what he claims is the Ibsenites’ dismissal of Ibsen’s last four plays, and he cites as proof the subtitle of Shaw’s essay on them in the Quintessence: “‘Down among the Dead Men,’ said Shaw, and Down, Down, Down was the estimate of the last plays as they appeared” (86). But while some of the Ibsenites were puzzled by the late plays, others praised them, most especially Shaw him-self, whose “Down Among the Dead Men” is among the most laudatory of all his writings on Ibsen. Here, Shaw writes, Ibsen passes “into the shadow of death, or rather into the splendor of his sunset glory; for his magic is extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more powerful” (Q2 136). Clearly, Williams did not bother to read past the subtitle of the essay he was denigrating.

Seven years later, in 1960, James Walter McFarlane, editor of The Oxford Ibsen, the standard scholarly edition of Ibsen’s works in English,

x PREFACE

reiterated Williams’s general gripe against Shaw as a reader of Ibsen, although in a politer tone. McFarlane scolded Shaw for having claimed that Ibsen’s plays are “first and foremost the embodiment of a lesson, illustrations of a thesis, exercises in moral persuasion.” To “ask for the quintessence of Ibsenism” is specious because it is “to formulate a wholly misleading question; there is nothing to be got by boiling down, there is no extract of wisdom that would allow us to regard [Ibsen’s] drama as a linctus for the ills of mankind.”10

Three years after this, the American drama scholar Maurice Valency, in his survey of modern drama, The Flower and the Castle (1963), blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s “reputation as primarily a social dramatist” and claimed that “a brilliant rhetorician and a wit” like Shaw could not understand Ibsen, “an artist.”11 Another well-known American writer on the modern theater, Robert Brustein, in The Theatre of Revolt (1964), takes the same viewpoint: “The Ibsen who tried so hard to disassociate himself from any consistent position would not have recognized himself in the ‘social pioneer’ of The Quintessence, whose ‘gospel’ is designed to save the human race.”12

Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen, appearing from 1967 to 1971, consolidated the anti-Shaw tradition. Castigating Shaw several times over, Meyer dismissed the Quintessence as “one of the most misleading books about a great writer that can ever have been written. Had it been entitled Ibsen Considered as a Socialist, or The Quintessence of Shavianism, one would have no quarrel with it” (M 636). Like Archer, Huneker, McFarlane, Williams, Wilson, and Valency, Meyer blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of thesis plays, complaining that Shaw was responsible for the notion that A Doll’s House was “a play about the hoary problem of women’s rights” (M 457). In 1972, Michael Egan, editor of Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, followed Meyer, noting that in the Quintessence, “the definition of Ibsenism implicitly offered (a literary campaign for moral reform through the exposure of middle-class hypoc-risy) was the quintessence of Shavianism. It tells us more about Shaw and the way he used and misunderstood Ibsen than it tells us about the com-plexities of, say, Hedda Gabler or Little Eyolf.”13

By 1975, the notion of Shaw’s distortion of Ibsen was so widely accepted that Daniel Dervin could write: “As we know [my italics], after a certain point when Shaw scrutinized Ibsen, he began to see what Narcissus saw in the pool.”14 For Dervin, Shaw’s own plays are enough to condemn him as a bad reader of Ibsen: the famous confrontation

PREFACE xi

scene between wife and husband in the third act of A Doll’s House “is not intended to provoke thought and reform by educating the audience to social realities as Shaw’s plays increasingly attempt to do” (185). Ten years later, in 1985, in Ibsen and Shaw, Keith May claimed that Shaw was wrong about Ibsen because his own optimism prevented him from understanding that Ibsen, who believed in “timeless human weakness,” was a skeptic: “All that mattered fundamentally to Ibsen was the noble spirit which flickered here and there in every generation.”15

The notion that Shaw’s “Ibsenism” is merely “Shavianism” in disguise is curiously ahistorical. In 1891, when he wrote the Quintessence, Shaw had not yet found his way as a writer. He had been an art critic and a music critic and had written five unknown novels. If this work were all he produced in his lifetime, he would deserve some notice in the history of English criticism for his brilliant writing on music, but what we know as “Shavianism” would not exist. The Shaw of 1891, even with all his bril-liance, could hardly set out to make Ibsen’s works contain the quintes-sence of a way of thinking embodied in an oeuvre as yet unwritten.

