Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal

380 Pages·2018·4.89 MB·English

by  Joan Templeton (auth.)

Bernard Shaw
and His
Contemporaries
SHAW’S IBSEN
A Re-Appraisal
Joan Templeton
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
Series Editors
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
Massachusetts Maritime Academy
Pocasset, MA, USA
Peter Gahan
Independent Scholar
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and
most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse
range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic
understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in
reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as
a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and
American following.
Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a
vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival
Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist,
lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape
the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No
one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as
controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In
many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of
the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the
subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism
that arose in the wake of World War 1.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14785
Joan Templeton
Shaw’s Ibsen
A Re-Appraisal
Joan Templeton
New York, NY, USA
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
ISBN 978-1-137-54341-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54044-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944577
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For Eric Bentley,
The Mentor of Us All
P
reface
The Quintessence of Ibsenism is perhaps the most famous book ever
written by one author about another. Published in 1891 and revised and
enlarged in 1913, it has been reprinted over and over and is regarded as
a classic. But the book’s value is usually considered to lie less in what it
reveals about its subject—Henrik Ibsen—than about its author—Bernard
Shaw. For many readers, this is not much of a detriment. Shaw’s latest
British biographer, Michael Holroyd, finds that the joy of reading the
Quintessence “is that of feeling Shaw’s agile and ingenious mind working
with such vitality on material so sympathetic to him.” Although Shaw’s
conversion of Ibsen “into a wholesale warrior does involve distortions
to some of the plays,” Holroyd notes, Shaw’s purpose, after all, was to
present his own “credentials as a man who was carrying on Ibsen’s busi-
ness of ‘changing the mind of Europe’” (H 1:199). The Quintessence is
considered to be the most important of Shaw’s nondramatic works for
explaining his view of the world and a “blueprint,” in Christopher Innes’s
term, for understanding his plays.1 In a recent statement on the book’s
usefulness, Matthew Yde notes that the Quintessence “has usually been
understood as a good indicator of Shaw’s own thinking, rather than a reli-
able guide to understanding Ibsen’s dramaturgical strategy and philoso-
phy of life; the quintessence of Shavianism rather than the quintessence
of Ibsenism.”2 Eric Bentley was blunter; although he appreciated Shaw’s
understanding of Ibsen, nevertheless, in his classic Bernard Shaw (1947),
he directed readers of the Quintessence to substitute the word “Shaw”
for the word “Ibsen” throughout.3 Blunter still was Charles Carpenter,
vii
viii PREFACE
over twenty years later, who noted: “Despite its subject (and its value as
an analysis of Ibsen), the book is still an uncamouflaged piece of Shavian
propaganda.”4
A considerably more critical view of Quintessence is that whatever it
tells us about Shaw, it is a seriously misleading book about Ibsen. Shortly
after Shaw read a first version—a lecture to the Fabian Society—in
1890, he was accused of transforming Ibsen into a socialist like himself.
This false charge, which still lingers, is the crudest version of the popu-
lar notion that Shaw wrongly regarded Ibsen as a reformer rather than
an artist. A month after the Quintessence appeared, Shaw’s great friend
William Archer, Ibsen’s devoted champion in England, published what
was essentially a review of the book, “The Quintessence of Ibsenism: An
Open Letter to George Bernard Shaw.” In it, he noted that Shaw’s argu-
ment would “strengthen the predisposition . . . to regard Ibsen, not
as a poet, but as the showman of a moral wax-work.” He noted, how-
ever, that this “cannot be helped” because “it is a drawback inseparable
from expository criticism” (A 31). By 1905, fourteen years later, Ibsen,
now established as a great dramatist, had been the subject of a number
of books in several languages that heralded his plays as arguments for
women’s rights and other causes. Greatly irritated, Archer took it upon
himself to respond in a lengthy essay, “Henrik Ibsen: Philosopher or
Poet?,” in which he vehemently denounced the irksome critics who read
Ibsen as “primarily a thinker, and only in the second place a poet”; he
briefly named “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant little study, The Quintessence
of Ibsenism” as “the type of this method of criticism” (A 81). Other
critics, who found the Quintessence less than “brilliant,” blamed Shaw
outright for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of social protest. In the same
year as Archer’s essay, 1905, the American critic James Huneker pub-
lished his landmark survey of early modern drama, Iconoclasts: A Book
of Dramatists, in which he claimed that in the Quintessence, Shaw had
transformed Ibsen into “a magnified image” of himself, “dropping ideas
from on high with Olympian indifference,” with the result that “we
are never shown Ibsen the artist, but always the social reformer with an
