Sp art by H L Brock on Saint Joan; Lr to E Reicher on cutting script of Heartbreak House, D 30, IV, p 3
12/30/23 Serious people who have won a high literary reputation by making lighter-minded folks laugh include Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw. Each of them has been profoundly moved by the most humanly appealing of all miracle workers of history, Joan of Arc and each has sought to interpret her to an age which refuses to believe in any miracles but those of its own mechanics. Mark Twain's Joan surprised and impressed alike Mark's admirers and his critics. Mr Shaw's Joan made her first appearance on any stage last week, having been confided to the Theater Guild by her translator out of legend into common sense.
Thus translated and interpreted in Mr Shaw's best manner of an inexorable image breaker, she remains no less miraculous - even to Shaw, who has been at such pains to hold the Maid utterly human - to extract the
dross of heroics from Joan herself and all the other actors in the fiery ordeal which fused France into a nation. So it is set forth in his philosophy. With all his common sense and all the commensensicality with which very rightly he endows his bourgeois-bred Joan - he does not make her a mere peasant lass who is driven to a mystical ending. The last act is a dream - a vision. It is characteristic of Mr Shaw that he has not hesitated to go over into mysticism to give his sublimated common sense the logical sweep which life in fact denies it.
The concern here, however, is not with what has been accomplished as literature or as drama. It is with Mr Shaw's Joan. This is the way he describes her, in meticulously typed stage direction in red ink:
"She is an able-bodied country girl of 17 or 18, respectably dressed in red, with an uncommon face: eyes very wide apart and bulging as they often do in very imaginative people; a long, well-shaped nose and wide nostrils, a short upper lip, resolute but full-lipped mouth, and handsome fighting chin. Her voice is normally a hearty coaxing voice, very confident, very appealing, very hard to resist."
This is the Joan who comes to the Squire of Baudricourt to ask for horse and escort to the presence of the Dauphin. To Joan's speech is given a touch, a mere touch, of rusticity.
Here is a fragment of her conversation with Dauphin Charles after she has got to Chinon, and spoken her message from God and the saints:
Charles - I don't want a message; but can you tell me any secrets? Can you do any cures? Can you turn lead into gold, or anything of that sort?
Joan - I can turn thee into a king, in Rheims Cathedral; and that is a miracle that will take some doing, it seems.
Charles - If we go to Rheims, and have a coronation, Anne will want new dresses. We can't afford them. I am all right as I am.
Joan's simplicity and earnestness even here saves the dignity of the subsequent conversation, even as her faith and devotion saved the crown and the kingdom. Shaw is no more afraid to let the personages of this mystical legend unbend than he was afraid to let great Caesar do it. He made Cleopatra kittenish. He dares to make Joan hearty. It is not easy in a few excerpts to give a picture of what he has done to her. Most can be accomplished, perhaps, with a quotation from the second scene of the second act where Joan talks with Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, the General who supplied the military science which went far to make the Maid's faith effectual in the field. Dunois has been waiting on the banks of the Loire attended by a page who is interested in kingfishers. He is watching for a breeze from the west:
A sentry's voice - The Maid.
Dunois - Let her pass. Hither Maid! To me!
(Joan is splendid armor comes in quickly from the westward. She looks displaced)
Joan (bluntly) - Be You Bastard of Orleans?
Dunois (stretching his baton toward the bar on his shield) - You see the bar sinister. Are you Joan, the Maid?
Joan - Sure.
Dunois - Where are your troops?
Joan - Miles behind. They have cheated me. They have brought me to the wrong side of the river.
Dunois - I told them to.
Joan - Why did you? The English are on the other side.
Dunois - The English are on both sides.
Joan - But Orleans is on the other side. We must fight the English there. How can we cross the river?
Dunois (pointing grimly) - There is a bridge.
Joan - In God's name, then, let us cross the bridge and fall on them.
Dunois - It seems simple, but it cannot be done.
Joan - Who says so?
Dunois - (not liking this) I say so; and older and wiser heads than mine are of the same opinion.
Joan (roundly) - Then your older and wiser heads are fatheads; they have made a fool of you; and now they want to make a fool of me, too, bringing me to the wrong side of the river. Do you know I bring you better help than ever came to any General or any town?
Dunois - (smiling patiently) - Your own?
Joan - No; the help and counsel of the King of Heaven. Which is the way to the bridge?
Dunois - Your are impatient, Maid.
Joan - Is this a time for patience? Our enemy is at the gates; and here we stand doing nothing. Oh, why are you not fighting? Listen to me. I will deliver you from fear. I -
Dunois (laughing heartily and waving her off) - No, my girl; if you delivered me from fear, I would be a good knight for a story book, but a very bad commander for the army. Come, let me begin to make a soldier of you. Do you see those two forts at this end of the bridge, the big ones?
Joan - Yes. Are they ours or the goddams?
Dunois - Be quiet and listen to me. If I were in either of those forts with only ten men, I could hold it against an army. The English have more than ten times ten goddams in those forts to hold them against us.
Joan - They cannot hold them against God. God did not give them the land under those forts: they stole it from Him. He gave it to us. I will take those forts.
Dunois - Single-handed?
Joan - Our men will take them. I will lead them.
Dunois - Not a man will follow you.
Joan - I will not look back to see whether any one is following me.
Dunois - Good. You have the makings of a soldier in you. You are in love with war.
Joan (startled) - Oh! And the archbishop said I was in love with religion.
Frankly, Shaw's Joan is as much soldier as saint. Her best friends are thus Dunois and La Hire, both soldiers by instinct and profession. She says to Dunois:
"I will never take a husband. A man in Toul took an action against me for breach of promise; but I never promised him. I am a soldier: I do not want to be thought of as a woman. I will not dress as a woman. I do not care for the things women care for. They dream of lovers and of money. I dream of leading a charge and of placing the big guns."
And when Charles has been duly crowned and there is talk in the vestry of Rheims Cathedral of Joan's return to her father's farm, La Hire says to her:
"You will miss the fighting. It's a bad habit, but a grand one and the hardest of all to break yourself of."
She herself says: "I am frightened beyond words before a battle; but it is so dull afterward when there is no danger."
None the less worthy at the last trial and in the fire is Shaw's Saint Joan, the Soldier.
As to the motives of those who destroyed Joan, Shaw's argument presents them as twofold and high-political. To the Church, the Maid, with her voices and her commands delivered direct from God meant the undermining of all ecclesiastical authority. The Maid - as the English Earl of Warwick puts it, plotting politely with the French Bishop of Beauvais - is the spirit of Protestantism. Therefore the Bishop must burn her. To the Earl her Protestantism does not much matter. He stands, not for the Church, but for feudalism, which is threatened by Joan's secular heresy of nationalism.