A second troubling aspect of the argument against Shaw is the notion that because he reads Ibsen as an anti-idealist like himself, he is ipso facto wrong. Apart from the odd implication that all writers possess a sensibil-ity that is wholly sui generis—which denies the notion of influence, let alone movements, like Realism, or Symbolism—the assumption is that Ibsen did not share Shaw’s anti-idealism. No critic has felt it necessary to offer any biographical or textual support for this position, which is presented as self-evident, but the critical logic is clear: Moral and social questions are not concerns of art; Ibsen’s work is art; therefore, Ibsen’s work is not concerned with moral and social issues.

My aim in this book is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that the Quintessence is not about its subject, but its author, and that Shaw misunderstood Ibsen and misread his works. The notion that Shaw attempted to turn Ibsen into a socialist is surely one of the most egre-gious errors in the literary criticism of the twentieth century, and I have tried to establish the record of inattention, flawed scholarship, and bias that resulted in this widespread misconception. I have also tested Shaw’s claim that Ibsen was an anti-idealist against Ibsen’s own idea of himself as a writer, expressed over many years in speeches and in letters, the most important of which were written to his friend and fellow fighter for mod-ernism, the great Danish critic Georg Brandes. I aim to show that writers who are determined to save Ibsen the poet from the taint of social and

xii PREFACE

cultural history ignore Ibsen’s own interests and concerns, as well as his strong conviction that his work was a “calling” through which he could speak truth to lies.

But, as Inga-Stina Ewbank has written of Ibsen in another context, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,”16 i.e., in the text itself, and my main subject is Shaw’s analyses of Ibsen’s plays. The Quintessence is the first book on Ibsen in English, and of all the early books on Ibsen, both inside and outside of Norway, it is the most ambitious, examining Ibsen’s dramas both as an oeuvre—a collected body of works—and as individual plays. I consider Shaw’s readings both in the context of what his contemporaries wrote about Ibsen, in England and elsewhere, and on their own terms. Shaw as an actual reader of Ibsen has been buried under the idea of a Shaw who saw Ibsen as a social critic and a lecturer on mor-als. I present the “other Shaw” of the Quintessence, the Shaw who had so thoroughly absorbed Ibsen’s plays that they were as much a part of his mental and spiritual universe as were the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Bunyan, and the King James Bible. Shaw’s great quarrel with the nine-teenth-century theater—in his journalism, in the Quintessence, and in his columns as drama critic for the Saturday Review—was that it was irrel-evant to actual life. For Shaw, one of the chief glories of Ibsen’s “new drama” was its scrupulously detailed characters: living, breathing people who were the opposite of the stock characters of the contemporary stage. Shaw was one of the first writers on Ibsen to offer detailed analyses of his characters, including astute psychological studies of Nora Helmer of A Doll’s House, Mrs. Alving of Ghosts, Rebecca West and John Rosmer of Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, Halvard Solness of The Master Builder, and Rita and Alfred Allmers of Little Eyolf. I want to show that Shaw read Ibsen’s plays not from the outside in, but vice versa, and read him per-ceptively and often brilliantly. The number of Shaw’s observations and analyses about Ibsen’s plays that have become standard, though unac-knowledged, in the literature on Ibsen, is an interesting phenomenon. Equally interesting is that many of Shaw’s harshest critics echo his analy-ses in their own readings of Ibsen’s plays.

Another goal, both historical and biographical, has been to trace Shaw’s personal response to Ibsen from his lukewarm initial opinion to his epiphanic reading of Peer Gynt, with William Archer, to his awaken-ing, through A Doll’s House, to a new, modern drama that he himself would help to create. I have tried to shed light on Shaw’s and Archer’s deep friendship, their shared love of Ibsen, and their agreements and

PREFACE xiii

disagreements regarding both his work and the “new drama” in general. I have also tried to establish a record of Shaw’s participation in the Ibsen campaign in London. While Michael Holroyd repeats the popular notion that when Shaw joined the campaign, he assumed its “generalship” (H 200), Michael Egan, editor of a 500-page anthology of pieces from Ibsen’s early English reception, claims that Shaw was “far less important than Archer, [Edmund] Gosse, or even Philip Wicksteed” [an economist who was one of the first English writers on Ibsen]” (Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, 21). Using Shaw’s diaries and letters, as well as the letters of his friends and fellow “Ibsenites,” along with other records, I have tried to clarify Shaw’s important role in the campaign, not as its “general”—Archer has the right to that title—but as a journalist and drama critic who used his columns as a bully pulpit for Ibsen, and as a man of the theatre who tirelessly gave his support—and his criticisms—to the val-iant men and women who introduced Ibsen to the English stage, the most important of whom were producer J. T. Grein of the Independent Theatre, actor-managers Charles Charrington, Elizabeth Robins, and Florence Farr, and actress Janet Achurch.

