Admitted Impediment
" Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment."
Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw. A Correspondence. Edited by Christopher St. John. - (Constable. £5 5s.)
Tins volume, royally produced by Messrs. Constable, is a fine possession. It is the record of the close association of two first-rate human beings. Moreover, because of the peculiar nature of that association, there can be an almost perfect and permanent reproduction of it. If Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw had met continuously during the years when they loved each other, we should probably have little record of it. But because either they, or fate, decided that they should know each other almost entirely through the medium of ink and paper, we, thirty-five years later, can have before us exactly what they felt and said to each other.
For that is the nature of the strange story which these letters recount, and which is described in detail in Mr. Shaw's preface. To say that they did not see each other is not literally accurate. In the first place, Shaw saw Ellen Terry frequently on the stage and fell in love with her in that way. She, on the other hand, the letters make quite clear, fell in love with his letters. She did not see him at all until the best of the letters had been written, and she did not see him, except on fugitive occasions, till nearly eight or nine years after the correspondence begins, when as a woman of over fifty she played Lady Cicely in Captain Brassbound's Conversion.
The correspondence began quite accidentally over a musical young lady friend of Ellen Terry's whom she wished Shaw, the musical critic, to assist. There was no preconceived plan, the letters make clear, by which the correspondents agreed not to meet. On the contrary, the early letters are full of proposals of the most natural and ordinary kind—for Shaw to call on Ellen Terry and read her one of his plays, &c., &c. On the other hand, it must not be supposed for one moment that the fact that they did not meet was accident.. Unquestionably, it was the result of a deep instinct, felt first perhaps on Shaw's part, but which gradually shows on both sides, that a meeting would be fatal to their relationship. One may suppose that such an instinct had on Shaw's part its roots in a perfectly rational grasp of their situation. Ellen Terry was at this time profoundly bound to Henry Irving, not merely personally but also as an actress. Nor was Shaw's love for her by any means a purely personal emotion. He was also passionately anxious to detach her from Irving and the Irving tradition of the theatre, and make her a Shaw-Ibsen actress. If they had met, it is quite clear that almost immediately this issue must have teen put to the test. In order to come to Shaw she would have had to leave Irving, which meant leaving the Lyceum Theatre and the summit of her profession, and descending to the most wretched, neglected, and indeed actually persecuted, hole-and-corner productions, which were all that Shaw could secure for his works at that time. Yet, if Shaw had become her lover, this conflict must have been immediately provoked. Rightly or wrongly, Shaw was not willing to put the issue to the test—an issue which undoubtedly would have involved completely ruining Ellen Terry in a worldly and professional way. Hence this long and passionate correspondence served as the solution of the problem. The love letters are in some cases worthy of preservation. Here is one of Shaw's :
" People are always talking of love and affection and the like— just as they talk of religion—as if they were the commonest things in the world ; but the Frenchman was nearer the truth when he said that a great passion is as rare as a man of genius. Has he (Irving) ever loved you for the millionth fraction of a moment ? if so, for that be all his sins forgiven unto him. I do not know whether women ever love. I rather doubt it : they pity a man, mother him, delight in making him love them ; but I always suspect that their tenderness is deepened by their remorse for being unable to love him. Man's one gift is that at his best he rem love—not constantly, nor faithfully, nor often, nor for long— but for a moment—a few minutes perhaps out of years. It is because I have had a glimpse or two that I am such a hopelessly impious person ; for when God offers me heaven as the reward of piety, I simply reply, I 'know. I've'been there. You can do nothing further for me, thank you.' "
An entirely separate side of the book is the light it throws on the life of a brilliant young social writer and his friends in the London of thirty-five years ago. There is a letter from Shaw from a Fabian summer school at Saxmundham, in Suffolk, where Shaw read Candida to the Webbs. (" Mrs. Webb says that ' Candida is simply a woman of bad character, neither more nor less.' " Ellen Terry had just written in answer to a reference to Mrs. Webb which is not given : " Now I'll let you off, poor man—no, rich,' with Mrs. Webb to ' arrange' you. Do you think she'd arrange me if I asked her ? ") The third side of the book is the interest of many of Shaw's letters for their own sake. There is a long detailed critique of Cymbeline written to Ellen Terry to help her in her rehearsals of Imogen
" I really don't know what to say about this silly old Cymbcline, except that it can be done delightfully in a village schoolroom, and can't be done at the Lyceum at all, on any terms. I wish you would tell me something about Imogen for my own instruction. All I can extract from the artificialities of the play is a double image— a real woman divined by Shakespear without his knowing it clearly, a natural aristocrat, with a high temper and perfect courage, with two moods—a childlike affection and wounded rage ; and an idiotic paragon of virtue produced by Shakespear's views of what a woman ought to be, a person who sews and cooks, and reads improving books until midnight, and ' always reserves her holy duty,' and is anxious to assure people that they may trust her implicitly with their spoons and forks, and is in a chronic state of suspicion of improper behaviour on the part of other people (especially her husband) with abandoned females."
. In spite of this perhaps somewhat churlish, though in those days of " bardolatry " absolutely essential criticism, Shaw's detailed instructions for the acting of the crucial scenes show a dramatic grasp of the possibilities of the play which are immense. When all is said and done, however, it will perhaps be no insult to the letters to say that the best reading in the book is Shaw's Preface. Indeed, there are fairly long sections of the correspondence which are only moderately interesting.
But what is profoundly interesting is the revelation which the book as a whole provides of Shaw's life. It is not too much to say that henceforward it will be quite impossible to understand the peculiar, dry, hygienic, antiseptic quality of his thought unless this story is taken into account. One has only, in order to realize its importance, to speculate on what effect it would have had on Shaw's work if he had taken Ellen Terry by storm and she had gone to him cor- poreally as well as by letter. It is, of course, idle to speculate on what particular effects on Shaw's work such a fulfilment of his love would have had. It might, for all we know, have caused him never to write another line ; or it might have ruined his work completely. On the other hand, it might have transformed him into one of the most complete, instead of one of the most particular, of great British writers. But, at any rate, it is inconceivable that it would not have had a profound effect upon his whole psychology ; hence it is equally inconceivable that the events which did in fact take place, that the long tension of the correspondence, did not have a profound influence in moulding him into what he actually became.
We see here, of course, many of the roots of the particular attitude towards sex which runs through all his work : which persists in so recent a play as The Apple Cart, where the King talks of his curiously innocent relationship " with the royal mistress.
A close investigation both of Mr. Shaw's early years, of
the full facts of his life story, and of his works would no doubt give material for some explanation. They would explain that is why Mr. Shaw's genius took a particular turn. But what, of course, we cannot explain is why he had genius at all. And it is perfectly possible that the frustration of his ordinary life was in fact a necessity to his work. The real world seldom, perhaps never, allows the perfect develop- ment of genius. Very likely Mr. Shaw found in this cor- respondence the best solution objectively possible for him. As he says, with all his eloquence, in the last words of the Preface to this volume :
" Let those who may complain that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love."
JOHN STRACHEY.
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