As she appeals direct to God without intermediary of the Church, so she appeals direct to the King without intermediary of the nobility. If every simple body gets in the habit of doing that, as the Earl plainly perceives, the nobility is done for. So from his point of view, also, it is imperative to get Joan out of the way. Shaw is at great pains to make the bishop a zealot even if he makes the Earl of Warwick a cynic. And he insists throughout on the absence of personal rancor - the actual presence of kindness - toward the doomed girl on the part of all the high personages. Only a dull English chaplain is enraged. And he repents in tears.
Obviously the Irish dramatist resident in London and so particularly acclaimed in America has used his best skill upon the job of getting medieval Joan translated into his twentieth-century philosophy. Obviously also he has striven in bringing the idol down to earth to keep in it all that originally set it on its pedestal. After dusting it thoroughly he very carefully puts it back.
Naturally he has not turned his Joan over to the Theater Guild without instructions. For instance, when it was supposed that Lee Simonson was going to provide the setting, the author wrote: "Simonson must not make the scenery fantastic. It may be very simple but if must suggest natural scenery. Joan was an extremely real person, and the scenery should be keyed to her reality. Simonson must also be limited to three cigarettes a day." It seems that during a conference with Shaw Simonson was so careless as to smoke incessantly - oblivious of the fact that Shaw himself is no smoker.
The first version of the play which got into the Guild's hands was put in rehearsal and played much too long. The cabled Shaw for cuts. His answer was, "Stop rehearsal till you have my prompt copy." With the new version arrived a letter from Shaw explaining that the first manuscript was to be read and digested only. Not rehearsed. The revised version fitted into the time limit.
Incidentally the fact that Shaw play after Shaw play has recently been produced here by the Theater Guild has led some persons to say and believe that the little group down at the Garrick Theater had succeeded in taming the supposedly untamable Irish apostle of common sense in the highest. Since the war they have done Heartbreak House and Back to Methuselah, and revived The Devil's Disciple. In the case of Methuselah, at least, they were after a while permitted to make considerable cuts in the sacred Shaw text. That was against all precedent.
In spite of this, the record does not indicate that the taming of Shaw has gone very far. Mr Shaw is still very much himself even in dealing with these American producers with whom he has reached a friendly modus vivendi. For the envy of less eminently successful playwrights may not come amiss. For instance, what Mr Shaw called the Guild's "trial trip" was done with Heartbreak House. The plan was to open the season with it in October, 1920. Actors were engaged for the leading roles and the scenery designed and half built. The came this cable from Shaw: "Production absolutely barred till Presidential election result known in November."
Mr Shaw holds the idea that elections and such large public events divert attention from the serious or Shavian drama. Representations to the contrary - hints that regular theatergoing Americans are, in fact, little concerned with politics - were of no avail. The difficulty of holding up a production once started, letting the actors go, and finding a substitute play - all these were urged also. Shaw replied: "Inexorable." Meekly, therefore, the Guild that year opened with something else and put off rehearsal of Heartbreak House till after the election.
Emanuel Reicher, who was directing the production, thought the script ought to be cut. In rehearsal as it stood, the play was running three hours. Shaw was informed of the situation through St John Ervine. His cabled reply was "Abandon play, cancel contract, advance will be returned, writing." He did write at length. Here are some of the things he said:
"It appears that you made the contract to produce Heartbreak House on the usual Broadway lines, without reading the play, and are now naturally alarmed to find that a performance will last three hours, and that it consists mainly of "talk" and must be cut.
"I am sorry you have had this disappointment; but it is not my fault. I was naturally incredulous as to the existence of a management in New York bold enough and clever enough to know that the alternative to attracting audiences by pleasing them for two hours is to put the utmost strain on their serious attention for three, and sending them home exhausted but indelibly impressed. I had just had one of my best plays wrecked in New York by cutting exactly as you want to cut; and I knew that cutting a single syllable would mean failure, as I had myself cut the play down to the bone, as I always do before printing it.
"You are now intimidated by your experience of the business hazards of your enterprise, and are appealing for permission to cut the play into the best imitation of a Broadway success you can produce for its ruin. That means certain failure. Having lost your artistic courage and conviction, or at least suspended them during financial pressure, you must look for plays suitable to you new policy and not meddle with mine.
"Nothing would induce me to consent to the omission of one word of the text, or the curtailment of one minute of the time, which, with brisk execution, will take from 8 to a few minutes past 11, Even if it took three hours and a half I should not spare the audience a second of it, especially as they would talk about it for a fortnight after and feel that they had had prodigious valued for their money. I know my business; and the Broadway managers know their business; but it is not the same business: take that to heart: and don't fall between the two stools.
"On hearing from you I will make steps for the exchange of the contracts, and the repayment to you of the sum advanced on account of royalties.
Faithfully G Bernard Shaw
Mr Reicher had retired after the first rehearsal, and all this time Dudley Digges, who also acted Boss Mangan in the play, was directing it uncut. The Guild cables: "Producing play verbatim Nov 10 in strict accordance with contract."
It was during the run of Heartbreak House that Shaw mailed for newspaper use a copy of his famous pamphlet against laughter in the audiences, reminiscent of his less known line in a letter to his old friend Louis Calvert, "How the dickens are we to give decent artistic performances to a bear garden? Can't they smile, darn them, instead of hee-hawing like that?"
And that was the first chapter.
The second was whether Back to Methuselah could be played in five parts as written, requiring the audience to make five pilgrimages to the playhouse. The Guild held out for permission to perform the whole cycle in three evenings. Shaw yielded on that point. Eventually, as already noted, he allowed cuts. To Lawrence Langner in London he had a number of things to say after seeing photographs of the production. For instance: "How much clothes did Eve wear?" "The Snake should be human." "The older Eve might have been using a sewing machine just to illustrate that there is nothing new." Apropos of Lloyd George: "I shall send this picture to Lloyd George: it is a better photo of him than any I have seen for a long time." "Why did you make up the Elderly Gentleman to look like me? I intended him to be an absurd old duffer." Langner said: "Don't you remember his last line: "I cannot live in a world of untruth'? We thought that referred to you. Besides, he talked so much."
When the thing was done, Shaw wrote another manager: "My name alone is worth $10,000. The Theater Guild expected to lose $30,000 on their production of Back to Methuselah and lost only $20,000."
In the case of The Devil's Disciple again Shaw postponed the opening in order to avoid a conflict with an international event. This time it was the Washington Conference. That solemn pow-wow had to be disposed of before the play in which General Burgoyne figures so airily could be revived for those who still remembered Mansfield, and even for those who didn't. When Arthur Guiterman in a letter to the press called attention to an error in General Burgoyne's route, Shaw sent a post card: "Please ask Major Swindon to say 'I will undertake to do what we have marched out from Ticonderoga to do' instead of 'from Boston.' Also ask all concerned in the third act to note that the name Burgoyne is stressed strongly on the last syllable, "B'goyn, not Burrr-goyne."
Shaw deals with his own play scripts very methodically. He has the script set up by his own printer and corrects and cuts for the final version from this printed text. When corrections are incorporated in a second printed form it is this corrected form which goes to the book publishers.
