Pygmalion & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

Von Bernard Shaw

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Pygmalion contains 272 letters and entries, written between 1896 and 1950, and edited by a leading contemporary Shavian Vitaly Baziyan. This publication from Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion, Constable and Company Ltd.: London, 1920 is a handmade reproduction from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading. Here are some inspirational book quotes from the book: 'Pygmalion is essentially a star play: unless you have an actress of extraordinary qualifications and popularity, failure is certain.' 'Pygmalion is my last potboiler. In future I will write plays that will not be understood for 25 years, if ever.' 'Pygmalion is my most steady source of income: it saved me from ruin during the war, and still brings in a substantial penny every week.' 'Am quite sensible, quite able, quite myself, and yet a lad playing with you on the mountains and unable to feel where you begin and I leave off. And if you tell me that you feel like that the sky will not be high enough for me (isnt that a nice Irish phrase?) Heavens! how delicious it is to make love to you!!!!!' ' Very well, go: the loss of a woman is not the end of the world. The sun shines: it is pleasant to swim: it is good to work: my soul can stand alone.' 'Last week a woman poisoned me with a war substitute for cocoa, as a result of which I not only suffered internal convulsions. . . but pitched head foremost down a flight of 17 stairs and landed on a my valuable head, which now looks like a composite of Michael Angelo' Moses and Shakspear…' 'I accused Mrs Patrick Campbell of having given me the dope in a cup of some stuff called Ovaltine, into which she put about half a canister. If I mentioned this in my letter, Ovaltine would get £20,000 damages out of us; and Mrs Campbell would be held up as Mrs Lucretia Borgia.' 'I am a Classic. I have never pretended to be anything else.' '…the amazing fact that I have ever been mistaken for anything else is due solely to the ignorance of literature prevalent among journalists who have no time for reading, and, indeed, no taste for it: an ignorance which enables managers to mutilate, travesty, and misrepresent Shakespear without detection or rebuke…' 'No art can have power for good without having power for evil also. If you teach a child to write, you thereby teach it to forge cheques as much as to write poems.' 'As you very properly say, the whole world is a fool; and I alone am right. Otherwise, what am I?' 'No I dont miss your love-making—and your sonnets! I know you so well Joey—and just how much you appreciated me—and how little—' 'I love you soulfully & bodyfully, properly and improperly, every way that a woman can be loved.' 'You know you always thought me a fool, and …that never did I think your love making other than what it was—sympathy, kindness, and the wit and folly of genius.' 'How much would you know about me if you read what people write about me instead of going to the original?' 'If you are really in love, this will not make you yawn.' 'The more unforeseen the development the better.' 'Trust your inspiration. If you have none, sweep a crossing. No one is compelled to write plays.' 'All film adventurers denounce one another as crooks, mostly quite justly.'

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Erscheinungsdatum: 26. Dez. 2021
• ISBN: 9783754179956

Buchvorschau

Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

Edited by Vitaly Baziyan

Copyright © 2021 Vitaly Baziyan

All rights reserved

A romance in five acts Pygmalion, written during 1912 and 1913, was first published in a translation by Bernard Shaw’s first German translator and literary agent Siegfried Trebitsch on the 16th October 1913 by S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin simultaneously with the first performance at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna. The first edition in English was published unauthorised on the 13th November 1914 by American firm G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The first authorised edition was published on the 21st April 1916 by Brentano’s in New York. The first English edition was published on the 25th May 1916 by Constable and Company Ltd. in London (Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion).

George Bernard Shaw won The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925 for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.

This publication from Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion, Constable and Company Ltd.: London, 1920 is a handmade reproduction from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading.

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Pygmalion contains 272 letters and entries written between 1896 and 1950. Sources of this collection are prior publications Collected Letters of Bernard Shaw published by Max Reinhardt; edition of letters published by University of Toronto Press; Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, in Two Volumes, Band 1 published by Oxford University Press; Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch published by Stanford University Press; Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a correspondence published by Constable and Co Ltd, London; The playwright and the pirate. Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris: a correspondence as well as Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed published by Pennsylvania State University Press; Shaw on Theatre published by Hill and Wang, New York; Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Granville Barker published by Theatre Arts Books, New York; Shaw published by Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh; Advice to a Young Critic published by Peter Owen Limited; The Letters of Bernard Shaw to the Times published by Irish Academic Press; Bernard Shaw on Cinema published by Southern Illinois University Press; The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Volume Three, 1905 – 1924 The Power to Alter Things, Volume Four, 1924 – 1943 The Wheel of Life published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw published by Bernard F. Dukore; To a Young Actress: The Letters of Bernard Shaw to Molly Tompkins published by Constable, London; Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence published by Victor Gollancz, London; My life and some letters. By Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Stella Cornwallis-West) published by Hutchinson & Co.