The discussion of Shaw as a reader of Ibsen has been dominated by the Quintessence. But Shaw is the author of other significant work on Ibsen that merits attention, including his exuberant reporting on early Doll’s House performances and his vehement defense of the play against its English abusers. Among his most interesting and lively commentar-ies on Ibsen’s plays are those in his Saturday Review columns, collected in Our Theatres in the Nineties, a neglected body of work that is among the best dramatic criticism in English (and hands down the wittiest). It is hugely entertaining to follow Shaw through three and a half years of a personal campaign in which Ibsen serves as a battering ram to attack the “claptrap” and the “twaddle” of the London theatre, including the stagey spectacles of Shaw’s favorite target Henry Irving. Among Shaw’s columns are also reviews of eight productions of Ibsen’s plays that are historical and critical gems, among which are his delightful account of the landmark 1896 French premiere of Peer Gynt, directed by Lugné-Poë, his skewering of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the Independent Theatre’s calamitous 1896 production of Little Eyolf, and, in a column of 1897, his brilliant juxtaposition of the Independent Theatre’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

While it has been widely recognized that the dramaturgy, i.e., the play-making, of Shaw and Ibsen is very different, it is the custom to

xiv PREFACE

consider Shaw’s first dramas, written in the 1890s, during the Ibsen cam-paign, as his “Ibsenite” plays. It has been fascinating to try to identify influence and affinity—or lack of them—in the themes and the drama-turgy of Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Candida—the Shaw play most associated with Ibsen—and to elucidate a drama long deemed a puzzle, the “topical comedy” The Philanderer, Shaw’s only direct dramatization of “Ibsenism.”

Throughout my study, I have tried to engage Shaw critically. Famous for taking up the roles of devil’s advocate and agent provocateur, Shaw habitually used his analytical genius in the service of polemics, and he does not hesitate to exaggerate to bolster his positions. This is especially marked in his arguments against Shakespeare worship, or “Bardolatry,” as he called it, in which he habitually holds Ibsen up as a writer superior to Shakespeare. It has been a very interesting task to examine these argu-ments, warts and all.

Finally, a note on method: In 1913, in the second edition of the Quintessence, Shaw’s additions and revisions were incorporated into the original book of 1891, as though they had been there all along, and it is this combined version that constitutes the text as we know it. But the Shaw of 1913 was no longer the Shaw of 1891. I have studied the two texts separately in order to establish the critical record, and, more impor-tantly, to show how Shaw’s revisions and additions, including three new chapters, reveal his deepened vision both of Ibsen’s dramas and Ibsen’s revolutionary transformation of the theater.

Joan Templeton

Notes

1. “‘Nothing but talk, talk, talk—Shaw talk’: Discussion Plays and the Making of Modern Drama,” The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 163.

2. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 26. 3. Bernard Shaw (1947; New York: Applause Books, 2002), 139. 4. Bernard Shaw and the Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 9. 5. (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 243. 6. Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in Drama and Art (London: Frank

Palmer, 1912), 36–37.

New York, USA

PREFACE xv

7. (New York: Farrar-Straus, 1977), 185. 8. Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 38. 9. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 95. 10. “Ibsen and Ibsenism,” from Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian

Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), reprinted in James McFarlane, Ibsen and Meaning: Studies, Essays, and Prefaces 1953–1987 (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1989), 61.

11. (New York: Schocken, 1963), 386. 12. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 187. 13. (London: Routledge, 1972), 21. 14. Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study (Lewisburg: Bucknell University

Press, 1975), 184. 15. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 120, 123. May’s book of ninety-

eight pages on Ibsen and a hundred and eight pages on Shaw is not the comparative study its title suggests. May repeats the conventional contrast between Ibsen the poet and Shaw the moralist, but after arguing that Shaw misunderstood Ibsen, he offers a “reminder” that “Shaw’s analy-sis of Ibsen’s plays was far ahead of his contemporaries, including the shrewdly appreciative William Archer” (124).

