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Introduction to Shaw, Journalist

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.41.2.0229

1529-1480

Peter Gahan, Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

[The Great War was] a war of ideals. Liberal ideals, Feudal ideals, National ideals, Dynastic ideals, Republican ideals, Church ideals, State ideals, and Class ideals, bourgeois and proletarian, all heaped into a gigantic pile of spiritual high explosive, and then shoveled daily into every house with the morning milk by the newspapers.—Bernard Shaw, Preface to 1922 reprint of The Quintessence of Ibsenism In a December 1900 letter, Bernard Shaw offered his opinion to Frank Harris, former editor of the Fortnightly Review as well as of the Saturday Review, about Harris's desire to start another journal. “We're too old for it: journalism is not for men over forty,” Shaw told Harris, “What you have to do now is to make your will, so to speak, in a series of dramas, tales or what you will.”1 Undaunted, Harris returned to newspaper proprietorship the following year with Candid Friend, which he edited unsuccessfully for little more than a year. It ran long enough, however, for Harris to publish an interview with Shaw. A journalist since the 1880s, Shaw had ended his career as a full-time critic in 1898 on Harris's Saturday Review, and in this interview with his old editor he spoke about the job of journalism: Daily journalism is a superhuman profession: excellence in it is quite beyond mortal strength and endurance. Consequently, it trains literary men to scamp their work. A weekly feuilleton is at least possible. I did one for ten years. I took extraordinary pains—all the pains I was capable of—to get to the bottom of everything I wrote about…. Ten years of such work, at the rate of two thousand words a week or thereabouts—say, roughly, a million words—all genuine journalism, dependent on the context of the week's history for its own effect, was an apprenticeship which made me master of my own style.2Shaw's career as a professional journalist was crucial to the type of writer he later became. His beginnings in mid-1880s London working on daily and weekly papers as well as more specialist journals coincided with the rise of New Journalism.3 He would later say, with some pride, “think of me as heading one of the pioneer columns of what was then called the New Journalism.”4 One can argue that Shaw contributed to the higher ideals of the movement whose more sensationalist aspects soon developed into what became known as tabloid journalism, in which fellow Dubliner Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliff) would become the most prominent practitioner as proprietor of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Shaw wrote for many of New Journalism's better-known editors: W. T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette, T. P. O'Connor at The Star, H. W. Massingham at The Star, the Daily Chronicle, and The Nation, Ernest Parke at The Star and North London News, and Clement Shorter at The Star and Illustrated London News, while Thomas Marlowe (also Irish and a longtime editor at Harmsworth's Daily Mail) and Robert Donald (a later editor of the Daily Chronicle) were other notable colleagues from his early days on The Star.5 Except for Stead (the figure most associated with the beginnings of New Journalism) at the Pall Mall Gazette, all these later editors apprenticed, in a sense, under The Star's founder and first editor, T. P. O'Connor, an Irish member of Parliament familiarly known as “Tay Pay.” H. W. Massingham, The Star's first deputy- editor, became over the years Shaw's closest professional colleague in the hurly-burly of London's political journalism right through the end of Massingham's tenure as editor of the political and literary weekly The Nation in 1923, where he became editor in 1907.Massingham had first suggested Shaw's name to O'Connor for the job of assistant leader writer prior to The Star's first issue in January 1888, and later, when editor of The Nation in the first quarter of the twentieth century, as Massingham's offices happened to be in Adelphi Terrace where the Shaws lived, he frequently lunched with them. A typical illustration of Shaw working through Massingham is when the latter was editor of the Daily Chronicle. In advance of a lecture to the Fabian Society, Shaw on 17 September 1895 requested that its secretary Edward Pease “ask the executive [committee] whether they will empower me to give a copy of my paper in advance to the Daily Chronicle to be printed as a verbatim report (if I can persuade Massingham to do it).” Massingham ensured the Daily Chronicle did publish Shaw's “The Political Situation: A Fabian View” on 5 October.6Shaw's other close professional journalist colleague, and one of his best friends personally, theater critic and Ibsen translator William Archer, had initially helped Shaw get his first full-time jobs in journalism: at Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, at Edmund Yates's fashionable weekly The World, and various other smaller outlets; Archer may even have initially suggested Shaw's name for The Star to Massingham, whom he knew.In a report for The Star from the British Association meeting held in Bath in September 1888, T. P. O'Connor has left