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Bernard Shaw's Pre-Raphaelite Drama
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
When Ford Madox Ford says in his autobiographical reminiscences, Memories and Impressions, that in Bernard Shaw “the last faint trickle of Pre-Raphaelite influence is to be perceived,” he is talking specifically about Shaw's affinities with the utopian socialism of William Morris and Shaw's preference for the “grayness and roughness” in dress affected by Rossetti, Morris, and their disciples. But Ford's reference to Shaw as a Pre-Raphaelite has justification for more reasons than Ford suggests, not the least of which is Shaw's own claim to be a Pre-Raphaelite dramatist. In the Preface to Plays Pleasant (1898) Shaw says that Candida was the result of his 1894 trip to Florence, “where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renascence,” and of a previous trip to Birmingham, where he attended a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit and saw the church windows of Morris and Burne-Jones. The Preface continues, “On the whole, Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities; for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men. … When my subsequent visit to Italy found me practising the playwright's craft, the time was ripe for a modern pre-Raphaelite play. Religion was alive again, coming back upon men, even upon clergymen, with such power that not the Church of England itself could keep it out.” An examination of Shaw's concept of Pre-Raphaelitism not only illuminates the theme of Candida but also reveals Shaw's early formulation of the idea that the artist is, to use Shaw's terminology from the Preface to Back to Methuselah, an iconographer of a living religion.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966
References
1 New York, 1911, pp. 142–143. Ford's concept of Shaw's Pre-Raphaelitism is suggested by the chapter title in which this reference appears: “Anarchists and Gray Frieze.”
2 London, 1931, pp. v-vi. All my citations of Shaw are from the Standard Edition of the Works of Bernard Shaw (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1931–50), unless otherwise specified.
3 “In the Picture Galleries: The Holman Hunt Exhibition,” reprinted in Jack Kalmar, “Shaw on Art,” MD, ii (Sept. 1959), 150–152.
4 “Art Corner,” Our Corner, May 1886, pp. 310–311; Feb. 1886, p. 124; May 1886, p. 310.
5 “The New Gallery—The Kakemonos in Bond Street,” and “Arts and Crafts,” in “Shaw on Art,” pp. 153–157.
6 For discussions of the Pre-Raphaelites and their aims, see in The Germ, John Lucas Tupper, “The Subject in Art,” Nos. 1 and 3; F. G. Stephens, “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” No. 2; and Stephens, “Modern Giants,” No. 4. See also John Ruskin, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, xii (London, 1904), 337–393; James Ashcroft Noble, “A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine,” Introd., The Germ (Portland, Me.: Thomas B. Mosher, 1898); Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London, 1882); William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto, 2 vols. (New York, 1892); Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols. (Boston, 1895); Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854–1870, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (London, 1897); W. M. Rossetti (ed.) Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism. Papers 1854 to 1862 (London, 1899); John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Millais, i (New York, 1899); W. M. Rossetti (ed.) Praeraphaelite Diaries and Letters (London, 1900); W. Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols. (New York, 1905–06); Henry A. Beers, “The Pre-Raphaelites,” A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1901); W. M. Rossetti (ed.), Rossetti Papers, 1862 to 1870 (London, 1903); L. March-Phillips, “Pre-Raphaelitism and the Present,” The Contemporary Review, lxxxix (May 1906), 704–713; Ford Madox Ford, Memories and Impressions (New York, 1911); Louise Rosenblatt, L'Idée de l'art pour l'art dans la littérature anglaise pendant la période victorienne (Paris, 1931), Ch. iii; Anna Janney De Armond, “What Is Pre-Raphaelitism in Poetry?” Delaware Notes, 19th ser. (1946), pp. 67–88; Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London, 1949), Ch. ii; D. S. R. Wel land, Introd., The Pre-Raphaelites in Literature and Art (London, 1953); and William E. Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).
7 Major Critical Essays, p. 139. Shaw's return to nature is, of course, also a part of the wider nineteenth-century romantic movement. For the Pre-Raphaelite movement as part of the romantic movement, see Beers, pp. 282–351, Rosenblatt, p. 87, and De Armond, p. 70.
8 Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, i, 79. Future references to this work will be indicated in my text by volume and page number.