This book represents a significant addition to modern-day understanding of Shaw’s play Pygmalion. It reveals his thoughts on a wide variety of issues and relationships with contemporaries. Bernard Shaw’s punctuation and spelling were mostly kept by the editor. Italics were used for plays titles, books, newspapers and unfamiliar foreign words or phrases. Christian names, surnames, positions and ranks were added in square brackets when they were omitted but are necessary for a better understanding. Cuts of a few words are indicated by three dots and longer omissions by four dots.

As to the equivalent of £1 now and then, editor’s query has been passed onto the Enquiries team of the Bank of England. In answer to his question ‘what is the equivalent of £25,000 in 1940 today?’, he received the following response ‘This would be approximately £1,431,188.12.’ This means that £1 in 1940 would be roughly £57.25 in 2020 with an inflation averaged 5.2% a year. Bank of England’s inflation calculator might be of interest to readers in case they have any inflation calculation queries relating to any sum of money mentioned in this book.

The ebook cover was created by the editor using the picture of Sir John Everett Millais.

The play Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on the 16th October 1913 in German by Siegfried Trebitsch.

Characters

Eliza Doolittle – Lilli Marberg

Professor Henry Higgins – Max Paulsen

Colonel Pickering – Oskar Gimnig

Alfred Doolittle – Heine Eugen

Freddy Eynsford-Hill – Charles Kaiser

A Bystander – Eugen Muratori

Another one – Hermann Wawra

Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Else Haeberle

Miss Clara Eynsford-Hill – Gisela Wilke

Mrs Higgins – Auguste Wilbrandt-Baudius

Mrs Pearce – Tini Senders

Parlourmaid – Antonie Schulz

Producer – Hugo Thimig

Pygmalion was first presented in England by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s Theatre in London on the 11th April 1914.

Characters

Eliza Doolittle – Mrs Patrick Campbell

Professor Henry Higgins – Herbert Tree

Colonel Pickering – Philip Merivale

Alfred Doolittle – Edmund Gurney

Freddy Eynsford-Hill – Algernon Grieg

A Bystander – Roy Byford

Another one – Alexander Sarner

Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Carlotta Addison

Miss Clara Eynsford-Hill – Margaret Bussé

Mrs Higgins – Rosamund Mayne-Young

Mrs Pearce – Geraldine Olliffe

Parlourmaid – Irene Delisse

Producer – Bernard Shaw

A German film of Pygmalion was created by Klagemann-Film GmbH (Germany) between June and August 1935. The film was first shown on the 2nd September 1935 at the Berlin Capitol cinema.

Characters

Eliza Doolittle – Jeny Jugo

Henry Higgins – Gustaf Gründgens

Colonel Pickering – Anton Edthofer

Alfred Doolittle – Eugen Klöpfer

Mrs Higgins – Hedwig Bleibtreu

Mrs Pearce – Käthe Haack

Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Olga Limburg

Clara Eynsford-Hill – Karin Evans

Freddy Eynsford-Hill – Vivigenz Eickstedt

Betsy – Erika Glässner

Jonny – Hans Richter

Screenplay – Heinrich Oberlander, Walter Wassermann

Producer – Eberhard Klagemann

Director – Erich Engel

An English film of Pygmalion was filmed at Pinewood Studios (England) in 1938. The film was first shown in London at Leicester Square Theatre on the 6th October 1938. George Bernard Shaw won the Oscar in 1939 for Best Screenplay and Dialogue for his role in adapting his play Pygmalion for the screen.

Characters

Eliza Doolittle – Wendy Hiller

Professor Henry Higgins – Leslie Howard

Colonel Pickering – Scott Sunderland

Alfred Doolittle – Wilfrid Lawson

Freddy Eynsford-Hill – David Tree

The four bystanders – Ivor Barnard, Wally Patch, H. F. Maltby, George Mozart

Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Everley Gregg

Miss Clara Eynsford-Hill – Lueen MacGrath

Mrs Higgins – Marie Löhr

Mrs Pearce – Jean Cadell

Parlourmaid – Eileen Beldon

Extra characters

Taximan – Frank Atkinson

The Vicar – O. B. Clarence

Count Aristid Karpathy (in the published version of the film script Nepommuck) – Esmé Percy

The Ambassadress – Violet Vanbrugh

A social reporter Ysabel – Iris Hoey

Another social reporter Perfide – Viola Tree

A Duchess – Irene Browne

A Grand Old Lady – Kate Cutler

A Lady – Cathleen Nesbitt

Constable – Cecil Trouncer

Second Constable – Stephen Murray

Screenplay – Bernard Shaw

Producer – Gabriel Pascal

Directors – Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard

Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play Pygmalion

1/ A British politician, sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian, social reformer, fellow Fabian, one of the founders of the London School of Economics, and Bernard Shaw’s long-standing friend Beatrice Webb née Potter to Charlotte Payne-Townshend [later Mrs Bernard Shaw]

20th April 1896

My dear Miss Townshend

We are back from our holiday—a delightful fortnight in the Lakes—feeling ever so much stronger for the change.