16. “Ibsen on the English Stage: ‘The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating,’” Ibsen and the Theatre: The Dramatist in Production, ed. Errol Durbach (London: New York University Press, 1980), 27–48.

xvii

ackNowledgemeNts

The greatest joy of finishing a book lies in thanking those who have con-tributed to it, and it is with immense pleasure that I express my gratitude to five Shaw scholars and friends who have made this book far better than it would otherwise be. Richard F. Dietrich urged me long ago to take up the subject of Shaw and Ibsen, and when I finally had time to do it, he gave me great help along the way. Thank you, Dick, for encour-aging me to plunge into the fascinating waters of the world of GBS; it has been a splendid swim. I also express my deep gratitude to Martin Meisel, who was kind enough to offer to read my manuscript and who did so painstakingly, offering helpful emendations and suggestions, and, most of all, saving me from errors. A thousand thanks to you, Martin. To Michel Pharand goes my heartfelt appreciation for two different kinds of services: his fine copy-editing skills and his support and encouragement during a trying time. Merci infiniment. I am also very happy to thank Ellen Dolgin for many conversations about Shaw and his plays that were immensely helpful to me in clarifying my ideas (and a lot of fun, besides). Finally, I express my gratitude to my editor, Peter Gahan, for his enthu-siasm, his corrections, his excellent suggestions about organization, and his help with the cover.

I would also like to thank my Palgrave Editor, Tomas René, and Palgrave Assistant Editor Vicky Bates, for their enthusiastic support and help. It was a pleasure to work with them.

My thanks go also to Michael O’Hara, President of the International Shaw Society, and his organizing committee for the 2015 Shaw

xviii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

conference at Fordham University, Manhattan, and to Frode Helland, Director of the Ibsen Center, University of Oslo, for inviting me to speak on occasions at which I could test my argument of Shaw as a reader of Ibsen before knowledgeable audiences. The responses I received from both groups were immensely important to me.

Once again, I have the pleasure of acknowledging the singular impor-tance of my “home away from home,” the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where I did much of the work on this book in the quiet confines of the Wertheim Room; I thank Jay Barksdale, librarian extraordinaire, for his help. I would also like to thank the librar-ians of the National Library, Oslo, and the British Library, London.

For help with photographs, I am grateful to Patricia Perez of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Susannah Mayor of Smallhythe Place, the Ellen Terry Museum; the curators of the Fales Library archives, New York University; and the rights and images departments of the Senate House Library, University of London, the National Trust of Great Britain, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

I would like to signal my great debt to four exemplary collections that were essential to my work: Dan R. Laurence’s Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, Stanley Weintraub’s Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, Evert Sprinchorn’s Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, and Jonathan Wisenthal’s Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings.

I gratefully acknowledge the Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from his works.

Lastly, I would like to thank all the members of the International Shaw Society who welcomed a newcomer and made her feel at home.

xix

coNteNts

The Road to the Quintessence 11 Becoming an Ibsen Critic: Shaw, Archer,

and the New Drama 12 The Fabian Society Lecture: Shaw, Ibsen, and Socialism 38

The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891 531 The Framing Chapters: Ibsen’s Modernism 572 Ibsen’s Revolutionary Calling 723 Reading Ibsen’s Texts: “The Plays” 854 The Open Mind of Ibsenism: “The Moral of the Plays” 1315 Ibsen and the English Theatre: “The Appendix” 136

The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898 1511 The Dramatist: Widowers’ Houses to Candida 1512 The Dramatic Critic: Our Theatres in the Nineties 184

The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen, 1913 253

1 Shaw’s Obituary of Ibsen 2532 An Old and a New Ibsen 2613 “The Last Four Plays: Down Among the Dead Men” 271

xx CONTENTS

4 A Modernist Manifesto: “What is the New Element in the Norwegian School?” 291

5 The Playwright as Thinker: “The Technical Novelty in Ibsen’s Plays” 299

6 Then and Now: 1891 and 1913 3087 Postscript: “Needed: An Ibsen Theatre” 3098 The Last Envoy: “Preface to the Third Edition,” 1922 311

Works Cited 321

Index 329

xxi

abbreviatioNs

A William Archer on Ibsen. The Major Essays, 1889–1919. Ed. Thomas Postlewait. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984.

CA Charles Archer. William Archer. Life—Work—and Friendships. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931.

CL Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874–1897; 1898–1910. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985, 1988.

D Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, 1885–1897. 2 vols. Ed. Stanley Weintraub. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.

H Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw. 3 vols. New York: Random House, 1988, 1989, 1991.

I Henrik Ibsen. Samlede Verker [Collected Works]. 3 vols. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1978.

LS Ibsen. Letters and Speeches. Ed. and trans. Evert Sprinchorn. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.

M Michael Meyer. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.OTN Bernard Shaw. Our Theatres in the Nineties. 3 vols. London: Constable,

1932.P Margot Peters. Bernard Shaw and the Actresses. Garden City: Doubleday,

1980.P Bernard Shaw: Prefaces. London: Constable, 1934.Q G. Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Walter Scott, 1891.Q2 Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism Now Completed to the Death

of Ibsen. New York: Brentano’s, 1913.W Shaw and Ibsen. Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and

Related Writings. Ed. J. L. Wisenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.

xxiii

list of figures

The Road to the Quintessence Fig. 1 George Bernard Shaw at 35. 1891. The National Portrait Gallery,

London 8Fig. 2 William Archer at 35. 1891. The Elizabeth Robins Papers.

Fales Library, New York University 9Fig. 3 Theatre Program. A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre,

London. 1889. Author’s personal collection 14Fig. 4 Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer and Charles Charrington as

Doctor Rank in A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London. June, 1889. Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 15

Fig. 5 Florence Farr. 1890. The Senate House Library, University of London 29

Fig. 6 Elizabeth Robins as Hedda Gabler. London, 1891. The Elizabeth Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 34

The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891 Fig. 1 Title page of the first edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. 1891.

Author’s personal collection 56Fig. 2 William. T. Stead. Ca. 1910. The W. T. Stead Resource Site.

http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk 64Fig. 3 Marie Bashkirtseff. Self-Portrait with Palette. 1883.

Oil on canvas. 92 × 72 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice 65

xxiv LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4 Henrik Ibsen at the age of 35. 1863. Author’s personal collection 73

Fig. 5 Georg Brandes. 1870s. Frontispiece. Georg Brandes, Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Rasmus Anderson. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1886 79

The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898 Fig. 1 Elizabeth Robins. Early 1890s. The Elizabeth Robins Papers.

Fales Library, New York University 162Fig. 2 Janet Achurch. Early 1890s. Enthoven Collection,

Victoria and Albert Museum, London 171Fig. 3 Henry Irving. Late 1880s. Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo 197Fig. 4 Ellen Terry. Ca. 1890. The National Trust, Great Britain 201Fig. 5 Edvard Munch. Theatre Program for Peer Gynt. Théâtre de

l’Oeuvre, Paris. 1896. Lithographic crayon on paper. 250 × 298 mm. The Munch Museum, Oslo 216

The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen, 1913Fig. 1 Bernard Shaw. 1913-14. George Grantham Bain Collection,

Library of Congress, Washington, D. C 262

xxv

author’s Note

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations, including those from Ibsen’s Collected Works, are mine. In quoting from Shaw, I have left his spelling and punctuation intact, except for silent corrections of very rare misspell-ings of Norwegian names and occasional additions of commas in brack-ets; to avoid confusion, I have also italicized the titles of works.

1

1 becomiNg aN ibseN critic: shaw, archer, aNd the New drama

It is sixty years since Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House,

and fifty since it reached England. Few people now

alive can remember, as I do, the force of its impact.

. . . We had to revalue all our values; and it is this

revaluation that gives Ibsen his supreme rank as a

playwright who changed the mind of Europe. (Shaw,

Nordisk Tidene [The Nordic Times], Brooklyn, June 2, 1938)

By the mid-1880s, when news of Ibsen’s dramas began to reach progressive circles in London, Shaw had written five ignored novels and was pursuing a thwarted career as a journalist. He was also following an assiduous program of self-education—in political theory, economic theory, literature, art, music—in the Reading Room of the British Museum. An active member of a host of organizations, both political and cultural, he was a deeply committed socialist and Fabian Society member who worked hard for the cause, speaking whenever and wherever he was needed.

