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 defned 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 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover credit: Age fotostock/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. For Eric Bentley, The Mentor of Us All PREFACE 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, fnds 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 uncamoufaged 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 frst 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 briefy 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 magnifed 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 frst decade of the twentieth century, his plays infuenced 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 offcially unpoetic Shaw in his infuential 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 infuence 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).