The appeal for the Library Fund [of The London School of Economics and Political Science] in the Papers has produced nothing. As it happened the immense excitement caused by [John] Gorst’s revolutionary Education Bill has sickened the public of every educational institution. Moreover, the idea tho’ it appeals so markedly to the enlightened man who knows and cares for Public Administration does not recommend itself to the mere Plutocrat. We have had various subscriptions coming in from those we have written to privately and the Clothworkers Company have promised £100—altogether the fund now amounts to £3,000. I am afraid we must be content to start with that. That means either a very small house in the Charing Cross neighbourhood or a house in Bloomsbury; and a very modest beginning in the way of books. I have suggested to Sidney [Webb] that the scholars should be expected to collect and catalogue the books and papers connected with the subject they undertake to investigate—the Library of course defraying the cost of postage and purchase. Small special collections similar to our collection of trade union reports are so much more valuable to future students than a mass of stuff sent in haphazard.

Mr [William Albert Samuel] Hewins reports well of the School—there are more enquiries about it than at any previous time—there is no doubt that the appeal for the [School] Library has advertised it immensely.

Shaw [The Webbs introduced Charlotte Payne-Townshend to Bernard Shaw on the 29th January 1896.] and [Graham] Wallas are still at the Cottage—but the latter has been up and down to London writing all the articles for the Daily Chronicle on Gorst’s Bill. The last time that I saw him was immediately after it was introduced, when he and [Henry William] Massingham (the Editor, Daily Chronicle) dined with us—both were boiling over with rage at the Bill. Sidney [Webb] takes a more moderate view and sees some good in it—but on the whole he thinks it will be mischievous and if it remains as drafted hopes it will not pass.

How do you find Rome and your Italian friends? [Charlotte Payne-Townshend had lived for some time in Rome and had a close relationship with the Swedish doctor Axel Martin Fredrik Munthe, best known as the author of an autobiographical account of his life and work The Story of San Michele.] Do you not find that London and the Fabians and such sordid subjects as Economics and Public Administration seem an ugly and distasteful memory, under the blue Italian sky! We shall be very glad to see you back to consult about the Library etc.

Ever yours

Beatrice Webb

P.S. By the way do you not think we might adopt the shorter address of the Christian name?

2/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 16th September 1896

. . . Meanwhile a new friend has joined the ‘Bo’ family. [Beatrice was named ‘Bo’ by her relatives.] Charlotte Payne-Townshend is a wealthy unmarried woman of about my own age. Bred up in second-rate fashionable society without any education or habit of work, she found herself at about thirty-three years of age alone in the world, without ties, without any definite creed, and with a large income. For the last four years she has drifted about—in India, in Italy, in Egypt, in London, seeking occupation and fellow spirits. In person she is attractive—a large graceful woman with masses of chocolate-brown hair, pleasant grey eyes, ‘matte’ complexion which sometimes looks muddy, at other times forms a picturesquely pale background to her brilliant hair and bright eyes. She dresses well—in her flowing white evening robes she approaches beauty. At moments she is plain. By temperament she is an anarchist—feeling any regulation or rule intolerable—a tendency which has been exaggerated by her irresponsible wealth. She is romantic but thinks herself cynical. She is a socialist and a radical, not because she understands the collectivist standpoint, but because she is by nature a rebel. She has no snobbishness and no convention: she has ‘swallowed all formulas’ but has not worked out principles of her own. She is fond of men and impatient of most women, bitterly resents her enforced celibacy but thinks she could not tolerate the matter-of-fact side of marriage. Sweet-tempered, sympathetic and genuinely anxious to increase the world’s enjoyment and diminish the world’s pain.

This is the woman who has, for a short time or for good, entered the ‘Bo’ family. Last autumn she was introduced to us. We, knowing she was wealthy, and hearing she was socialistic, interested her in the London School of Economics. She subscribed £1,000 [£139,906.98 in 2021 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator] to the [School’s] Library, endowed a woman’s scholarship, and has now taken the rooms over the School at Adelphi Terrace, paying us £300 a year for rent and service. It was on account of her generosity to our projects and ‘for the good of the cause’ that I first made friends with her. To bring her more directly into our little set of comrades, I suggested that we should take a house together in the country and entertain our friends. To me she seemed at that time a pleasant, well-dressed, well-intentioned woman—I thought she should do very well for Graham Wallas! Now she turns out to be an ‘original’, with considerable personal charm and certain volcanic tendencies. Graham Wallas bored her with his morality and learning. In a few days she and Bernard Shaw were constant companions. For the last fortnight, when the party has been reduced to ourselves and Shaw, and we have been occupied with our work and each other, they have been scouring the country together and sitting up late at night. To all seeming, she is in love with the brilliant philanderer and he is taken, in his cold sort of way, with her. They are, I gather from him, on very confidential terms and have ‘explained’ their relative positions. Though interested I am somewhat uneasy. These warm-hearted unmarried women of a certain age are audacious and are almost childishly reckless of consequences. I doubt whether Bernard Shaw could be induced to marry: I doubt whether she will be happy without it. It is harder for a woman to remain celibate than a man.