Ibsen was very much in the air in the leftist circles Shaw moved in. In 1884, Henrietta Frances Lord’s translation of Ghosts appeared in the

The Road to the Quintessence

© The Author(s) 2018 J. Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7_1

2 J. TEMPLETON

socialist magazine To-Day, along with the first installment of a good-natured debate on Marxist value theory between Shaw and Philip Wicksteed, a noted economist who was on his way to becoming one of England’s first writers on Ibsen. Wicksteed and Shaw, fellow members of the English Land Restoration League, an organization devoted to promot-ing the ideas of the political economist Henry George, were friends and frequent companions. Shaw called Wicksteed his “master in economics”1 and was an active member of his prestigious “Economic Circle,” a club which met twice a month to discuss economic reform. Shaw undoubtedly knew about the futile attempts of Wicksteed, a popular lecturer, to speak on Ibsen, whose reputation was so pernicious that even Wicksteed’s own alma mater, University College, London, refused him their premises.

Shaw was also friends with another Ibsen admirer, Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, who was the first translator in English of two of Ibsen’s plays, An Enemy of the People (her title was An Enemy of Society) and The Lady from the Sea. In 1886, Shaw participated in her Bloomsbury lodgings in a private reading of Nora, the first full English translation, by Henrietta Frances Lord, of the play now known as A Doll’s House.2 Eleanor Marx read the role of Nora, her common-law husband Edward Aveling, the role of Helmer, and Shaw, the role of Krogstad. Afterwards, Shaw took pains to establish his indifference to this event, noting that he participated only to please Eleanor Marx and had “a very vague notion of what it was all about.” What he mostly remembered was eat-ing caramels back stage. His own radicalism had made him, in his word, “immune” to “the shock of Ibsen’s advent,” which “did not exist for me, nor indeed for anyone who was not living in the Victorian fools’ par-adise. All the institutions and superstitions and rascalities [sic] that Ibsen had attacked had lost their hold on me.”3

Shaw also liked to point out that he had been working along the same lines as Ibsen before he heard of him. In 1905, when Shaw’s dramas had begun to arouse interest in his novels, The Irrational Knot, his second novel (1880), which had appeared serially, was published as a book; in the “Preface,” Shaw claimed that the novel shared a great affinity with A Doll’s House. When he was introduced to Ibsen’s play at Eleanor Marx’s reading, he wrote, “its novelty as a morally original study of a marriage did not stagger me as it staggered Europe. I had made a morally original study of a marriage myself, and made it, too, without any melodramatic forgeries, spinal diseases, and suicides” (P 657). Emphasizing his “final chapter, so close to Ibsen,” Shaw declared: “I seriously suggest that The

THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 3

Irrational Knot may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the Life Force to write A Doll’s House in English by the instrumentality of a very immature writer aged twenty-four.”

The Irrational Knot focuses on a misalliance between Marian Lind, a beautiful, intelligent, and sensible upper-class lady, and Edward Conolly, a self-made, American electrical engineer grown rich through a mechani-cal invention. He seems efficient at everything, including playing Bach’s fugues for organ; Marian’s best friend calls him “a cast-iron walking machine.”4 Marian admires him greatly and marries him in spite of her father’s horror at his working-class origins. Intellectually, Conolly is a staunch anti-Victorian, but in his marriage, he falls short; the unhappy Marian complains to her friend: “A courtier, a lover, a man who will not let the winds of heaven visit your face too harshly, is very nice, no doubt; but he is not a husband. I want to be a wife and not a fragile ornament kept in a glass case. He would as soon think of submitting any project of his to a judgment of a doll as to mine” (254). Marian runs away from Conolly with an old suitor who swears adoration but turns out to be a spoiled bore who loves only himself. They separate, after which she finds herself preg-nant. In the end, her stalwart husband crosses the ocean to New York to rescue her, but she refuses to go back to him. She would shame him, she argues, and she finds him “too wise” (421). Although Marian, unlike Ibsen’s intrepid Nora, undergoes no epiphany of the self, as a pregnant “fallen woman” who chooses disgrace over security, she is Nora’s partner in courage. The imperturbable Conolly insists that he would raise her child as if it were his own, but he is so coolly imperious that Marian’s refusal to remain his wife seems, in spite of her circumstances, understandable; although Shaw called the anti-Victorian Conolly the “Nora” of his novel, he also wrote that “long before I got to the writing of the last chapter I could hardly stand him myself.”5 The novel trails off, open-ended, with the exit of Conolly, who gets the last word: “It is impossible to be too wise, dearest” (422). Shaw had written himself into an impasse in a genre that was uncongenial to him, but the “very immature writer” he called himself had indeed, like Ibsen, written “a morally original study of a marriage.”