Review of play Saint Joan, D 29, 8:4
12/29/23 Saint Joan is one of those Shaw plays, and they are among the best that improve as one looks back at them. In the three hours and a half of last night's performance, which lasted from a punctual 8 o'clock to a no less punctual 11:30, there seemed to be many backwater eddies in which the drama, the "chronicle play" as the program calls it, was lost in monotonously whirling words. Many of the Shavian stock of ideas and jokes walked again, particularly that favorite shillalah knocking of English imbecility. Out of the historic and heroic past, from within the very aura of a saintly presence, "topical allusions," reached forward to smite the humdrum world of today as glibly and irresponsibly as in a Gilbertain libretto. But these are only the contortions of the Sybil; they cannot permanently obscure the Sybil's inspiration.
This is no simple chronicle history, with its be-all and its end-all in merely historic events and personalities. It is, as Hogarth would have said, the Morality of a Saint's Progress. And, though it lacks the English painter's solidity of outline and his stanch actuality, it adds a touch of Celtic sympathy and fire, of philosophy, of intensely humanized imagination and of divination. This Joan is a simple country girl, homely and familiar as no other of her dramatic biographers has made her; but she is also the epic heroine of all sainthood. At 11:30 one begins to realize that the many lengthy discourses, even the seemingly stereotyped Shavian japes, all have their part in revealing to us how sainthood comes upon earth, how it triumphs - and is martyrized.
It comes from the hearts of the people, simple folk who are content with mere goodness and courage. We meet Joan at the Garrick as the result of the failure of certain hens to lay their accustomed eggs. It was thought to be a phenomenon related to the coming of the Maid of Domremy, and when the hens began to lay again the fact was of importance in procuring for her a horse and a helmet - the chance to lead the folk of France. Not that the great ones really believed. They perceived a personality of might, a spirit of flame, and made use of it to inspire armies hitherto defeated. From time to time, even among the great ones, this soul and that was touched to the vision, but always with a very human limitation. The priest remained always in bondage to the authority and the creed of his church, the soldier to the technique of his profession.
And so soon as Joan's great work was done, those whom she had profited most felt themselves most encumbered by her. The feudal Baron saw in the popular uprising which she headed the end of fealty to his order; the great prelate saw in it the end of the supremacy of the church. For Joan meant much more than the victory of France and the crowning of the Dauphin at Rheims. She meant the advent in the whole world of the force of Protestantism and Nationalism. And so the prelates and the Barons united to do away with her. The final words of this Joan, as she reappears in a dream among the mortal who have known her, are: "O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy Saints? How long, O god, how long!"
Certain passages in this curiously mingled play are of surpassing beauty. The initial scene of the eggs gives us a portrait of girlhood and sainthood blended which, in its very different way, is gracious and fine as anything in Candida. A full half dozen of the men in the piece are as subtly and acutely characterized as the men of Caesar and Cleopatra. The scene in which Joan first uplifts the sword of France before the altar thrills mightily with heroism of the spirit. Even the spoofing and topical gagging epilogue, in which a frock-coated top-hatted "Gentleman of 1920" talks with the spirits of Joan and of her associates of five centuries before breathes a spirit and a philosophy which are of Shaw's best.
But the great triumph of the play is the scene of Joan's trial and burning. There the finest sympathy, the shrewdest intellectual intention, fuse with simple human feeling to produce really great drama. Nowhere else in Shaw is there a scene quite so true, so moving and uplifting. Yes, it is a play that gains mightily in retrospect.
The casting tops the Theater Guild's previous best - a multitude of performances so variously and contrastingly fine as to defy brief commendation. The Joan of Winifred Lenihan is superlative - with limitations. The "dangerous power" ascribed to the Saint, and her flaming spirit, are not always in full evidence. One believes in, but does not quite feel, her power of inspiring a whole nation and leading it to victory. But Joan's moods of frank girlhood, and of a sainthood patient and proud, are rendered with consummate simplicity and grace. Taken as a whole, it is a really great performance and one which, like the play, grows mightily in memory.
Remarks on vegetarians before Vegetarian Soc of London Univ, D 9, IV, 10:2
12/9/23 When GBS addressed the Vegetarian Society of London University his opening remark was: "I can talk to a god." Having apparently bewildered his audience, he hastily added: "I mean I can talk to a dog." Then he continued: "I am a sage and probably, though this does not necessarily follow, I should be a saint. In 1880 I had a curious impulse to become a vegetarian. A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses. There are many people who think that a meat diet is the proper thing, especially those who have never done and never intend to do, a hard day's work.
"In the days of the bicycle craze, riders trying to do a long run found that a beefsteak simply smote them to the earth. Hence apparently followed the large number of places offering 'Teas for Cyclists'. Still, there is really nothing in it from the athletic point of view. A man may train on meat or vegetable for a fight with Carpentier or Dempsey with equal confidence of success. Many vegetarian animals are fierce. For example, the bull is a ferocious beast. I have known human vegetarians to be as fierce as bulls. And speaking from long experience, I may say that vegetarians are the most ferocious beings in English society. They have a consciousness of elevation - of superiority. But I advise you never to tell a hostess you are vegetarian. She would have a sleepless night and then provide a dish of tomatos and bread crumbs, which have no nutritive value and a disgusting taste. It is a delightful delusion of the carnivorae that in denying ourselves meat we can eat anything that is not meat. So we can, but, as a matter of fact, we don't. We select our vegetables with much more care than do our self-proclaimed enemies their viands."
Explains, in lr to R Somerville, head of NY Univ Dramatic Art Dept, why amateurs who put on plays in name of charity pay more for privilege than regular producers; says difference between amateur and professional performer is not in the pay, N 25, II, 4:5
11/25/23 Amateurs who put on plays in the name of charity not only do not get special rates when they produce George Bernard Shaw's plays, but they are made to pay extra for the privilege, according to a letter received from GBS by Randolph Somerville, head of the Department of Dramatic Art at New York University. In a letter the playwright not only explained the seeming discrimination against amateurs but also gave a meticulous definition of the difference between an amateur and a professional performance.
Mr Somerville wrote to Shaw for permission to use other plays in addition to You Never Can Tell, which the Washington Square College Players produced last year. Mr Shaw replied:
"Playwrights often receive letters asking them to authorize performances of their plays by societies formed to develop appreciation of dramatic art in their neighborhood. These societies are sometimes university, YMCA, labor, college or polytechnic clubs, sometimes branches of drama leagues, sometimes isolated ventures calling themselves by any title which occurs to them. As a rule they all make the same mistake. They appeal for special consideration on the ground that they are personally disinterested and actuated solely by public spirit; that they are poor; that all work connected with them is unpaid, and that, if they make any money, they give it away to charities, to political organizations of some sort or another, or to some public object not connected with the theater. The result is that the playwright is obliged to class them as 'amateurs' and refer them to the Collection Bureau of the Society of Authors, which, in turn, is obliged to make them pay 5 guineas a performance and to forbid them to give more than two performances consecutively.