a striking portrait of his employee, the thirty-two-year-old socialist journalist Bernard Shaw delivering his paper on “The Transition to Social Democracy” (later published in Fabian Essays) to the Economics Section: A tall thin man, with a very pale and very gentle face, read a paper which calmly denounced as robbers some of the men the world is accustomed to regard as ornaments of society, the patterns of morality, and the pillars of the church. This was Mr. George Bernard Shaw. The whole thing was done, not with the savagery of a wild illiterate controversialist, but with the light touch, the deadly playfulness, and the rapier thrusts of a cultivated and thoughtful man. Mr. Shaw is as yet little known to the general world, but he is a power, as he deserves to be, among the militant Radicals of the metropolis. (“What We Think,” The Star, 24 September 1888, 1)Writing paragraphs, notes, and occasional columns for The Star provided Shaw with a regular if meager income as well as experience in editorial journalism. His pieces, however, quickly led to disagreements with O'Connor whenever his Fabian socialism came into conflict with the paper's Liberal Party line. The Irish Parliamentary Party, to which O'Connor belonged, had forged a parliamentary alliance with Gladstone's Liberal Party to facilitate the formation of a Liberal government that could then legislate for Irish Home Rule. Although The Star had been founded by O'Connor and his Liberal Party backers as a Radical Liberal evening paper for the ordinary working man, its radicalism did not extend to the new wave of socialism that had begun to find its way into public discourse by the late 1880s, and in which movement Shaw, almost as soon as he joined the new Fabian Society in 1884, had become a prominent voice. The new paper rapidly reached a large circulation, not least because of its sensational “Jack the Ripper” reporting led by Ernest Parke, and Shaw's political disagreements with his editor (never personally acrimonious) eased after O'Connor hired him in early 1889 as the paper's music critic using the humorous pseudonym Corno di Bassetto. Fabian maneuvering within The Star's editorial department, however, was not confined to Shaw, and his later claim that “We collared the Star” (Fabian Tract No. 41 [1892], 18), referred as much to Massingham, who became involved in even more divisive clashes with O'Connor over editorial control of the paper. These disputes led to O'Connor being bought out by its Liberal Party backers in 1890 with Massingham replacing him, although the latter lasted only six months as editor before moving on later to the Daily Chronicle, first as political leader writer and then editor.For most of Shaw's fourteen-year career as a full-time professional journalist, he was a critic of the arts, first of books and art, then music, and finally theater, all of which, in contributing to his relentless development as a writer, enabled him to become “master of my own style.” Peter Gahan chronicles these crucial years of full-time journalism in “Bernard Shaw, New Journalist (1885–1898),” while Jose Luis Oncins-Martínez in his “Bernard Shaw: Book Critic” considers Shaw's early years as a professional critic reviewing books for the Pall Mall Gazette. David Clare's “Cosmopolitan versus Parochial Irishness in Bernard Shaw's Music Journalism (1877–1894)” traces Irish connections in Shaw's anonymous music reviews for The Hornet (his earliest stint at music criticism in the 1870s, when he “ghosted” reviews for his mother's musical associate Vandeleur Lee), The Star as Corno di Bassetto, and The World as G.B.S. Clare finds that Shaw advised fellow Irish immigrants to England from his own experience to maintain a fine line between being proud of their Irish origins while being cognizant of London-based cosmopolitanism.The manifold world of London journalism prompted from Shaw a diverse output of writing, not only regular reviewing work and occasional paragraphs but also major lengthy political, economic, cultural, and arts essays in some of the leading literary and political journals as well as smaller socialist outlets, where, as its most public face, he could articulate Fabian socialism at some length. Irrespective of whether The Star in its first couple of years had, in fact, been “collared” by the Fabians as Shaw claimed (some later historians dispute this), the contentious issues that played out between its journalists, editors, proprietors, and associated politicians indicated a growing impatience in the middle-class Fabian Society with its controversial tactic (much criticized by other socialist groups) of permeating the Liberal Party through its Radical wing. That tension eventually led in 1893 to the publication of Shaw's pivotal political essay, “To Your Tents, Oh Israel!” published in Harris's Fortnightly Review in November 1893 and signed “The Fabian Society.” The essay, intended by Shaw and his Fabian colleague Sidney Webb to foment a political storm, is reprinted here for the first time as it appeared in the Fortnightly Review. The writing was entirely Shaw's following discussions with and suggestions from Webb, who vetted Shaw's various drafts before final approval by the Fabian Society. Peter Gahan's introduction fills in the complex historical background to what is essentially a topical