Widowers' Houses & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play. Bernard Shaw
except yours truly
G. Bernard Shaw
35/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 22nd December 1892
(at Kelmscott [House])
Set to work making an album of all the press notices of the play [Widowers’ Houses]. Cold weather, very muddy underfoot. [Henry Halliday] Sparling and I went for a walk before dinner. The routine here is that Sparling and I work all day in the green room, the others visiting us occasionally, but using the tapestry room. Breakfast at 9; dinner at 13; afternoon tea at about 17; and supper at 19. Then we all go up to the tapestry room and play at “20 Questions.” All except Morris and myself go to bed at about 22 or 23. We sit up and jaw a bit longer. Tonight [William] Morris talked a lot about Iceland. This evening we had the mummers in.
36/ To the head of the publishing firm of David Nutt Ltd. Alfred Trübner Nutt
27th December 1892
Dear Sir
I have only succeeded in getting together one complete MS of the play [Widowers’ Houses], which I am correcting, fitting with a preface &c. I must hold on to it until the job is finished. Meanwhile I have had a couple of offers for its publication—three, in fact. One of them is from a firm in which Mr [Jacob Thomas] Grein, of the Independent Theatre, is interested. They propose to try a half crown edition, with a sixpenny royalty; and I am rather inclined, on Grein’s account, to accept this if I can satisfy myself that the firm in question has the requisite circulating machinery. Do you think you could do better for me than this? The reason I ask you to bid for a pig in a poke is that the quality of the bacon is hardly in question this time. Three months ago the play would certainly not have been worth publishing. Today a heap of articles and notices (my own collection of press cuttings runs over 130, and is far from complete) has presumably created some curiosity about the work; and it is the value of the curiosity that is now in the market. It is on this basis, and not on that of the literary value of the MS (as to which I have my own unalterable opinion) that I want an offer.
yrs faithfully
G. Bernard Shaw
P.S. I return to town on Wednesday; so that my address is still 29 Fitzroy Square. W.
37/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 27th December 1892
The Birchalls [the Reverend Oswald Birchall and his wife Katherine Mary Birchall] came to dinner. In the morning May [Morris], [Henry Halliday] Sparling and I took a walk down the river and back. I worked at copying bits out of press notices for quotation in the preface to Widowers’ Houses. Wrote a letter to The Speaker in reply to an article on the play.
38/ Bernard Shaw’s letter to the editor of The Speaker “Unconscious villainy and Widowers’ Houses”
31st December 1892
I now, as an experienced critic, approach the question which is really the most interesting from the critical point of view. Is it possible to treat the artistic quality of a play altogether independently of its scientific quality? For example, is it possible for a critic to be perfectly appreciative and perfectly incredulous and half insensible at the same time? I do not believe it for a moment. No point in a drama can produce any effect at all unless the spectator perceives it and accepts it as a real point; and this primary condition being satisfied, the force of the effect will depend on the extent to which the point interests the spectator: that is, seems momentous to him. The spectacle of Hamlet fencing with an opponent whose foil is “unbated” and poisoned produces its effect because the audience knows the danger; but there are risks just as thrilling to those who know them, risks of cutting arteries in certain surgical operations, risks of losing large sums by a momentary loss of nerve in the money market, risks of destroying one’s whole character by an apparently trifling step, perils of all sorts which may give the most terrible intensity to a scene in the eyes of those who have the requisite technical knowledge or experience of life to understand the full significance of what they are witnessing, but which would produce as little effect on others as the wheeling forward of a machine gun on a hostile tribe of savages unacquainted with “the resources of civilization.” One can imagine the A.B.W. [Arthur Bingham Walkley, an English public servant and drama critic] of the tribe saying, before the explosion, “This may be artillery—whatever artillery means—but it is not fighting,” just as our own A.B.W., whom it is my glory to have floored and driven into mere evasion, says of my play “This may be the New Economics, which I do not profess to understand, but it is not drama.” All I can say is that I find drama enough in it, and that the play has not fallen flat enough to countenance A.B.W.’s assumption that his anaesthesia is my fault instead of his own. It has long been clear to me that nothing will ever be done for the theatre until the most able dramatists refuse to write down to the level of that imaginary monster, the British Public. We want a theatre for people who have lived, thought, and felt, and who have some real sense that women are human beings just like men, only worse brought up, and consequently worse behaved. In such a theatre the mere literary man who has read and written instead of living until he has come to feel fiction as experience and to resent experience as fiction, would be as much out of place as the ideal B.P. itself. Well, let him sit out his first mistaken visit quietly and not come again; for it is quite clear that it is only by holding the mirror up to literature that the dramatist pleases him, whereas it is only by holding it up to nature that good work is produced. In such a theatre Widowers’ Houses would rank as a trumpery farcical comedy; whereas, in the theatre of today, it is excitedly discussed as a daringly original sermon, political essay, satire, Drapier’s Letters [by Jonathan Swift], or what not, even by those who will not accept it as a play on any terms. And all because my hero did not, when he heard that his income came from slum property, at once relinquish it (i.e. make it a present to Sartorius without benefiting the tenants) and go to the goldfields to dig out nuggets with his strong right arm so that he might return to wed his Blanche after a shipwreck (witnessed by her in a vision), just in time to rescue her from beggary, brought upon her by the discovery that Lickcheese was the rightful heir to the property of Sartorius, who had dispossessed and enslaved him by a series of forgeries unmasked by the faithful Cokane. (If this is not satisfactory I can reel off half a dozen alternative “dramatic” plots within ten minutes’ thought, and yet I am told I have no dramatic capacity.) I wonder whether it was lack of capacity, or superabundance of it, that led me to forgo all this “drama” by making my hero do exactly what he would have done in real life: that is, apologize like a gentleman (in the favorable sense) for accusing another man of his own unconscious rascality, and admit his inability to change a world which would not take the trouble to change itself? A.B.W., panting for the renunciation, the goldfields, and the nuggets, protests that I struck “a blow in the air.” That is precisely what I wanted to do, being tired of blows struck in the vacuum of stageland. And the way in which the blow, trifling as it was, has sent the whole critical squadron reeling, and for the moment knocked all the breath out of the body of the New Criticism itself, shews how absurdly artificial the atmosphere of the stalls had become. The critics who have kept their heads, counting hostile and favorable ones together, do not make five percent of the whole body.
G. Bernard Shaw
39/ Bernard Shaw’s diary
Preliminary Notes 1893
BOOKS FOR REVIEW
Title & Author Paper [Received] [Posted] [Published]
Wagner’s Prose Works The Daily Chronicle 9/1/– 15/2/– 18/2/-
Vol. I, W. Ashton Ellis (translator)
Mediztval Lore, Bartholo-
mew Anglicus, ed. by
Robert Steele; pref.
by William Morris 20/1/– 1/2/– 13/2/-
Land Nationalisation,
Harold Cox 28/1/– 2/2/– 4/4/–
Essays on Vegetarianism,
A.