"The next day an ordinary commercial speculator, who has no other purpose than to make money for himself, will receive from the same playwright, or from the society, without question, an authorization to perform night after night for a shilling in the pound on the takings when these do not exceed £50.
"For this the societies have themselves to thank. If they would organize themselves as continuing bodies, building up a capital fund by the profits of their performances; appoint a responsible director, pay everybody a living wage as soon as they have the means, and aim at the foundations of a permanent series of performances every season under a standing title (Blanktown Repertory Theater, or something of the kind) in, if possible, a theater of their own, they could at once obtain authorization on professional terms, exactly as the commercial speculators do. It is their own thoughtless protests that they are doing nothing more than the amateur dramatic clubs do; that, acting for the fun of it, and giving away all the money they make to objects unconnected with the theater, that forces the playwright, as a matter of professional etiquette, to class them with the amateur clubs and make them pay the same fee.
"The remedy is in their own hands. No sane playwright wants to discriminate against bona fide attempts to educate the people in dramatic art; on the contrary, he wants to encourage them by every means in his power. Societies devoted to this object are clearly entitled to go into the play market exactly as the trustees of a picture gallery go into the picture market, or a public library into the book market. But they must constitute and describe themselves accordingly, and not insist on being idle amateurs.
Mr Somerville explained that the New York University players had been giving performances throughout four seasons, that they had a theater of their own and a regular director, and that the proceeds were devoted to building up the organization. The players are not paid, however, and Mr Somerville asked if this would constitute them amateurs. In a letter giving the players the standing of professionals GBS added this Shavian touch:
"The fact that your actors are not paid does not touch the distinction between amateur and professional work. Many actors in ordinary commercial companies not only do not get paid, but actually pay to be allowed to act. The only practicable diagnostic is the destination of the profits.
Ed on unveiling of tablet to R B Sheridan in Bath, N 25, II, 6:6
11/25/23 Sheridan and Shaw
Mr George Bernard Shaw went to Bath the other day to "unveil a tablet" on the house where Richard Brinsley Sheridan lived in 1771-1772 and whence he eloped with Miss Linley and a lady's maid. Bath, so rich in famous associations, can be trusted never to neglect them. The notion of the Bath bigwigs seems to have been that the most brilliant Irishman of today would be useful in advertising the old town and one of the most brilliant Irishmen of any day. Scarcely any famous man of the eighteenth century has been more maligned than Sheridan. It is probable that the common notion of him now is largely a calumny. In an alcoholic age he drank less than most of his fellows, but he was easily affected. In time he became a water drinker. We are always hearing about his debts, but Pitt left much greater ones, and the nation paid them. Sheridan's family paid his.
The fame of Sheridan's eloquence has overshadowed his sterling merit as a public man. He never took a pension. He refused £20,000 offered him in gratitude for his opposition to the war with America. At the head of a small minority in Parliament he fought vigorously the union between Great Britain and Ireland. He worked for parliamentary reform. He stood steadily for free speech, though no man suffered more from the unscrupulous party press and pamphlets of the time. Sheridan was especially strong on finance. Mr Shaw doesn't seem to have tried to reconstruct the real figure of Sheridan, though he did say that "as a politician he was incorruptible." It was natural that he should consider him principally as a playwright. He ranked him above Congreve, below Goldsmith. Of course, as a sociological-didactic moralist or anti-moralist Mr Shaw couldn't be expected to approve high comedy. "Sheridan's comedy was extraordinarily entertaining, but it wouldn't bear much thinking about. Even 'The School for Scandal' had no message for us at the present day."
Per contra, Major Barbara, unappreciated by Mr Walkley and Mr Archer, was a marvelous "message" to the late Mr Stead and Sir Oliver Lodge. Sheridan's fault was that he was not one of Mr Shaw's "paper apostles." Go in for anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, and so on, if you want to be a great dramatist, or even a great novelist. Besides, Sheridan stopped writing at twenty-eight. That evidently grieves Mr Shaw. The Greek dramatists wrote their best plays in old age. Congreve, like Sheridan, got out of the business early. Probably "the drama had no very great hold on them." Well, their drama still has a considerable hold on readers, and that of Sheridan's on spectators. Mr Shaw didn't say so, but since he is a philosopher, sage, seer, and what-not, the older he gets the better plays he will write. Methuselah as playwright - pleasing, dreadful thought!
Some cynics think Mr Shaw's prefaces his best plays. The Manchester Guardian declares them "the only first-rate eighteenth century literature written since the Battle of Waterloo." At least it may be said that, like the plays they usher, they belong essentially to that branch of eighteenth century literature of which Parson Adams's specimens found no publisher.
Predicts world prohibition of hard liquor, says Mary Lawton, N 7, 29:3
11/7/23 Miss Mary Lawton, who passed five months in England gathering material for magazine articles, said she had a long talk with George Bernard Shaw, who told her prohibition would eventually sweep over the entire world and that the use of alcohol would become negligible. She interpreted his remarks as applying exclusively to spirituous liquor.
On statesmen, sp art, S 2, VII, 8:2
9/2/23 GBS proposed to outdo the psychologists and go Mr Edison one better. The psychologists cannot select proper material for Major Generals by causing a battalion of soldiers to make crosses within circles or to draw rings within triangles. Mr Edison has a partiality for the young man who can answer the greatest number of his questions on history, geography and astronomy. Mr Shaw would go still further and apply these methods in selecting statesmen.
He spoke the other day before American college professors and students who are studying social and economic questions in England. He said he was after bigger game than Generals, electricians and inventors. He would require Prime Ministers, Chancellors of the Exchequer, Lords of the Admiralty and others in high public positions to pass special tests devised by the wisest of the wise.
How the superwise jury is to be chosen Mr Shaw does not tell. Perhaps he has faith that there is some budding Solomon in the United Kingdom who is competent to draw the panel that he has in mind. He avoided that side of the subject.
But he was strong in advocating his plea. According to him, there has never been a government that knew anything about governing. He rejected Lincoln's famous phrase, "government of the people, by the people, for the people." The same principle might as well be applied to plays. Mr Shaw thinks that plays may be of the people and for the people, but never by the people.
If we are to have theaters we must have people capable of writing plays, he pointed out and if we are to have a government fit to govern, we must have men with certain faculties which only certain men possess - men with genius for finance, for foreign affairs, for industrial matters, and so on. "If you don't get men thus qualified, you are going to make an awful mess of it," he said, and left no doubt in the minds of his hearers that up to date no country has ever been governed by properly qualified rulers. Cromwell selected extraordinarily good men to govern England, said Mr Shaw, but he was obliged to fall back upon his Generals, who, whether they could play the civil game or not, could play the soldier game well. Mr Shaw would have a test committee, one committee to possess the wisdom of the ages, the shrewdness of the serpent, the fairness of white honor. That spotless committee would make a card index of available candidates for the office of Foreign Minister, for instance, and would appraise their worth, proclaim their strong points and place their names in a panel, which he would call Panel A. Then the committee would say to the voters, the King or the President: You want a Foreign Minister or a Secretary of State. You must choose him from this panel, for these are the only men in the country fit for such a job.
