BERNARD SHAW AND ELLEN TERRY

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4024, 3 November 1931, Page 2

BERNARD SHAW AND ELLEN TERRY

LETTERS OF THIRTY YEARS A ROMANCE OF LITERATURE Mr St. John Ervine, in the ‘Observer,’ reviews ‘ Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence.’ In the year 1892, Ellen Terry, solicitous as ever for the welfare of distressed persons, wrote to Edmund Yates, the editor of the * World,’ to inquire how a young woman, named Elvira Gambogi, might obtain a place in the English world of music. The editor passed the letter on to his musical critic, a long, spare-bodied man, with a red beard, uncommonly' fine hands, one humorous eye, and one fanatical eye. The name of this critic was George Bernard Shaw, and he replied to Miss Terry’s letter in a style that she considered to be both stiff and prim and unkind. She was right about the primness of its author, for Mr Shaw, despite his audacity and his courage and his wit, is personally as prim and demure as a deaconess; but she was wrong about the stiffness and the brutality, as she was presently to disc&ver; for a few days later, to her astonishment and pleasure, she received a long letter from him m which he faithfully reported upon her protegee’s chances of obtaining a footing in that world. It was a good letter, as all Mr Shaw’s letters are, and, because of its honesty, a kind letter. He has never stooped to the form of frightful cruelty which Hatters the incompetent with' the assertion that they are skilled or deludes the mediocre with the praise that is due to the great. The kindness which was implicit in this letter became explicit a week later, when Mr Shaw again wrote to Miss Terry to tell her of a chance of employment for Miss Gambogi of which he had just heard. il And to think 1 thought vou stuffy! Coals of fire are burning my poor brains out!” the delighted Ellen wrote in her reply. He then sent her a copy of a book he had recently written, ‘ The Quintessence of Ibsenisra,” in which he had rebuked her for misusing her talents in paltry plays when she might have employed them in fine ones, for example, ‘ The Lady From the Sea,’ by Henrik Ibsen, who was just then throwing the disordered minds of the majority of London dramatic critics into deeper disorder. Mr Shaw's purpose in sending this book to her was to explain why he had called her an “ ignoramus,” and to induce her to believe that he had not used it in the mean manner in which Henn Irving had interpreted it in a speech delivered at Liverpool. “ Did you call me an ‘ignoramus’? Well, 1 forgivo you for speaking the truth. But I must ask Mr Irving to tell me about it,” she had exclaimed to Mr Shaw, who, however, preferred that she should learn “ about it ” from him.

That was tho beginning of the extraordinary correspondence which is published in this handsome volume, most ebly edited by Miss Christopher St. John, who has" special qualifications for editing it, since she assisted Ellen Terry to write her brilliant autobiography, ‘ The Story of My Life,’ and has been for many years the house-mate of her daughter, * Miss Edith Craig, the “ Edy ” to whom frequent reference >s made in these letters. It was not until the close of 1895 that the correspondence became frequent and voluminous. About that time, Mr Shaw, who had lately written a short play, called ‘ The Man of Destiny,’ was anxious to have it performed at the Lyceum by Irving and Ellen Terry, but as his relations with Irving might fairly be called terse, if not tart, he felt unable to approach the actor himself, so he began an approach to him through her. Mr Shaw’s difficulty in going direct to Irving with his play was not entirely due to the asperity with which the critic had occasionally castigated the actor. That, indeed, was the least part of the difficulty. What appalled Mr Shaw, apparently, was the fear in his mind that Irving would iqstantlv suspect, as was very' likely, in the circumstances of the theatre of that time, to suspect, that Mr Shaw was asking for a bribe for good notices. There is an old story of a critic who lived for years on the sums paid bymanagers for an option on his play. The unfortunate man was ruined by an innocent or unscrupulous manager, who not only purchased the piece, but produced it! In Mr Shaw’s day as a criticfavourable opinions appear to have been purchased in this manner. At all events, legend declared that they were. The author of ‘ The Man of Destiny ’ desired production, not a bribe, and his strategy, therefore, was devised solely for the purpose of persuading Irving to produce the piece, he as Napoleon, and Ellen Terry as the Strange Lady, without allowing him to believe for a second that Mr Shaw was only another cadger. Mr Shaw, therefore, sought the suffrages of Miss Terry. “ To my exasperation,” he wrote to her, “ I hear that are going to nlav Madame Sans-Gene* And I have just finished a beautiful little one-act plav for Napoleon and a strange lady—a strange lady who will be murdered by someone else while you are nonsensically pretending to play a washerwoman. . . . I was asked to do an English Madame Sans-Gene as an opera. . . . If they had asked me to do it for Ellen Terry, I would have obliterated them from the surface of the globe. Will your tomb in Westminster Abbey have nothing but reproaches for an epitaph?” This letter led to many others, but it did not lead to a production of ‘ The Man of Destiny ’ by Irving. That fact is among the most important in the history of the English theatre in the past thirtyfive years. For let us be certain about these letters. They are not love-letters. No man who loved and sought to possess a woman, or was loved by a woman who wished that he might possess her, ever wrote or received such letters as are here published. Mr Shaw wrote to Miss Terry, not as an ardent lover, but as an author; she wrote to him, not as a woman desiring to be captured and possessed, but as an actress who halfsuspected that she was missing her place in the theatre, and as a woman who immensely admired clever men and liked to be entertained by them. Moreover, she had discovered from a long letter which Mr Shaw had written to her about her performance of the part of Imogen in ‘ Cymbeline ’ that he had a remarkable sense of the theatre, and could give her tips that Irving, absorbed only in his own performance,