[Beatrice Webb]

3/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 9th March 1897

—As I mounted the stairs with Shaw’s Unsocial Socialist to return to Bertha Newcombe I felt somewhat uncomfortable as I knew I should encounter a sad soul full of bitterness and loneliness. I stepped into a small wainscotted studio and was greeted coldly by the little woman. She is petite and dark, about forty years old but looks more like a wizened girl than a fully developed woman. Her jet-black hair heavily fringed, half-smart, half-artistic clothes, pinched aquiline features and thin lips, give you a somewhat unpleasant impression though not wholly inartistic. She is bad style without being vulgar or common or loud—indeed many persons, Kate Courtney for instance, would call her ‘lady-like’—but she is insignificant and undistinguished. ‘I want to talk to you, Mrs Webb,’ she said when I seated myself. And then followed, told with the dignity of devoted feeling, the story of her relationship to Bernard Shaw, her five years of devoted love, his cold philandering, her hopes aroused by repeated advice to him (which he, it appears, had repeated much exaggerated) to marry her, and then her feeling of misery and resentment against me when she discovered that I was encouraging him ‘to marry Miss Townshend’. Finally, he had written a month ago to break it off entirely: they were not to meet again. And I had to explain with perfect frankness that so long as there seemed a chance for her I had been willing to act as chaperone, that she had never been a personal friend of mine or Sidney’s, that I had regarded her only as Shaw’s friend, and that as far as I was concerned I should have welcomed her as his wife. But directly I saw that he meant nothing I backed out of the affair. She took it all quietly, her little face seemed to shrink up and the colour of her skin looked as if it were reflecting the sad lavender of her dress.

‘You are well out of it, Miss Newcombe,’ I said gently. ‘If you had married Shaw he would not have remained faithful to you. You know my opinion of him—as a friend and a colleague, as a critic and literary worker, there are few men for whom I have so warm a liking; but in his relations with women he is vulgar, if not worse; it is a vulgarity that includes cruelty and springs from vanity.’

As I uttered these words my eye caught her portrait of Shaw—full-length, with his red-gold hair and laughing blue eyes and his mouth slightly open as if scoffing at us both, a powerful picture in which the love of the woman had given genius to the artist. Her little face turned to follow my eyes and she also felt the expression of the man, the mockery at her deep-rooted affection. ‘It is so horribly lonely,’ she muttered. ‘I daresay it is more peaceful than being kept on the rack, but it is like the peace of death.’ There seemed nothing more to be said. I rose and with a perfunctory ‘Come and see me—someday,’ I kissed her on the forehead and escaped down the stairs. And then I thought of that other woman with her loving easygoing nature and anarchic luxurious ways, her well-bred manners and well-made clothes, her leisure, wealth and knowledge of the world. Would she succeed in taming the philanderer?

[Beatrice Webb]

4/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 1st May 1897

. . . I am watching with concern and curiosity the development of the Shaw-Townshend friendship. All this winter they have been lovers—of a philandering and harmless kind, always together when Shaw was free. Charlotte insisted on taking a house with us in order that he might be here constantly, and it is obvious that she is deeply attached to him. But I see no sign on his side of the growth of any genuine and steadfast affection. He finds it pleasant to be with her in her luxurious surroundings, he has been studying her and all her little ways and amusing himself by dissecting the rich woman brought up without training and drifting about at the beck of impulse. I think he has now exhausted the study, observed all that there is to observe. He has been flattered by her devotion and absorption in him; he is kindly and has a cat-like preference for those persons to whom he is accustomed. But there are ominous signs that he is tired of watching the effect of little words of gallantry and personal interest with which he plied her in the first months of the friendship. And he is annoyed by her lack of purpose and utter incapacity for work. If she would set to, and do even the smallest and least considerable task of intellectual work, I believe she could retain his interest and perhaps develop his feeling for her. Otherwise he will drift away, for Shaw is too high-minded and too conventionally honourable to marry her for the life of leisure and luxury he could gain for himself as her husband.