Thus, said Mr Shaw, you will have in charge of foreign affairs a man who will lead his country through the mazes of international politics without stubbing its toe once. And even if he is the exception and does stub his toe, you have a list of first-rate substitutes to fall back on.
Mr Shaw did not say how many panels he would have, but presumably the whole alphabet would be represented. He got as far as the letter "C," placing in that category the sharps on municipal matters and in Panel "B" those qualified to direct a department of the interior.
"If you could get such panels," Mr Shaw said, "democracy might have some sense." He would say to the electors: You are a free people and you must choose the members from panel "B." There are thousands of people on it and you must not choose Mr Bottomly or people who are obviously disqualified. The Parliament must choose the Cabinet and above all the Premier from Panel "A."
If you cannot adopt Mr Shaw's scheme, he thinks it better to be governed by a House of Lords or something akin thereto, for he gave his audience to understand that a member of the House of Lords, being there because he was the son of his father, might by some hook or crook have brains and might be honest, but that any man who had had to go before the electors was forever tainted, the ordeal of an election having, "unfortunately strained out the honest and able men."
These utterances have been remarked as strange, coming from a member of the Labor Party, but Mr Shaw neutralized the seeming harshness by declaring that the present Labor members in Parliament were there by reason of the fact that they had studied much and held strong convictions, but that in the future men would belong to that Party because their fathers had belonged before them, and then they would have sunk down to the depths now reached by other parties. The originators of the party would be done and the new members, whatever their capacities in ordinary life, would in the conditions of political life, be as useless and as imbecile as others.
Views on modern letter writing, sp art, S 2, III, 3:2
9/2/23 The typewriter, then? Has the widespread use of the writing machine contributed to any falling off in the style of modern writing? Replies to this question have been received from several prominent writers and make interesting reading. GBS answered in long hand (a neat, meek-looking little hand, in strange contrast to the devastating utterances of that great iconoclast) written on the margin and between the lines of the letter of inquiry from the present writer, the question's and replies running as follows:
'Do you write in longhand or direct with the typewriter?'
"I write in short hand and hand it over for transcription on the typewriter."
'Do you consider that the use of the typewriter has contributed to a deterioration of literary style?'
"Rubbish! I have written not less than a million words for publication directly with a typewriter. When an author's style deteriorates, the remedy is not long hand, but prohibition."
Lr to London Times on condition in Ireland, Jl 31, 3:6
(The Times, London 31 July 1923)
7/31/23 GBS, in a letter to the London Times recommending Ireland as a place to spend a vacation says: "Several persons have complimented me on my courage in venturing into the south of Ireland for my summer holiday. The people feel safer in the friendly atmosphere of Poincaresque France or in the land of the bottomless mark chute, where merchants chain up their typewriters with Krupp chains over night only to miss them, chains and all, in the morning. They are not afraid even of being dosed with castor oil in Italy by Anglo-phobe Fascists, but they dare not set foot in Ireland.
"I admit there is some excuse for them. The Irish Government has just passed a coercion act which would make Trotsky gasp and which makes the history of Dublin Castle under English rule seem like freedom broadening down from precedent to precedent. It contains a flogging clause, directed specially against robbery under arms, of such savagery that foreigners may well be led to believe no man's property or person is safe.
"Ireland is at present in a reaction of quiet with the hands of its Government reinforced by extraordinary temporary measures and is therefore at this moment probably the safest country in the world for visitors."
Eds on errors in typography and history in The Devil's Disciple as pointed out by A Guiterman, Je 11, 12:4; Je 13, 18:8
6/11/23 Geographer Shaw
Last May Mr Arthur Guiterman, author of "The Laughing Muse" and "The Mirthful Lyre," wrote a letter to The Times, quarreling with Mr Bernard Shaw's history and geography as displayed in the fine old Bowery melodrama, The Devil's Disciple. Mr Guiterman forgot that Mr Shaw is under no obligation to accept bourgeois geography and history. In the play, a British Major, thick-headed and conventional as an Irishman of genius chooses to conceive him when in the act of writing one of those perfectly conventional Surrey "thrillers" that have made him a reputation for originality, says:
"I will undertake to do what we have marched South from Boston to do and what General Howe has marched North from New York to do - effect a junction at Albany and wipe out the rebel army with our united forces."
Mr Guiterman, unnecessarily, if we may be permitted to say so, rectified some of Mr Shaw's agreeable geography. That great occasional thinker is not incorrigible. He consents to change: "Burgoyne did actually begin in Boston, but Swindon (our Major) telescopes the campaign out of all reason by saying "South from Boston," as Albany is West of Boston and South of the Hudson River, by which they went around."
New charms arise from the map when Saint Bernard of the Fabians condescends to improve it. In the revised version, Albany is South of the Hudson. What the deuce is the use of bothering about that? Albany is South of the Mississippi, South of the Gulf of Mexico, if our young friend insists on it. We love him as a reconstructor of the past and present. "Burgoyne did actually begin at Boston." He certainly did. He got there in 1775, saw the Battle of Bunker Hill and wrote about it in his dramatic way: a better reporter than commander. He went back to England in the Fall of '76; so the actuality of his beginning at Boston in reference to the campaign of 1777 is obvious only to Mr Shaw.
Another geographical peculiarity not mentioned by Mr Guiterman occurs to all reverent Shavian memories. Mrs Dudgeon, the pleasant mother of the young Chesterfieldian Satanist of the play, is described in Mr Shaw's stage directions, which, with his prefaces, are so much more important, interesting and dramatic than his plays, as a "New Hampshire woman." So, Burgoyne, marching South from Boston, marches North into New Hampshire, as the quickest way of reaching Mr William Barnes's capital, South of the Hudson, according to Georgius Americanus; South of the Orinoco, South of the Amazon, "due South"; South of the Southernmost tip of the South Pole.
Why "pull the map" on the undaunted Columbus, discoverer and regulator of a new world? It is our misfortune not to have, as we usually have, in health and in disease, a copy of The Devil's Disciple before us, but are we mistaken in remembering that Mr Shaw, the incomparable intuitionist, says in his stage directions that General Burgoyne's forces were called by our stupid Colonial ancestors "The Continentals"? Talent can be measured; genius can't be plumbed. Those New Hampshire streets lighted by oil lamps; that "solicitor" - doesn't he wear yellow riding breeches as all the New England "squires" did? - the furniture, the whole Yankee scene as envisaged by that infallible eye, are beyond praise, beyond history; and Mr Shaw has as good a right to be above geography as the Emperor Sigismund had to be above grammar.