political essay, but one highly consequential for twentieth-century British politics.Almost all of Shaw's major political essays written for journals or newspapers or as lectures would be revised for publication as Fabian Tracts. Thus, an expanded version of “To Your Tents, Oh Israel!” with extensive revisions by Shaw appeared in early 1894 as Fabian Tract No. 49: “A Plan of Campaign for Labor.” The Fabian Society ensured a nationwide distribution for “A Plan of Campaign for Labor,” which for the first time clearly laid out a blueprint, a detailed plan of how to establish a Labour Party of around fifty trade unions–backed candidates to represent working-class interests in Parliament. When the Labour Party led by Keir Hardie was formed in Westminster twelve years later after the 1906 general election, it had happened more or less exactly as the tract had proposed.Shaw's career as a full-time professional journalist ended shortly before his June 1898 marriage to wealthy Irish Fabian Charlotte Payne-Townshend. A few months later, Grant Richards published Shaw's first two volumes of plays as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, which, following the successful productions of Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple in America that helped make him financially independent, cemented the arrival of Bernard Shaw, dramatist. Nevertheless, Shaw continued to write journalism in a variety of forms for another fifty-two years. Maintaining his old contacts in the newspaper world, he could almost always find publication outlets for even his most controversial pieces, and not only in the English-speaking countries of the British Empire, but also, and most lucratively, in America, as well as in Germany, France, the Spanish-speaking world, and beyond.7At all stages of his writing life, Shaw wrote letters to the press on a vast range of topics. Most famous were his frequent missives to the paper of record, The Times of London, which he began writing shortly after leaving full-time journalism. Whereas practically all his early journalism was written for Liberal papers (and small socialist journals), the increasingly well-known Shaw discovered that the Conservative Times was usually more than happy to publish him. Shaw's Times correspondence has been collected as The Letters of Bernard Shaw to The Times (2007), edited by Ronald Ford, while a selection (a mere fraction of his total output) of Shaw's press letters to other outlets has appeared in Agitations (1985), edited by Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau. Jean Reynolds's essay appearing here, “Shaw's Letters to Newspapers,” samples Shaw's press letters, always revealing his commitments and critical eye.Even when The Times refused to publish a letter, Shaw could always place it elsewhere, most often at The Nation with Massingham, who kept a constant editorial weather-eye alert for journalistic controversies that he knew he could use Shaw to stoke, and even to be a willing instigator. On the rare occasions The Nation baulked at publishing a Shavian pronouncement, the resolutely Liberal and conscientious C. P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian almost always could be relied upon to print it. The Nation, though, hosted in its correspondence columns some of the best known of Shaw's newspaper controversies, in which he would contribute at least two letters often more, though never insisting on the last word. One such controversy with music critic Ernest Newman over the 1910 London reception of Richard Strauss's dissonant-sounding opera Elektra went on for weeks, while another that followed his major 1913 lecture “A Case for Equality” at the National Liberal Club started because Massingham made sure that The Nation reported Shaw's lecture (in contrast to the New Statesman, even though Shaw had been one of the latter's founders earlier that year).8 One of his main antagonists was Leonard Hobhouse, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and apostle of New Liberalism (and, incidentally, an occasional leader writer at the Manchester Guardian). Hobhouse was one of the few, even among Shaw's ideological foes, who simply could not abide him either in person or in print. Unwilling to forgive Shaw for having steered the Fabians toward an anti-Boer position in the South African wars, he called him “the evil genius of the Fabian Society,” apparently because Shaw's Irish wit was too quick for the Anglo-Saxon mind.9 The Liberal Hobhouse was horrified by Shaw's arguing in “The Case for Equality” for economic equality, as distinct from social equality. Shaw maintained not only that they cannot be differentiated, but that, as it is impossible to devise a method of calculating economic reward in terms of personal merit (however defined), any form of justifiable inequality the meritocratic Hobhouse sought to establish on that basis was, therefore, also impossible.10 With the post-lecture controversy having played out in the columns of The Nation, the December issue of Metropolitan Magazine in New York published Shaw's full lecture along with a detailed report of the discussion following the lecture, including Shaw's replies.11 Its editor, H. J. Whigham also offered a prize for the best essay replying to Shaw's “Case for Equality,” and received nearly three thousand replies!12A