[Beatrice Webb]

5/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 8th May 1897

Silly these philanderings of Shaw’s. He imagines that he gets to know women by making them in love with him. Just the contrary. His stupid gallantries bar out from him the friendship of women who are either too sensible, too puritanical or too much ‘otherwise engaged’ to care to bandy personal flatteries with him. One large section of women, comprising some, at any rate, of the finest types, remains hidden from him. With the women with whom he has ‘bonne fortune’ he also fails in his object, or rather in his avowed object—vivisection. He idealizes them for a few days, weeks or years, imagines them to be something utterly different from their true selves, then has a revulsion of feeling and discovers them to be unutterably vulgar, second-rate, rapscallion, or insipidly well-bred. He never fathoms their real worth, nor rightly sees their limitations. But in fact it is not the end he cares for: it is the process. His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity, delight in being the candle to the moths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity. And he is mistaken if he thinks that it does not affect his artistic work. His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationships, the lack of the sterner kind of humour which would show him the dreariness of his farce and the total absence of proportion and inadequateness in some of his ideas, all these defects come largely from the flippant and worthless self-complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women. For all that, he is a good-natured agreeable sprite of a man, an intellectual cricket on the hearth always chirping away brilliant paradox, sharp-witted observation and friendly comments. Whether I like him, admire him or despise him most I do not know. Just at present I feel annoyed and contemptuous.

For the dancing light has gone out of Charlotte’s eyes—there is at times a blank haggard look, a look that I myself felt in my own eyes for long years. But throughout all my misery I had the habit of hard work and an almost religious sense of my intellectual mission. I had always my convent to fly to. Poor Charlotte has nowhere to turn. She can only wander listless through the world, with no reason for turning one way rather than another. What a comfort to be a fanatic. It is Bernard Shaw’s fanaticism to turn everything inside out and see whether the other side won’t do just as well if not better; it is this fanaticism which gives him genuine charm. He has a sort of affectionateness too, underneath his vanity. Will she touch that?

[Beatrice Webb]

6/ To a renowned English actress and actor-manager Ellen Terry

8th September 1897

. . . Are you going to do Peter [the Great by Laurence Irving] on the road? You should. Think of how much anxiety it will save you if you have your difficulties with the words settled before the first night in London. [Richard] Mansfield produces "The Devil’s Disciple" at the 5th Avenue Theatre on the 6th Oct, after an experiment or two with it in the provinces. Ah, if you only would play a matinee of it with Forbes[-Robertson], I would actually go to see it (a compliment I haven’t paid Candida). Besides, I would teach that rapscallionly flower girl of his something. "Caesar & Cleopatra" has been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write for them in which he shall be a west end gentleman and she [Mrs Patrick Campbell] an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers [a first reference to Pygmalion written during 1912 and 1913].

I see you wont tell me anything about Prossy. It would be seething the kid in its mother’s milk, I suppose; but still I do want to know in general terms whether my style of work fits her. [Ellen Terry’s daughter Edith Craig played Prossy in Bernard Shaw’s play Candida.]

It is luncheon hour, and there’s a visitor.

That letter would not have surprised anybody at the hotel. Did you ever read "Rejected Addresses [by the brothers James and Horace Smith]? I only remember three lines from Lady Elizabeth Mugg."

—for who would not slavery hug,

to spend but one exquisite hour

in the arms of Elizabeth Mugg!

I should write the same about you if there were any rhyme to Ellen. I love you soulfully & bodyfully, properly and improperly, every way that a woman can be loved.

GBS

7/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 27th September 1897

These two months we have overworked for enjoyment; constantly too exhausted to care for exercise, and days when extreme exasperation from over-brainwork has made me quite incapable of enjoying the country. Also Shaw and Charlotte’s relationship is disturbing. Shaw goes on untroubled, working hard at his plays and then going long rides with her on a tandem cycle. But she is always restless and sometimes unhappy, too anxious to be with him. He is sometimes bored, but he is getting to feel her a necessary part of his ‘entourage’ and would, I think, object to her breaking away from the relationship. He persuades himself that by keeping her occupied he is doing her good. If it were not for the fact that he is Shaw I should say that he was dishonourable. But as he has always advertised his views of marriage and philandering from the housetops, every woman ought to be prepared for his logical carrying out of these principles.

[Beatrice Webb]

8/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 5th February 1899

Since we returned to England [Beatrice and Sidney Webb went away for a trip round the world.] I have been disinclined to write in my diary, having nothing to relate and having lost the habit of intimate confidences, impossible in a joint diary such as we have kept together during our journey round the world. One cannot run on into self-analysis, family gossip, or indiscreet and hasty descriptions of current happenings, if someone else, however dear, is solemnly to read one’s chatter then and there. I foresee the sort of kindly indulgence or tolerant boredom with which Sidney would decipher the last entry and this feeling would, in itself, make it impossible to write whatever came into my head at the time of writing without thought of his criticism.