Shaw's American History, Je 13, 18:8;
6/13/23 Shaw's American History
To the Editor of The New York Times: From an editorial in this morning's Times I gather that George Bernard Shaw has been explaining his views of the strategy and topography of Burgoyne's campaign as exhibited in The Devil's Disciple. I haven't had the pleasure of reading the explanation, but I can help Mr Shaw just a very little bit on the point of his having laid the scene of his play in New Hampshire.
In August, 1777, Burgoyne, who was then near Saratoga, detached Lieut. Col. Baum with his Hessians and others to seize the American military supplies at Bennington. General Stark, at the head of the New Hampshire militia, defeated and captured Baum and his command, thereby largely contributing to Burgoyne's final discomfiture. Though the district in which the battle was fought became part of the new State of Vermont after the Revolution, it was at the time known as "the New Hampshire Grants," and though in dispute between New Hampshire and New York, was mainly held by settlers like Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys by virtue of grants from the Governor of New Hampshire. Especially as Mr Shaw introduces both Hessians and a fighting minister in his play, and as the Hessians on one side and a certain belligerent Parson Allen on the other played their parts in the battle of Bennington, it seems probable that the dramatist and preface-writer had some notion of the affair of the Hampshire Grants and vaguely located his play in the region thereof.
But it does look as though we ought to send some one over to revise English school histories and geographies. I would suggest Mr Hirshfield - if we can spare him.
Arthur Guiterman
Views on Walt Whitman, Je 10, III, 6:1
6/10/23 "I don't know. Ask the book sellers. But Whitman is a classic and not a best seller. Curious that America should be the only country in which this is not as obvious as the sun in the heavens.
Lr by A Guiterman taking him to task for queer notions of Amer history in play The Devil's Disciple, My 6, II, 6:7
5/6/23 To the Editor of The New York Times: Apparently even the Theater Guild lacks the temerity to edit Mr George Bernard Shaw's queer notions of American history and geography. In the admirable production of The Devil's Disciple Major Swindon is still permitted to express Mr Shaw's vague impression of the strategy of Burgoyne's campaign of 1777 in the following extraordinary speech:
"I will undertake to do what we have marched south from Boston to do and what General Howe has marched north from New York to do - affect a junction at Albany and wipe out the rebel army with our united forces."
If Burgoyne had started "south from Boston" he might, barring opposition, be marching yet. Fortunately for him, however, Boston had been safely in American hands since its recapture by Washington in March 1776; therefore Burgoyne marched south from Canada by way of Ticonderoga into the comfortable trap that was being prepared for him at Saratoga. How the amiable British General wandered into New Hampshire, where we find him in the play, Mr Shaw may be able to explain.
Perhaps we ought to rest satisfied, seeing that Mr Shaw does know that Albany is north of New York, and hold our peace; but our advanced thinkers have recently been so insistent upon the superiority of transatlantic scholarship of all points that unless somebody says something we'll have Mr Shaw upheld as an authority on the American Revolution.
Incidentally, why do the actors in The Devil's Disciple put the stress on the first syllable of "Burgoyne"? For all I know that perhaps is now being done in England, but, even if it is, it's wrong.
Arthur Guiterman
Correspondence between him and Theater Guild on production of The Devil's Disciple, My 6, VII, 1:3
5/6/23 Shaw, it now comes out, feels that in the Theatre Guild people are needlessly extravagant because for two seasons and a half they cabled to him about the production of The Devil's Disciple, now at the Garrick. He replied by postals, and advised them that postals, four or five lines apiece, written at leisure, were the proper medium of business exchanges. These postals were infrequent but firm. He considered The Devil's Disciple his most lucrative play, and with his usual business acumen insisted upon a Dick Dudgeon he approved. He has the cast now, the money is coming in, and some sentimentalists believe he is deriving satisfaction from the thought that the Guild is being repaid for the cables.
The first Shaw postal sent to Lawrence Langner, one of the Guild directors, read: "Mansfield squeezed the last farthing out the The Devil's Disciple;" its success was the turning point of his career as far as his final conquest of New York was concerned, but that was more than twenty years ago.
"Still the play remains essentially a star melodrama, and as such not so much the Theatre Guild's business as, say, Barrymore's.
"We can discuss it when we meet; this is only to prepare you for my point of view."
The point of view proved to be, when Mr Langner talked the matter over in London, that there were three actors who should play Dick Dudgeon, Minister Anderson, and Judith. These three all happened to be in the Barrymore family, and, peculiarly enough, were John, Lionel, and Ethel.
Mr Langner replied that the Guild, even with a Shaw success, could not afford the salaries of these three in one play.
"Be careful," warned Shaw, "some one else will have the bright idea before you."
'If they have the bright idea,' replied Langner, 'they won't have the money.'
The Guild made several suggestions the next season for actors in the leading roles, but all were vetoed by Shaw. And just to show there were no hard feelings, Back To Methuselah was played at the Garrick for the first time anywhere.
When the tumult and the shouting had died the Guild once more thought of The Devil's Disciple. At this time Mr Langner's book of one-act plays was published and he sent Shaw a copy.
The reply aroused interest even before it was opened. Mr Langner felt it had something special to impart - Shaw had written a full-page letter:
"Dear Lawrence Langner: The plays are very good; I read them all through with undiminished appetite; and so did my wife. But you will find the same difficulty with them as I did with my Philanderer. The circle of freethinkers to whom your outlook on family life is commonplace is astonishingly small. It is hard to imagine that men with the morals of tomcats and the conversation of camp followers are so convinced of the sacredness of indissoluble monogamy that they are unable to understand a play in which legal ties do not settle everything; but they are mostly like that, and even critics who have picked up what I may call problem play jargon are as scandalized as Victorian governesses when their own cackle is brought home to them on the stage.
"Now that you have tried how cold the water is, you may venture a little deeper than one act into modern life. Moses doesn't count.
"Can you tell me whether the Theatre Guild still entertains any intention of reviving The Devil's Disciple? I have refused a deal of American business during the last two years to keep the field clear for the Guild, both in New York and on the road; and, the time has come when I must know whether the Guild has dropped it or not. On the one hand, I should very much like to see the Guild get back the money it lost on Methuselah, even though it lost it by discarding my warnings against putting an impossible strain on its audiences and cramming the thing into three nights. On the other hand, such a loss is enough to give the Guild cold feet as far as I am concerned, in which case I must find fresh victims. Let me know what I have to expect, for I must make hay while the sun shines, unless I have strong reasons to believe that a waiting game will pay me. At present I do not even know whether the Guild still exists."
Ed on his suggestion to arm people in Ireland, My 3, 18:5
5/3/23 His Plan Proves Successful
As an adviser in matters of state George Bernard Shaw has no great fame, and few Governments have shown an inclination to treat his ideas, however interesting, as practical. Yet Mr Shaw is not always wrong, and the Irish Free State, while it may not be doing what he recently told it to do because of the telling, at any rate seems to be following the plan he suggested.
