Widowers' Houses & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play. Bernard Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. J. Hills 3/2/–?

      Form & Design in Music.

      H. Heathcote Statham. 10/5/– 31/5/–

      The Beethoven—Cramer Studies,

      J. S. Shedlock, ed. The World 27/2/–?

      Voice Training Primer,

      Mrs Behuke & D.C.W. Pearce. 3/6/–

      INTRODUCTIONS

      To Miss [Nellie] Erichsen by Bertha Newcombe at Joubert’s Studio. 24th April.

      To [Henry Jackson Wells] Dam by Ernest Parke, Express Dairy, Fleet St. 3 June.

      Mrs Francis Adams, by the Salts [Henry Stephens Salt and Mrs Salt née Catherine Kate Joynes], Hygeian Restaurant. 20th September.

      HEALTH

      On the 21st January I got a headache in the afternoon that was almost a sick headache. Had the remains of it in the morning; but it passed off.

      On the 23rd April had a slight headache in the evening.

      During the week ending the 14th May I had a cold of a tolerably pronounced sort. It left me with a nervous cough; but when I spoke in the open air on the Sunday evening I thought I was rid of it. On the night of Monday the 15th, however, I was very feverish and the next night was almost as bad. I interpreted my condition as due to the return of the influenza.

      On the 5th June I felt very much out of sorts, as if I had caught cold in my inside. For the first time in my life I found although I could pass urine without any difficulty, yet at the end of the operation came a severe pang. This frightened and disconcerted me a good deal. Evidently a cystitis. It lasted about a fortnight. All through this period I was extremely weak physically, well as far as appearance went, but very easily fatigued and not very far above prostration point. I attributed all this to the fact of the influenza. About the last week of June I began to recover a good deal.

      In August and September I got some change and holiday at Zurich and with the Webbs [Sidney and Beatrice СКАЧАТЬ