With regard to our friends and relations, we found only two persons whose lives had been completely changed during our absence—our two friends GBS and Charlotte have married each other. Shaw has become a chronic invalid, Charlotte a devoted nurse. They live in an attractive house up at Hindhead. He still writes but his work seems to be getting unreal: he leads a hothouse life, he cannot walk or get among his equals. He is as witty and as cheery as of old. But now and again a flush of fatigue or a sign of brain irritation passes over him. Charlotte, under pressure of anxiety for the man she loves, has broadened out into a motherly woman and lost her anarchic determination to live according to her momentary desires. There are some compensations for the sadness of the sudden cutting-off of his activity.

[Beatrice Webb]

9/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 30th October 1899

. . . The Shaws have taken up their residence in Charlotte’s attractive flat over the School of Economics, and Sidney and I meet there on Thursdays to dine sumptuously between our respective lectures. Charlotte and Shaw have settled down into the most devoted married couple, she gentle and refined, with happiness added thereto, and he showing no sign of breaking loose from her dominion. What the intellectual product of the marriage will be I do not feel so sure: at any rate he will not become a dilettante, the habit of work is too deeply engrained. It is interesting to watch his fitful struggles out of the social complacency natural to an environment of charm and plenty. How can atmosphere be resisted? . . .

[Beatrice Webb]

10/ To an English stage actress Mrs Patrick Campbell née Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner known informally as Mrs Pat

22nd November 1901

My dear Mrs Patrick Campbell

Thank you for your beautiful photograph [Mrs Patrick Campbell as Clara Sang in the play Over ævne, første stykke (Beyond Human Power) by the first Norwegian Nobel laureate Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson]; but I should have photographed you in bed, saying It’s tempting Providence. That was the finest passage in the play. After all, there are lots of beautiful people about; and some of them can perhaps even thread needles with their toes; but they cant take a filament of grey matter from their brains and thread it infallibly through that most elusive of eyelet holes in the top of a dramatist’s needle. Besides, that produces a new sort of beauty, compared to which natural beauty is a mere reach-me-down from Nature’s patterns. Long ago, when everybody was maudlin about your loveliness, I snapped my fingers—admired nothing bin your deft fingers and toes. Now I admire you ENORMOUSLY. You have picked the work of nature to pieces and remade it whole heavens finer. It is the power to do that that is the real gift. . . .

Yours sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

11/ Bernard Shaw’s article Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers contributed to the Society of Authors’ quarterly journal The Author

1st April 1902

Spelling generally

I always use the American termination or for our. Theater, somber, center, etc., I reject only because they are wantonly anti-phonetic: theatre, sombre, etc., being nearer the sound. Such abominable Frenchifications as programme, cigarette, etc., are quite revolting to me. Telegram, quartet, etc., deprive them of all excuse. I should like also to spell epilogue epilog, because people generally mispronounce it, just as they would mispronounce catalogue if the right sound were not so familiar [also Shakespear and shew instead of Shakespeare and show]. That is the worst of unphonetic spelling: in the long run people pronounce words as they are spelt; and so the language gets senselessly altered. 

Contractions

The apostrophies in ain’t, don’t, haven’t, etc., look so ugly that the most careful printing cannot make a page of colloquial dialogue as handsome as a page of classical dialogue. Besides, shan’t should be sha’’n’t, if the wretched pedantry of indicating the elision is to be carried out. I have written aint, dont, havnt, shant, shouldnt and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. I also write thats, whats, lets, for the colloquial forms of that is, what is, let us; and I have not yet been prosecuted.

Hyphens

I think some of the hyphens given are questionable. Smallpox is right; and small pox is right; but small-pox is, I should say, certainly wrong. A hyphen between an adverb and a verb, or an adjective and a noun, is only defensible when the collocation would be ambiguous without it. The rule given that compound words of more than one accent should be hyphened is, like most rules, a mere brazening-out of a mistake.

Punctuation

Stops are clearly as much the author’s business as words. The rules given here are very properly confined to matters of custom in printing. I wish, however, that the Clarendon Press, or some other leading house, would make a correct rule for the punctuation of quotations between inverted commas. The common practice is to put the points belonging to the sentence in which the quotation occurs inside the inverted commas instead of outside. For example: Was he wise to say "Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die?" The correct, but less usual punctuation is: Was he wise to say "Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die"?

Italics

This is deplorable. To the good printer the occurrence of two different founts on the same page is at best an unavoidable evil. To the bad one, it is an opportunity of showing off the variety of his stock: he is never happier than when he is setting up a title-page in all the founts he possesses. Not only should titles not be printed in italic; but the customary ugly and unnecessary inverted commas should be abolished. Let me give a specimen. 1. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. 2. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. 3. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. The man who cannot see that No. 1 is the best looking as well as the sufficient and sensible form should print or write nothing but advertisements of lost dogs or ironmongers’ catalogues: literature is not for him to meddle with.