It was to arm all the men in Ireland who could be trusted to use weapons property and both permit and encourage them to defend themselves from the bandits and assassins who have been ravaging the country under the pretense of fighting for a republic.
To some extent, at least, this has been done of late, and the results have been excellent. The so-called "irregulars" have encountered resistance in many cases where formerly they could have acted as they chose, and distant observers have not been so much mystified as before by the ease with which a people noted for pugnacity and courage could be robbed and killed and have their houses burned by a minute minority, composed chiefly of mere boys.
That such a minority could rule - and devastate - Russia has been more or less easily explicable by the nature of the Slavonic peasant; but the Irish are credited with being fighters, all of them, and that they did not defend themselves was hard to understand. It was the case, evidently, of the man with the gun as against many men without guns, and there is an old proverb to the effect that "the wolf does not have to count the sheep." And an unarmed man, even though Irish, is likely to be rather sheepish when confronted by those who can shoot and are ready to do it.
Sp art on internatl celebration of Shakespear's tercentenary, Ap 22, VIII, 3:1
4/22/23 Very few of us understand what has happened to Shakespear in the twentieth century. We think of him as a famous playwright whose works have held the stage for 300 years continually. We are quite mistaken. What has really happened is that the young men of the theater of the twentieth century have found themselves plunged into a struggle to restore Shakespear to the state after an exile of 250 years. During these 250 years we have had Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Mrs Siddons, Kean, Macready, Barry Sullivan, Irving, Ada Rehan and Tree (to name the dead only). They all put the name of Shakespear on their playbills, and professed, and sometimes felt, a superstitious reverence for his genius even when they were taking the most grotesque and often the most ignorant and maladroit liberties with him.
But they could not have given us Shakespear's plays as he meant them to be given even if they had wanted to and understood his intentions, because when the English theater recovered from the suspension of the monarchy under Cromwell it was transformed into a new sort of theater that Shakespear's plays could by no means be fitted into. The Puritans, repudiating the playhouse, were all the more infatuated about music; and Cromwell, after extirpating the Shakepearean playhouse, welcomed the Italian opera house, which was quite a different affair.
What people looked to it for was not nature in Shakespear's dramatic mirror, but magic; the magic that changed speech into music by the art of the singer and changed the boards into Elysian fields by the art of the scene painter. And the singer was never so popular as when singing the thrills and roulades that are most remote from human speech and natural expression, whilst the scene painter's triumph was the 'transformation scene,' radiant with a glory that never was on sea or land. The enchanted public would have nothing else, and soon could not even conceive that anything else was presentable in the theater.
Shakespear's Torture Grew Worse
The magic of scenery put Shakespear on a Procrustean bed; and his torture grew worse and worse as audiences became more and more critical of scenic art, and demanded a more and more perfect illusion. The new opera theater had a proscenium like a picture frame and a curtain to hide the stage while the scenes were being set. When two scenes, each occupying the whole depth of the stage, followed one another, the curtain had to descend between them; and the audience had to wait in idleness and boredom until the carpenters were ready and the curtain went up again. Playgoers were broken into enduring these interruptions four times in the course of a single play. Thus Shakespear's cinematographic method of presenting a play in an unlimited number of brief scenes, with the greatest possible variety and rapidity, became impossible. First, the time occupied by the four intervals, say three-quarters of an hour, had to be cut out of the play somehow. Next, what was left had to be patched and transposed and pieced so as to avoid having to change the scene too often during the acts.
Still, the mischief was not so great at first as it afterward became, because certain simple changes of scene in full view of the audience were tolerated for 200 years. In my youth I was accustomed to the closing in of flats, the withdrawal or protrusion of side wings, the descent of sky borders and front scenes, all carried out shamelessly under the eyes of a pit without stalls, which jeered mercilessly when the flats would not join or when the trick of their withdrawal was betrayed by the twinkling heels of the carpenters running them off, or, greatest delight of all, when the pulling back of a side wing revealed some old gentleman who, immersed in study of the opera's libretto or a copy of the play, would remain for a few delirious moments unconscious of the fact that he was on the stage in full view and that the roar of applause and laughter from the delighted house was a tribute to his incongruous self.
The odd thing was that the audiences who had this sort of fun more or less every night were great sticklers for illusion on the stage, and really believed that the ridiculous makeshifts they laughed at helped their dramatic imagination instead of destroying it. They were not subtle enough to distinguish between the pleasure of looking at a picture, which the best scenic artist gave them in a very high degree, and the interest of a drama, which is a very different matter.
The Audience Was Barred
But when they became more critical, the wings and flats and sky borders and front cloths had to go and changes of scene in view of the audience were barred. Shakespear's plays had then either to be aborted into five scenes, or else the number or intervals had to be increased, which meant an increase of boredom and interruption for the audience. Under such conditions Shakespear became unbearable; it was the actor that drew the audience (when there was any audience), and the actor had to spend absurd sums on scenery and stage pageantry to make up for the ruin of the mutilated play. All the plays that did not offer star parts to the actor or actress vanished from the stage. Hamlet and Benedick, Beatrice and Rosalind were worn to rags while thirty plays and three hundred characters lay on the shelf, dead as Tut-ankh-Amen.
A revolt against this was inevitable sooner or later. First came Mr William Poel, now a veteran of 70, with his Elizabethan Stage Society. Single handed, in the face of misunderstanding and, worse still, no understanding at all, of ridicule, of the inadequate resources of a man of modest private means, he managed to give occasional and isolated performances which at best were interesting throughout both dramatically and decoratively and at worst always provided at least a convincing sample or two of what he was driving at. Among the young actors who took part in these pioneer experiments was Mr Harley Granville-Barker; and in the fullness of time Mr Granville-Barker, as a full blown London West End manager, astonished the capital by giving a series of Shakespearean performances in which not a line was omitted nor a scene transposed or altered in any way, without act divisions or waits or interruptions, and with a splendor of decorative beauty and an increase of dramatic illusion that left the pictorial devices of opera-house Shakespear nowhere.
And now, what is all this to do with Stratford-On-Avon?
An End Of Star System
Well, just as Mr Granville-Barker in his prentice days was attracted by the ideas of Mr Poel and worked with him, so Mr Bridges Adams in his college days was attracted by the work of Mr Granville-Barker, and shared it as a professional training; and it is Mr Bridges Adams who has restored Shakespear to the Stratford stage and made an end of the star system, and of the tedious waits for the carpenters to set the old sham scenery, and of the monstrous mutilations by which the plays were hacked down to fit the proportion of an hour and a half of playing to and hour of sitting staring at the curtain or patronizing the refreshment bars - in short, of the bed of Procrustes.