9 “Modern Giants,” The Germ, No. 4, p. 190. All my page references to items in The Germ are to the Mosher edition.
10 Quoted in Scott, ii, 39.
11 Rev. of Poems, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Academy, 14 May 1870, p. 199.
12 “Pre-Raphaelitism,” p. 359.
13 The Germ, No. 2, p. 65. See also Tupper, The Germ, No. 1, p. 14; Ruskin, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” pp. 357–358 n.; Hunt, i, 82–86, 125, 312–314, et passim; W. M. Rossetti, Family Letters, i, 126.
14 “Art Corner,” June 1885, p. 374.
15 Our Theatres in the Nineties, ii, 181. Future citations from this work will be indicated in my text by OTN, followed by volume and page number. Shaw attributes to William Morris, a major influence on Shaw's Pre-Raphaelitism, the same attitude toward Swinburne: “Of Swinburne … he [Morris] said that he [Swinburne] got everything from books and nothing from nature” (William Morris As I Knew Him, New York, 1936, p. 40).
16 See esp. “A Dramatic Realist to His Critics” (1894), in Shaw on Theatre, ed. E. J. West (New York, 1959), pp. 31–38.
17 Ibid., p. 38.
18 Raskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism, p. 21. Brown also objected to Hunt's “microscopic detail” (Hunt, i, 127).
19 “The New English Art Club—Monet at the Goupil Gallery,” in “Shaw on Art,” p. 157.
20 See esp. Ruskin's “The Two Boyhoods,” Modern Painters, Vol. v, Pt. ix, Ch. ix, which contrasts the practical effects of Giorgione's aesthetically pleasing, religious environment with Turner's ugly, irreligious Covent Garden background. See also Modern Painters, Vol. iii, Pt. iv, Chs. xiv, pars. 39–42, and xvi, pars. 9–22; Vol. v, Pt. ix, Ch. iii, passim; The Stones of Venice, Vol. ii, Ch. vi, passim, and Vol. iii, Ch. iv, pars. 31–36. For Morris' attitude toward medieval art and society, see esp. Hopes and Fears for Art, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, xxii (London, 1914). Both Ruskin and Morris argue that great art cannot exist in a corrupt society and that modern artistic productivity is thus dependent on social and economic reform; they both believe that the last period of ethical-artistic health was the Middle Ages. In “William Morris as Actor and Dramatist,” OTN, ii, 210, Shaw agrees with Morris' contention that the thirteenth century was “the most advanced point” in art and that the nineteenth was “the most backward one.”
21 The Savoy, No. 1, pp. 13–17. Future page references to this essay (indicated parenthetically in my text) are to this version.
22 In a speech dedicating a gate to the abbey of Ayot St. Lawrence, Shaw said that the fourteenth-century abbey was built by people who “knew God” and wanted to give Him a home (in Stephen Winsten, Shaw's Corner, New York, 1952, p. 213).
23 Religion to Shaw does not signify orthodoxy or sectarianism. Shaw's Creative Evolution encompasses all sincerely held beliefs, including the Christian Socialism of Morell, the revolutionary doctrine of John Tanner, the Catholicism of Saint Joan, even the capitalism of Andrew Undershaft. Shaw wrote to his friend, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, the Abbess of Stanbrook, that the Jain religion, because of its great number of fantastic images, comes closest to representing the multi-faceted unity of God (“The Nun and the Dramatist: George Bernard Shaw to the Abbess of Stanbrook,” Atlantic Monthly, cxcviii, Aug. 1956, 76).
24 Ford, p. 169. Unlike historians of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Shaw was not troubled by the question of whether or not the coterie led by Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones can be called Pre-Raphaelite. Shaw does not limit the name to the original seven members of the P.R.B., but refers to Madox Brown as a Pre-Raphaelite in the “Art Corner” of May 1886, freely associates the aesthetic of Ruskin and Morris with Pre-Raphaelite principles, and calls himself a Pre-Raphaelite dramatist.
25 Hunt, i, 135; also i, 87; i, 140; i, 147; i, 227; ii, 218; ii, 451; et passim. Ruskin, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” p. 358 n., warned the Pre-Raphaelites against falling into “medievalism or Romanism.”