“The Magic of the Great Poet”: William Archer and Peer Gynt

In 1888, about two years after he read the role of Krogstad, Shaw was re-introduced to Ibsen in an entirely different way, with consequences so important that he would write, forty-three years after the fact, in a

4 J. TEMPLETON

slip, that he had first “heard of Ibsen from William Archer” (“An Aside,” 2). A polyglot journalist and critic who would become one of the clos-est friends of Shaw’s life, Archer began his career at the London Figaro, making trips to Paris to cover the Comédie Française. He then wrote for a variety of newspapers, including the World, the Nation, the Tribune, and the Manchester Guardian. Whenever he could find the time, he worked on his own project of translating Ibsen’s plays into English. He had been devoted to Ibsen since adolescence, encountering his works on visits to the branch of the Archer clan that lived in Norway, where he learned to speak Norwegian. In love with the theatre since childhood, on his sixteenth birthday he wrote to a friend from Copenhagen that he had seen eight performances in the nine days he had been there, mostly at the “house of Holberg,” the Royal Theatre (where the fledgling dram-atist Ibsen had gone on a study trip). He also mentioned that he was looking forward to the next night’s performance in Hamburg (CA 37).

In December of 1881, in Rome, the twenty-five-year-old Archer met the fifty-three-year-old Ibsen. Archer’s friends teased him that he had gone to Italy precisely toward that end, and not as a much needed holiday from a work schedule that had exhausted him. The verse dra-mas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) had made Ibsen famous in Scandinavia; now, thanks to the prose dramas Pillars of Society (1877) and, especially, A Doll’s House (1879), he was famous in Europe. Archer described his first meeting with Ibsen in a letter to his brother, future biographer, and sometime co-translator of Ibsen, Charles Archer: he had bravely asked to be introduced to “the great Henrik” one evening in Rome’s Scandinavian Club, presenting himself as the English transla-tor of Pillars of Society, the only Ibsen play to have been performed in England thus far (in a single, mostly unremarked matinee in London the preceding year). Archer undoubtedly did not tell Ibsen that he had agreed to abridge the text for actor-manager W. H. Vernon and had added an enticing title: Quicksands; or The Pillars of Society. Archer reports to his brother with great satisfaction that his and Ibsen’s conver-sation was convivial and that Ibsen invited him to call (CA 101-02).

Ibsen liked the deferential and erudite Archer, and by the end of Archer’s Roman holiday, they had become friends. Over the years, Archer would pay Ibsen occasional visits, and their correspondence lasted until Ibsen’s final illness almost twenty years later. An indefatigable

THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 5

champion of Ibsen for four decades, Archer was the leader of the English Ibsen campaign and the first major translator of Ibsen’s plays into English. Correcting the proofs of the five volumes of Ibsen’s Prose Dramas, brought out by Walter Scott in 1890-91, Archer wrote to his brother, making, as was his habit, a literary allusion, that they were “on the whole the most satisfactory job of my life, even with all their imper-fections on their heads” (CA 186). Later, Archer would provide most of the translations for the first English edition of Ibsen’s complete works, The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, brought out by William Heinemann in eleven volumes (1906-08). Besides his reverence for Ibsen as a writer, Archer was fond of him personally, and called him, affectionately (and privately), in a Scots accent, “the old min.”

In 1883, Archer went to Christiania (later Oslo), where he saw A Doll’s House, returning night after night to marvel at the last scene, the confrontation between wife and husband. He also saw the Norwegian premiere of the even more scandalous Ghosts, the great Swedish actor-manager August Lindberg’s landmark production in which Lindberg played the syphilitic Oswald. Both productions confirmed Archer’s con-viction that the strict censorship exercised by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office would make performance of both plays impossible in England.

The next London season saw a performance meant to make Ibsen acceptable to the British playgoer. The young playwright Henry Arthur Jones, fresh from his first success, the melodrama The Silver King (1882), was asked by a West End manager to produce a “sympathetic” Nora, and, with the help of his collaborator Henry Herman, Jones trans-formed Ibsen’s disturbing play into the innocuous Breaking A Butterfly. Harley Granville Barker, the actor, director, critic, and playwright who would become Shaw’s beloved friend and important collaborator at the Royal Court Theatre, called the adaptation a “perversion” and gave the following account of it in his delightful essay, “The Coming of Ibsen”:

Nora becomes Flora, and, to her husband, rather terribly,

Flossie. . . . The morbid Dr. Rank is replaced by Charles

his-friend, called, as if to wipe out every trace of his original,

Ben Birdseye! He is not in love with Nora, of course; that

6 J. TEMPLETON

would never do. . . . [T]he tarantella is left intact, of course.