On the whole, and excepting expressly the deplorable heresy about italics, these Clarendon Press rules will serve the turn of the numerous authors who have no ideas of their own on the subject, or who are still in their apprenticeship, or who, as English gentlemen, desire to do, not the sensible and reasonable thing, but the thing that everybody else does. At the same time, the poverty of the rules shews how far we still are from having an accurate speech notation. To the essayist and the scientific writer this may not greatly matter; but to the writer of fiction, especially dramatic fiction, it is a serious drawback, as the desperate phonetics of our dialect novels show. Now the Clarendon Press prints for the essayist and the professor much more than for the fictionist. I therefore suggest that some well-known printer of novels should be asked for a copy of his rules, if he has any. A Scotch printer for preference, as the Scotch intellect likes to know what it is doing.

G. Bernard Shaw

12/ To a novelist, playwright, Bernard Shaw’s first German translator, and literary agent Siegfried Trebitsch

1st July 1902

My dear Trebitsch

The following information may be useful to [an Austrian writer, playwright, director, and critic] Hermann Bahr. I am an Irishman (like [a novelist, playwright and poet Oliver] Goldsmith & [a satirist, playwright, poet, and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Richard Brinsley Butler] Sheridan), born in Dublin on the 26th July 1856. I came to London in 1876. I wrote 5 novels; but nobody would publish them. I was equally unsuccessful in my attempts to get work as a journalist: no editor would touch my articles. Early in the eighteen-eighties there was a revival of Socialism in England. I plunged into the movement, having been greatly impressed by Das Kapital, which I read in the French translation. However, I soon challenged the soundness of [Karl] Marx’s economics, and threw over the traditions of the revolutionary party of 1848–71. The English Social-Democrats were as much horrified at my heresy against Marx as the German Social-Democrats now are at the similar heresies of [Eduard] Bernstein. In 1884 a society of middle class Socialists—mostly journalists and civil servants—was founded under the title of The Fabian Society. Of this society I became a leading member. Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier (now colonial secretary in Jamaica) and Graham Wallas were my colleagues; and we set to work to find a perfectly constitutional and parliamentary formula for Socialism, and to free it from the Marxian dogmas and from the old fashioned revolutionary street fighting foolishness. Bernstein was in exile in London at that time; and it was by us that he was won over from his Marxian orthodoxy to his present position. For twelve years I was very active as a public speaker and agitator, delivering addresses from all sorts of platforms, sometimes to the British Association or the literary societies, sometimes to the passers-by in the streets and parks.

In the meantime I had at last (from 1885 onward) obtained work as a critic, first of literature and then of music. My mother had been a distinguished amateur of music in Dublin; and I had acquired a good deal of knowledge of music in this way in my boyhood. I used my musical feuilletons as vehicles for political & social satire, and soon began to be known by my signature G.B.S. I still call myself a pupil of [Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart in comedy much more than of any of the English literary dramatists. Later on I criticised the theatre, and fought for [Henrik Johan] Ibsen as I had already fought for [Wilhelm Richard] Wagner. I also criticised pictures. The dates are, roughly, 1885 to 1889, literature in the Pall Mall Gazette & painting in The World; 1888 to 1890, music in The Star; 1890 to 1894, music in The World; 1895 to 1898, the theatre in The Saturday Review—practically ten years of criticism. In 1898 I got married.

The story of my plays is in the prefaces to Plays, Pleasant & Unpleasant; so I need not repeat it here. Besides my novels (the best known of which is "Cashel Byron’s Profession) and the plays, I have published The Quintessence of Ibsenism and The Perfect Wagnerite, both of them rather philosophical than critical. Some of my Socialist writings, especially those in Fabian Essays [in Socialism]" (of which I was the editor), have been translated into German.

If there is anything else you want to know, write me a catechism & I will answer all your questions.

When the theatres come to business about the plays we can agree as to the division of the royalties. Shall we share half & half? But we must agree for each play separately, as you must always be able to tell the managers that you can do nothing without my consent and that the royalty must be enough for two. I will not promise to take half what they offer; but you must insist on their giving double what I will take. My rapacity will be your excuse for pressing them to give the full market price. By the way, what is the usual price? We must not try to get too much; but then we must not err in the opposite direction either.