26 William Michael Rossetti, The Spectator, 1851; quoted in Hamilton, p. 56. See also Family Letters, i, 127, 132; and “The P.R.B. Journal,” Praeraphaelite Diaries, pp. 300–302.
27 Shaw did write four plays (The Glimpse of Reality, Androcles and the Lion, Saint Joan, The Six of Calais) with medieval settings.
28 Conversely, Shaw approves of Hunt's portrayal of Jesus as “a common carpenter, a lean Syrian Jew” in the “Shadow of the Cross” (“Art Corner,” May 1886, p. 311).
29 “In the Picture Galleries,” p. 152.
30 See, for example, The Sanity of Art, Major Critical Essays, pp. 315–316; Pref. Pygmalion, p. 198, Pref. On the Rocks, p. 173; “Literature and Art,” Platform and Pulpit, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York, 1961), p. 44.
31 “The Author to the Dramatic Critics,” Widowers' Houses (London, 1893), p. 112.
32 An article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, lxxix (Feb. 1856), 209–232, hostile to both Pre-Raphaelitism and realistic staging in drama, associates the two, defining Pre-Raphaelite drama as “the specification of little traits and details that serve to realize the character as much as possible” and the reproduction of historically accurate settings and costumes.
33 Bernard Shaw, Collected Leiters, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London, 1965), p. 623.
34 Ibid., p. 641.
35 “The Nun and the Dramatist,” p. 76.
36 Augustin Hamon, The Twentieth Century Molière: Bernard Shaw, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London, 1915), pp. 184–187, and Richard Burton, Bernard Shaw: The Man and the Mask (New York, 1916), pp. 69–70, consider her an intellectually common woman emancipated from conventional morals; Margaret Schlauch, “Symbolic Figures and the Symbolic Technique of George Bernard Shaw,” Science and Society, xxi (Summer 1957), 218, discusses her as Mother-Goddess and symbol of the Life Force; William Irvine, The Universe of Bernard Shaw (New York, 1949), p. 175, considers her a realist caught between two romantics; A. H. Nethercot, Men and Supermen: The Shavian Portrait Gallery (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 7–17, and Jacob H. Adler, “Ibsen, Shaw, and Candida,” JEGP, lix (Jan. 1960), 52, consider her a Shavian Philistine and Mother Woman; Walter N. King, “The Rhetoric of Candida,” MD, ii (Sept. 1959), 83, believes that she is realist and Philistine combined; Barbara Bellow Watson, A Shavian Guide to the Intelligent Woman (London, 1964), pp. 65–69, emphasizes her practical, bullying, protective, “saving” qualities. For a resumé of critical opinions of Candida, see Nethercot, pp. 8–9, and King, pp. 71–73.
37 Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists (New York, 1909), pp. 254–255.
38 Pp. 213–216. Shaw's description of the theme of the Ring (faith in evolving life), pp. 221–222, is the same as his description of the conflict of Candida (see below, p. 436).
39 Pref. The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, p. 374. For Shaw's defense of instinctive “immoral” behavior, see esp. “The Two Pioneers,” The Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 13–24; “Siegfried as Protestant,” The Perfect Wagnerite, pp. 213–224; The Sanity of Art, pp. 301–304, et passim.
40 “Give me my rug. … Now hang my cloak across my arm. … Now my hat. … Now open the door for me” (pp. 93–94).
41 “Well, dear me, just look at you, going out into the street in that state! … Look at his collar! look at his tie! look at his hair! One would think somebody had been throttling you. … Here! Stand still. [She buttons his collar; ties his neckerchief in a bow; and arranges his hair.] There! Now you look so nice that I think youd better stay to lunch after all, though I told you you mustnt” (p. 100).