But the third act sees the parent play stood deliberately on its

head, and every ounce of Ibsen emptied out of it. Burlesque

could do no more. Torvald-Humphrey behaves like the pasteboard

hero of Nora’ doll’s-house dream; he does strike his chest and say:

“I am the guilty one!” And Nora-Flora cries that she is a poor weak

foolish girl, “no wife for a man like you. You are a thousand times

too good for me,” and never wakes up and walks out of her doll’s

house at all.6

In his review of Breaking A Butterfly, in a quip that is often quoted, Archer noted that the phrase in the playbill “founded on Ibsen’s Nora” should have read “founded on the ruins of Ibsen’s Nora”; Jones and Herman had “trivialized” Ibsen’s play. But he also added a caveat to this judgment, one that has been largely ignored: “I am the last to blame them for doing so. Ibsen on the English stage is impossible. He must be trivialized, and I believe that Messrs. Jones and Herman have performed that office as well as could reasonably be expected.”7 (To his credit, Jones later apologized for Breaking A Butterfly.)

Shaw and Archer, both born in 1856 (Shaw was two months older), met during the winter of 1882-83 in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where both were habitués. Archer’s description of Shaw is now iconic: “I frequently sat next to a man of about my own age (twenty-five) [actually, twenty-six] who attracted my attention, partly by his peculiar colouring—his pallid skin and bright red hair and beard—partly by the odd combination of authors whom he used to study—for I saw him, day after day, poring over Karl Marx’s Das Kapital [in French] and an orchestral score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. How we first made acquaintance I have forgotten; but one did not need to meet him twice to be sure that George Bernard Shaw was a personality to be noted and studied.” He adds: “At any rate, we became fast friends” (CA 119).

Recognizing Shaw’s brilliance and wanting to help him out of his pov-erty, Archer was of primary importance in Shaw’s belated start as a jour-nalist. He passed on to him a number of book reviewing assignments,

THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 7

and in 1886, the post of art critic for the fashionable World. Archer, who was the newspaper’s dramatic critic, had been persuaded to add art reviewing to his task; when, as he later wrote, his “conscience could endure it no longer” (CA 135), he suggested to Shaw, a self-taught stu-dent of art history who had spent countless hours in Dublin’s National Gallery, that he send the editor a writing sample. Shaw was hired on the spot. A few years later, when the music critic of the World resigned, Archer once again did Shaw (and the World) another good turn. Shaw had been steeped in music since his boyhood in Dublin; his mother was a leading amateur singer, and Shaw learned songs and operas from her vocal scores, teaching himself to play the piano using the score of Don Giovanni. In London, where both Shaw’s mother and sister had music careers, Shaw continued to immerse himself in music at concerts and in the books and scores of the British Museum library. Archer secured the job for Shaw, he wrote, by simply telling Edmund Yates, the newspaper’s editor, “the truth: namely that he was at once the most competent and the most brilliant writer on music then living in England” (CA 135).

Charles Archer notes that the friendship between his brother and Shaw was “founded on a common idealism in fundamentals” and that it stood “the strain of radical difference of temperament and wide diver-gence of views” (CA 119). Both men held a deep belief in the worth of the individual, but the gentlemanly Archer, in spite of his strong anti-clericalism, was conservative in many ways and was far less demand-ing than Shaw as a critic, appreciating the popular, well-made plays of Eugène Scribe and his followers and saluting Arthur Wing Pinero as the regenerator of English drama. Shaw, one of whose pen names was “N. G.” (No Gentleman), was an ardent socialist with critical views on virtually everything, including the theatre, which, like Archer, he had learned to love in his youth. He escaped from a series of dreary schools in Dublin at the Theatre Royal, whose stock company put on Shakespeare, farces, intrigue dramas, melodramas, and of course the Christmas pantomime. There were touring companies as well, which allowed him to see Henry Irving and the actor he considered the great-est of all, Barry Sullivan. Shaw, like Archer, loved the theatre and had very eclectic tastes, but he despised drama that pretended to be better than it was; he scorned the artificialities of Scribean drama, which he called “Sardoodledom,” after Victorien Sardou, Scribe’s most popular follower, and castigated the plays of Pinero as melodrama pretending to