In haste, yrs sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

13/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 4th September 1906

. . . Among the friends who have visited us are the Granville Barkers, he staying for ten days, she for Sunday. G.B. is a most attractive person, young and good-looking—good-looking in a charming refined fashion, with a subtle intellectual expression—faculties more analytic than artistic? I think with self-control, industry, freedom from vulgar desires and common fears—with varied interests, good memory; a sharp observer of human nature and above all with a delicate appreciation of music, poetry and art—a medley of talents of which I do not yet see a very definite whole. He has not yet emancipated himself from GBS’s influence or found his own soul. I think what he lacks is warmth of feeling—he is cold, with little active pity or admiration, or faithful devotion. A better acquaintance than a friend, a better friend than a husband. At least that is his pose, and it is difficult in ten days’ uneventful companionship—a companionship of talk not acts—to distinguish the pose from the reality.

She [an actress and theatre manager Lillah McCarthy] is a strikingly handsome lady, also hard-working and dutiful—a puritan, I think, by temperament; her acting is a craft, not an art. Otherwise, I fear she is not otherwise than commonplace, and he has all the appearance of being bored by her after two months’ marriage. Her little actress ways—the gush, the over-emphasis, the odd effect of hardness which seems to follow from the perpetual publicity of an actress’s life—are to me distressingly unattractive, not to be counterbalanced by the really fine form and colouring of her person.

[Beatrice Webb]

14/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 13th March 1909

. . . I went to Granville Barker’s Madras House this afternoon. After listening to this and to GBS’s Misalliance, one wonders whether these two supremely clever persons are not obsessed with the rabbit-warren aspect of human society? GBS is brilliant but disgusting; Granville Barker is intellectual but dull. They both harp on the mere physical attractions of men to women, and women to men, coupled with the insignificance of the female for any other purpose but sex attraction, with tiresome iteration. That world is not the world I live in, or, indeed, think to exist outside a limited circle at the top and at the bottom of the social strata. In the quiet intermediate area of respectable working-class, middle-class and professional life, and in much ‘gentle’ society, there is not this over-sexed condition. The women are almost as intelligent as, and certainly a good deal more spiritual than, the men, and their relations to the other sex are those of true friendship and intelligent comradeship in the transaction of the affairs of life, and in the enjoyment of the interests and beauty of life. The male and the female have become the man and the woman. It is mischievous to be perpetually drawing society as even worse than it is, just because most persons are stupider than such clever mortals as GBS and Granville-Barker, and fail to express their good thoughts and feelings otherwise than in clichés and banal phrases which bore these clever ones. . .

Where I think GBS, Granville Barker, H.G. [Herbert George] Wells, and many other of the most ‘modern’ authors go wrong, from the standpoint of realism in its best sense, is their complete ignoring of religion. By religion I mean the communion of the soul with some righteousness felt to be outside and above itself. This may take the conscious form of prayer, or the unconscious form of ever-present and persisting aspiration—a faith, a hope, and a devotion to a wholly disinterested purpose. It is this unconscious form of religion which lies at the base of all Sidney’s activity. He does not pray, as I often do, because he has not acquired so self-conscious a habit. But there is a look in his eyes when he patiently plods on through his own and other people’s work, when he unwittingly gives up what other people prize, or when he quietly ignores the spite or prejudice of opponents, that tells of a faith and a hope in the eventual meaning of human life—if not for us, then for those who come after us. He refuses to put this aspiration into words, because he would fear the untruth that might be expressed in those words. He has a dread of being even remotely irrational or superstitious. But, for all that, he believes.

Not one of GBS’s men or women, or Granville Barker’s or H.G. Wells’s, have either the conscious or unconscious form of religion. The abler of these puppets of their thoughts deny it: the stupider are oblivious of it—a few are blatant hypocrites. And, that being so, there is nothing left for them to be but intellects or brutes, and for the most part they are both. It is strange that, whatever these clever men may think and feel themselves, they don’t perceive that there is such a thing as religion and that it is a force which moulds many lives and makes the mere rabbit-warren an inconceivable horror.

[Beatrice Webb]

15/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 21st April 1911

. . . We spent a Sunday with the Bernard Shaws and he read us his last little play (Fanny’s First Play). A brilliant but slight and somewhat futile performance. He and Charlotte are getting every day more luxurious and determined to have everything ‘just so’ without regard to cost or fitting in with other people’s convenience. But they are neither of them quite satisfied with their existence. GBS is getting impatient and rather hopeless of his capacity to produce anything more of value; Charlotte is beginning to loathe the theatrical set and is even turning to us to try and interest GBS again in socialism. He and Sidney really like and appreciate each other and they might be, as they have been, of great value in mutual stimulus and criticism. But GBS is bored with discussion; he won’t give and take; he will orate and go off on to the sex question, which does not interest Sidney as GBS has nothing positive to propose. Then, Charlotte does not really like me and I do not really care for her! We respect but do not admire each other. As a matter of fact there does not seem much reason for meeting—and therefore we seldom meet, and when we do, the conversation tends to be made-up and not spontaneous. Which is somewhat sad, as he and Sidney