awful frown.”5
As Shaw became famous as a dramatist in the first decade of the
twentieth century, his plays influenced his reputation as a critic, and he
was accused of being a didactic writer incapable of understanding the art-
ist Ibsen, and even, in one well-known instance, of having been Ibsen’s
“butcher.”6 By the 1930s, George Orwell could remark in passing in a
PREFACE ix
letter to a friend that Shaw “had slandered Ibsen in a way that must make
poor old I[bsen] turn in his grave” (W 3), and Edmund Wilson, in The
Triple Thinkers (1938), declared that Shaw, in turning Ibsen into a social
reformer, creates “a false impression” and “seriously misrepresents him.”7
In the 1940s and 1950s, Shaw became a whipping boy of the New
Critics as a foremost example of the unpoetic soul. The movement’s
most famous arbiter of taste, T. S. Eliot, famously and somewhat nastily
attacked Shaw in his imaginary conversation, “A Dialogue on Dramatic
Poetry,” in which “B,” one of the participants, explains that “Shaw
was a poet—until he was born, and the poet in Shaw was stillborn.
Shaw has a great deal of poetry but all stillborn; Shaw is dramatically pre-
cocious and poetically less than immature.”8 Following Eliot, Raymond
Williams took on the task of saving Ibsen from the officially unpoetic
Shaw in his influential Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1953). Explaining
that his book is intended to be literary criticism in the manner of “Mr.
Eliot,” Williams offers a “revaluation of Ibsen.”9 He seems almost to be
holding his nose as he regrets that Ibsen’s mode was realism, “a tradition
which was acutely inimical to art”; in spite of this impediment, however,
Ibsen somehow managed to achieve “work as valid and as permanent as
our century has” (97). But because of the pernicious influence of The
Quintessence of Ibsenism, which “has to do with Ibsen only in the sense
that it seriously misrepresents him” (138), Ibsen has been mistaken for
sixty years as a writer who focused on moral issues that were incidental
to his art. For having committed this blunder, Williams believes, Shaw
and the other “Ibsenites” deserve to be blamed as “the disintegrators
of Ibsen” (43). Williams is especially indignant at what he claims is the
Ibsenites’ dismissal of Ibsen’s last four plays, and he cites as proof the
subtitle of Shaw’s essay on them in the Quintessence: “‘Down among the
Dead Men,’ said Shaw, and Down, Down, Down was the estimate of the
last plays as they appeared” (86). But while some of the Ibsenites were
puzzled by the late plays, others praised them, most especially Shaw him-
self, whose “Down Among the Dead Men” is among the most laudatory
of all his writings on Ibsen. Here, Shaw writes, Ibsen passes “into the
shadow of death, or rather into the splendor of his sunset glory; for his
magic is extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more
powerful” (Q2 136). Clearly, Williams did not bother to read past the
subtitle of the essay he was denigrating.
Seven years later, in 1960, James Walter McFarlane, editor of The
Oxford Ibsen, the standard scholarly edition of Ibsen’s works in English,
x PREFACE
reiterated Williams’s general gripe against Shaw as a reader of Ibsen,
although in a politer tone. McFarlane scolded Shaw for having claimed
that Ibsen’s plays are “first and foremost the embodiment of a lesson,
illustrations of a thesis, exercises in moral persuasion.” To “ask for the
quintessence of Ibsenism” is specious because it is “to formulate a wholly
misleading question; there is nothing to be got by boiling down, there is
no extract of wisdom that would allow us to regard [Ibsen’s] drama as a
linctus for the ills of mankind.”10
Three years after this, the American drama scholar Maurice Valency,
in his survey of modern drama, The Flower and the Castle (1963),
blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s “reputation as primarily a social dramatist”
and claimed that “a brilliant rhetorician and a wit” like Shaw could not
understand Ibsen, “an artist.”11 Another well-known American writer on
the modern theater, Robert Brustein, in The Theatre of Revolt (1964),
takes the same viewpoint: “The Ibsen who tried so hard to disassociate
himself from any consistent position would not have recognized himself
in the ‘social pioneer’ of The Quintessence, whose ‘gospel’ is designed to
save the human race.”12
Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen, appearing from 1967 to 1971,
consolidated the anti-Shaw tradition. Castigating Shaw several times
over, Meyer dismissed the Quintessence as “one of the most misleading
books about a great writer that can ever have been written. Had it been
entitled Ibsen Considered as a Socialist, or The Quintessence of Shavianism,
one would have no quarrel with it” (M 636). Like Archer, Huneker,
McFarlane, Williams, Wilson, and Valency, Meyer blamed Shaw for
Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of thesis plays, complaining that Shaw was
responsible for the notion that A Doll’s House was “a play about the
hoary problem of women’s rights” (M 457). In 1972, Michael Egan,
editor of Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, followed Meyer, noting that in
the Quintessence, “the definition of Ibsenism implicitly offered (a literary
campaign for moral reform through the exposure of middle-class hypoc-
risy) was the quintessence of Shavianism. It tells us more about Shaw and
the way he used and misunderstood Ibsen than it tells us about the com-
plexities of, say, Hedda Gabler or Little Eyolf.”13
By 1975, the notion of Shaw’s distortion of Ibsen was so widely
accepted that Daniel Dervin could write: “As we know [my italics], after
a certain point when Shaw scrutinized Ibsen, he began to see what
Narcissus saw in the pool.”14 For Dervin, Shaw’s own plays are enough
to condemn him as a bad reader of Ibsen: the famous confrontation