was unlikely to give her. She called him endearnig names to induce him to exercise his wits as a stage director in her behalf. Brilliant counsel on the way to play a part was worth a ducky or' two! When Mr Shaw informed her that his heart was at her feet, he took uncommon care to announce his gift in choice sentences; but if Mr Shaw’s heart had seriously been laid at Ellen Terry’s feet, his pen would have spluttered on the paper which told her that it was there. Why, some of these letters were written in the presence of Mr Sidney ebb !\\ ill anyone, with his hand on his heart, have the audacity to declare that a lover would write to his lady under the shadow of the part-author of ‘ Industrial Democracy,’ 1 The History of Liquor Licensing,’ the ‘ Consumer s Co-operative Movement,’ and ‘i he Breaking up of the Poor Law and the Public Organisation of the Labour Market?’ He would not have dared! The story told in these letters is not a tale of love, but a tale of the long struggle between Irving and Shaw for the mastery of the theatre. The great actor was secure in liis authority: the dramatist wished to eject him from that authority, putting himself in it, and at the same time to have the actor’s help. That is the story told here, and nothing else is the story. Ellen Jerry must intuitively have known that Mr Shaw was attempting to use her as his ally in the fight with Irving, for although his flattery tempted her, she never yielded to it. She knew that Irving exploited her and meanly rewarded her —1 do not refer to money when L sav that—for the benefit he derived from' her popularity, and it is evident from some of her letters that she resented tins mean exploitation; but she knew, too, that Mr Shaw was trying the same game with iver, and that his exploitation would be no less, though it might be more glorious, than Irving’s. Her pitiful history is that of a woman of genius and extraordinary charm who failed to win the high seat of authority in the theatre that was her indisputable right because she was too tender-hearted to take it. Had she been less considerate of the feelings ol others, more unscrupulous in her demands for her rights, that place would have been hers. J3ut she had too much of the mothering instinct. Mr Shaw, tempting her to play Candida. appeals with diabolical cleverness to that mothering nature, and she almost succumbs to his pleas. But Irving needed her care more than Mr Shaw needed it. just as the Rev. James Mavor Morrell, more than Eugene Marjoribanks, needed the mothering of Candida. This great woman, beautiful, brilliant, and kind, went to her grave, leaving her life less than it ought to have been, because there was always a clever man nudging her in an appeal for sympathy and help. Towards the end of the letters Mr Shaw, suspecting, no doubt, that Miss Terry had never deceived herself by his professions of undying devotion, removes, his disguise. <l It is not the small things that women miss in me,” he tells her in a burst of candour, “ but the big things. My pockets are always full of the small change of love-making, but it is magic money, not real money.” This astonishing and brilliant, and, in many passages, beautiful book, demands to he read. It reveals the young Bernard Shaw, for his youth 'began when he was forty, more vividly than anything else that I have read. The great majority of these letters were written before Ellen Terry had even seen her epistolary lover. She rarelv met him at all, pretending to him. that he would be so disillusioned that he would not wish to woo her bypost again, and he was too shy to maintain in her presence tlve pretence of ardour and passion which he made in his letters. Foi* Bernard Shaw is an aborted actor, able to perform onlyon paper, and incapable of doing the la-di-da in life. What i have now to announce is the evident truth that it was well for Mr Shaw that Ellen Terry, intuitively- wise, resisted his efforts to tempt Ivor away from the Lyceum, even when she knew that it would be well for her to go; for what would have become of him if she had turned him into a mere manufacturer of plays for her? She did not like the piece he specially wrote for her. ‘ Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.’ which had better have been called

‘ Captain Brassbound’s Conversation,’ and doubted if she was good in it when nt last she played Lady- Cicley. (She was grand, of course!) And what would have become of her if he, unruly as he was likelv to be, had torn himself away from his entanglement and had announced that he would write plays for himself and not for her? I have stated that FI leu Terry and Mr Shaw seldom met, that the greater number of her letters to him and his to her were written before she had seen so much as a photograph of him. I once saw them meet. She was old and almost blind, hut still beautiful to at least one person, as she will continue for as long as that person lives. Mr Shaw looked at her in the queer, quizzical, affectionate fashion he has, and if one had been shallow, one might have thought “ lie is saying to him sell* ‘So that’s the wreck of a romance, is it?’” But 1 doubt if ho saw the wreck; I suspect that he saw only the romance. For what else could a sensitive eye see in her who kept the heart of a young girl in the body ol an old and bent woman?