42 See “Ruskin's Politics,” Platform and Pulpit, pp. 130–144, and William Morris As I Knew Him, pp. 46–52.
43 George A. Riding, “The Candida Secret,” The Spectator, 17 Nov. 1950, p. 506.
44 In Mrs. Higgins' drawing room are Morris wall-papers and fabrics, “A few good oil-paintings from the exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery thirty years ago (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler side of them),” and “a portrait of Mrs Higgins as she was when she defied fashion in her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism in the eighteen-seventies” (Pygmalion, p. 244). Candida, of course, is not a Pre-Raphaelite lady; her dress and surroundings betray her Philistine origin. But Irvine's surmise (p. 149) that the germ of Candida was the triangle resulting when Shaw visited the household of May Morris and her husband suggests that possibly a Pre-Raphaelite lady, May Morris, with whom Shaw had formed an unspoken “Mystic Betrothal” (William Morris As I Knew Him, p. 32), was the original inspiration for Candida. Another source of the Candida triangle is Shaw's first novel, Immaturity (1879), which centers on the fortunes of a practical, Philistine woman, a priggish, youthful clerk, and an artist who is modelled on a painter “very much ‘in the movement’ at the old Grosvenor Gallery” (Pref. Immaturity, p. xli).
45 Higgins as artist does not work with words, except in a linguistic sense, but with a human being; like Shaw's other Pygmalion, the scientist in Back to Methuselah, Higgins is a creator of life. For a convincing discussion of Shaw's purpose in creating as heroes a “puny and adolescent” poet and a “cold and anti-social” linguist, see Paul Lauter, “ ‘Candida’ and ‘Pygmalion’: Shaw's Subversion of Stereotypes,” ShawR, iii (Sept. 1960), 14–19.
46 In his attempt to deal with a problem which in modern psychological theory would be discussed as sublimation of the sexual drive, Shaw advances an anti-Freudian theory of the divorce of the sexual from intellectual or aesthetic capacity. The idea of such “disengagement” appears also in Back to Methuselah, where the Ancients have not redirected their sexual energies but have abandoned them for intellectual ecstasy.
47 Oswald Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1960), p. 233, says that in the “peculiarly ‘medieval’ phase … the ‘stunner’ became the basis of the Preraphaelite sense of beauty.” See also Scott, i, 315, and W. M. Rossetti, Family Letters, i, 200.
48 Watson, p. 165, notes that, to Eugene, Candida is “a personification of ideal womanhood, a pre-Raphaelite madonna.” However, Shaw compares Candida to Titian's “Virgin of the Assumption”; why he chose this particular painting of the Virgin is conjectural, but my guess is that he used a post-Raphaelite Madonna to suggest that Candida is not in reality a Pre-Raphaelite lady but a practical, non-intellectual, bourgeois housewife and mother, who would perfectly fit Shaw's description of Raphael's “ideal wet nurse” (above, p. 434). Ruskin's comments on the “Assumption” (Modern Painters, Vol. v, Pt. ix, Ch. iii, pars. 30–32) may have suggested to Shaw a connection between Titian's “Assumption” and Candida. According to Ruskin, Titian was a “wholly realist, universal, and manly” artist who saw “sensual passion” as “a Divine fact”; the painting is an expression of both Titian's religious faith and his love of art for art's sake: “The Assumption is a noble picture, because Titian believed in the Madonna. But he did not paint it to make anyone else believe in her. He painted it, because he enjoyed rich masses of red and blue, and faces flushed with sunlight.”
49 Letter to Huneker, Iconoclasts, p. 255. See also Shaw's letter to The Kansas City Star, 6 Jan. 1900, reprinted in Burton, p. 231.
50 In view of Shaw's later statement that Jesus was “an artist and a Bohemian in his manner of life” (Pref. Androcles and the Lion, p. 23), it is no surprise to find the Christ-figure in Candida an artist. Shaw believed that Jesus' divinity was potentially available to every man, especially to the man of genius, who is a genius by right of his recognition of the godhead within him. See esp. “Why Jesus More than Another?” and “The Peculiar Theology of Jesus,” Pref. Androcles, pp. 5–6, 41–42.
51 The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill, Centenary Edition, v (London, 1897), 80. For Shaw's debt to Carlyle, see Julian B. Kaye, Bernard Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition (Norman, Okla., 1958), pp. 9–16.
52 At its worst, this art is mechanical and meaningless; but at its best Shaw values it as a first step to a higher art; see “The Religion of the Pianoforte,” The Fortnightly Review, 1 Feb. 1894, pp. 255–266; Man and Superman, pp. 111, 113; Pref. Misalliance, pp. 87–100; “The Aesthetic Man,” Everybody's Political What's What, pp. 178–200.