But the Stratford audiences see only what Mr Bridges Adams has been able to do; they have no idea yet of what he could do if the Memorial Theater had been built as a Shakespearean theater instead of as an opera house. It was built, unhappily, forty-six years ago, when the last traces of the Shakespearean tradition had been lost, and the stage cut back to a proscenium and elevated and withdrawn to an extent which destroyed all the old intimacy between the actors and the audience. Mr Poel had got over this difficulty by giving his demonstrations, not in theaters, but in the old halls of the city companies or of the Inns of Court. Mr Granville-Barker, at great expense, had reconstructed the London and American stages on which he worked by building a fore-stage out into the auditorium.
In the Stratford theater this is not possible. The requisite space cannot be spared from the auditorium, and the elevation and remoteness of the stage floor are insurmountable obstacles to any sort of adaptation, temporary or permanent. All that Mr Bridges Adams can do is to pretend that the front of the existing stage is a fore-stage and make the best of the pretense; but successful as he has been, he is still reproached by the doctrinaires of genuine Shakespearean production for makeshifts that are forced on him by the construction of the theater, which is the very worst possible for his purpose, just because it was built to be the very best possible for operatic purposes.
It will have to be completely redesigned and reconstructed before Shakespear's plays can be performed as they are now performed on the best modern stages of America and Central Europe. Until this is done all the other activities of the Shakespear Association of Stratford will be hampered, and Stratford will be unable to realize its ideal of maintaining a model Shakespear theater and a model school of Shakespearean acting and production for the whole world.
The little town of Stratford, in which £50 would be quite a large sum to raise by public subscription, has from first to last put down in money and land upward of £100,000 for Shakespear, and the multi-millionaires of the rest of the world have contributed less than £15,000. Hardly fair, this distribution of the burden which ought to be considered a privilege of supporting the pleasantest and most intensely and happily English place of pilgrimage left in the island. Will no rich gentleman or lady oblige with the requisite funds? Or any poor lady or gentleman shame the rich ones by a modest subscription to the association?
Views on moving pictures vs authors, Ap 8, IV, 3:1
4/8/23 "Does the cinema threaten the pen? Why should it?"
"1. Scenarios have to be written, have they not?"
"2. If the scenario and the screen do in 5,000 words what the novel does in 100k they save both the pen and the reader a good deal of trouble. If anyone 'threatened' to save me trouble I should cry 'C'mon!'
"3. There is practically unlimited work in the world waiting for the pen. Anything that sets the pen free from its present drudgeries sets it free, not for idleness but for better employment. The introduction of calculating machines into business houses has saved oceans of ink and set many clerks free to do something better than acting as very slow and ineffective calculating machines but nobody has made a fuss about it.
"4. Fiction will take care of itself under any circumstances whether it is conveyed from the professional liar to his willing audience by handwriting, typewriting, cinematography, photophonography, telepathy, or what not, does not matter a rap to the art of fiction or its practitioners.
It might be mentioned in a parenthetical undertone that Shaw himself is contemplating - if, as he says, he is not already too old - the writing of an original film scenario.
Article in periodical, New Leader, says all Irish Free Staters should be armed and ready to shoot rioters, Mr 16, 6:1
(The New Leader, London, 16 March 1923)
3/16/23 'How To Restore Order In Ireland' is the title of an article by GBS in the current issue of The New Leader. This is his opening paragraph: "Some little time since I was sounded as to whether I would accept, if invited, a place in the Senate of the Irish free State, I replied that I would consider it if the head of the Irish government were transferred to London.
Shaw says that at that moment it was the only answer any freeman could make. "Ireland should," he adds, "take a leaf out of England book of war. First register the whole population, as the British government did in 1915. A citizen should receive on registration not only his card but a gun and a supply of ammunition. It should be impressed on him that if on receiving an official alarm by whistle, bell, or what not, he did not at once sally from his house, weapon in hand, by night, or by day, to cooperate with his neighbors in shooting down all rioters and incendiaries he would be liable to be shot for cowardice and desertion.
Eds on article in N Y Amer on conditions in Ireland, Mr 7, 14:5
3/7/23 Pioneers Weren't Organized
On thinking over Mr Shaw's plan for ending the war which has made Ireland more truly than ever before, except in its very worst days, "that most distressful land," one can see that it has perilous as well as promising possibilities. On the one hand, there still would exist, at least for a while, the full difference between the civilian and the soldier, and this might result simply in the soldier's taking from the civilian the arms and ammunition entrusted to the latter.
On the other hand, the civilian who definitely has been authorized to do in case of need what policemen and soldiers do does undergo a change. That was shown to some extent in this country during the war with Germany, and it was shown still more plainly in England, where home defense was entrusted to men ineligible for active military service, and the devotion with which they did their duty was disclosed in "Mr Britling Sees It Through" and in many other books of that kind, even better than in the official reports.
It is something distinctly different from vigilance committees like those of early Californian days, and still more is it different from mobs of lynchers. Those whom Shaw calls pioneers never did anything like what he suggests; it was chiefly to individual action and prowess that they trusted, while he wants organization and discipline.
Yet between the two ideas there is a relation, and if it is possible to give to civilians the courage and the familiarity with arms which pioneers necessarily acquire, perhaps his scheme would work.
It may be that Mr Shaw's proposal, whatever its merits might have been in the past, now is belated. According to seemingly trustworthy reports, republican resistance at last is yielding fast to pressure from the Free State Army. So said a dispatch in yesterday's Times, but it is easier to hope than to believe that the end, under present methods, is near.
Play Arms and the Man causes riot in Czech theater, F 10, 8:2
2/10/23 The first performance in a Czech theater yesterday of G Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man led to a riot. For days the Czech press had been agitating fiercely against the comedy, which, it contended, ridiculed Balkan soldiers. Serbian students frustrated the performance, and although the rioters were finally ejected by the police the performance was stopped.
Interview with Agnes M Miall, sp art, Ja 7, IV, 1:1
1/7/23 There is one person I have interviewed with whom one would be thankful to stay all day, if possible. When GBS talks, the greatest chatterbox in the world would be content to listen forever. His animated monologue holds never-ending fascination no matter what the subject - and he glides over twenty in one magic hour - his flow of witty shafts and extravagant statements that conceal much truth never falters for a moment. He is like no one else. His exuberant personality overflows into everything he touches. Every inch of his flat in Adelphi in London, with its huge windows overlooking the Thames, is colored with the extraordinary vitality of the man.
You know it is no ordinary home the minute you reach, at the foot of the stairs, the little wicket gate inscribed 'Mrs G B Shaw.' You are more certain of it than ever when, upstairs, you are shewn into a room crowded with books, pictures and photographs. Carved on the white mantelpiece is a motto in old English: 'They saye. Quhat do they saye? Let them saye.'
When I saw Shaw I went in the company of an American girl, so he launched brilliant, half laughing invective against the U S. That it was half a century behind the rest of the world in civilization was the theme of his diatribe. Yet the man is far more adored in America than in England, where his readers have an uncomfortable impression of a mischievous small boy sticking a pin into them to see how loud they will scream.