typical Shaw letter about the disarmament movement that had been growing through much of the 1890s, “Trafalgar Celebration and the Tsar,” appeared in the Daily Chronicle on 13 October 1898, when Massingham was editor. Shaw's comments were prompted by the contradiction between Russia's Tsar Nicholas II's intention to hold a conference on disarmament at the same time as plans were afoot for holding the annual London celebration of the October 1805 British victory at the Battle of Trafalgar: Sir,—Are we to understand from the letter of Mr. William Caius Crutchly, Secretary to the Navy League, that our first response to the Tsar's pacification proposal is to be a Trafalgar celebration? No doubt the celebration and testimonialisation of remarkable events and eminent men will always be cherished in England as a means of procuring notoriety for noisy nobodies. But since peace hath her victories no less than war, I suggest that if the Press is in the least in earnest in its compliments to the Tsar it should refuse to give gratuitous advertisements to those obnoxious nobodies who can find nothing better to celebrate than battles…. Can we not go to Trafalgar-square on the anniversary of the battle and pull down the column which commemorates it? The Prince of Wales could dislodge the first stone.13This Trafalgar letter anticipated the most deeply considered of Shaw's newspaper writing, his massive output of war journalism during World War I. At first, he had attempted to stem the march to war in Britain, and then once war began, he maintained a critical approach to the government's execution of it. Although he was antimilitarist, rather than a pacifist, he insisted that the war should end only with the defeat of Germany (or, rather, Prussian militarism) to ensure the possibility of a true postwar democracy. He collected most of his wartime journalism in the volume What I Really Wrote about the War (1931), which began with a March 1913 letter, “Armaments and Conscription: A Triple Alliance Against War,” published in the Daily Chronicle, by then edited by Robert Donald, another veteran from the early days at The Star. Shaw had long been critical of the ineffectual, if conscientious Liberal foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and declared, “The great secret of our foreign policy is that we have no foreign policy.” More constructively, he proposed that in order to prevent an immediate war in Europe a triple alliance should be agreed between England, France, and Germany: “if France attack[s] Germany we [Britain] combine with Germany to crush France, and if Germany attacks[s] France, we combine with France to crush Germany.”14 He intensified his criticism of the Foreign Office less than a year later in the Daily News and Leader, “The Peace of Europe and How to Attain It” being published on 1 January 1914: When we claim that foreign policy should be controlled by democracy instead of by aristocratic foreign secretaries and their retinues of Nuts, nothing comes of it, because the democracy knows well that it is as destitute of a policy as any Foreign Office, … and Christmas-card Pacifism do[es] not make a policy, and will not prevent the building of a single Dreadnought nor avert conscription.15With war inevitable, Shaw's contributions increased. On 1 August 1914, the Daily Citizen published “The Madness of This War”: “If war is madness, we should have thought of that before…. We muddled our way in and we may have to fight our way out. The best of us will consent to the inevitable, sullenly and angrily; and this better be taken carefully into account by statesman and journalists who may feel tempted to deck this horrible emergency in the rhetorical trappings of enthusiasm and patriotism.”16 Other pieces of Shaw's early war journalism include “The Peril of Potsdam: Our Business Now,” published in the Daily News and Leader on 11 August, as well as an interview he gave to American progressive and syndicated journalist Mary Boyle O'Reilly, daughter of nineteenth-century Irish poet and newspaper editor, John Boyle O'Reilly. “Cleverest Man in England Talks to Mary Boyle O'Reilly—George Bernard Shaw—Slashes Right and Left” began appearing in American papers in October, and later in England. All these pieces led up to his major statement, Common Sense about the War, which he began drafting in the first month of the war. Published in November 1914 as a thirty-two-page supplement to the New Statesman, the tract caused an immediate outcry in England on account of its evenhanded approach to the principal belligerents' motives.Despite the extremely angry response in most of the English press to Common Sense, Shaw persisted, and with the hostility gradually abating by 1917 the British High Command invited him as a notable commentator to visit the front lines. A series of three articles, “Joy Riding at the Front,” resulted, published during March in the Daily Chronicle. Among other things, Shaw described meeting with General Henry Rawlinson, who had led the British forces at the Battle of the Somme: “[Rawlinson] was frank; his manners were his own; and he had no academic illusions about the situation, which was not then a very rosy one; for the recent Somme offensive had come to nothing but a very superfluous demonstration of the homicidal uselessness of sending waves of infantry to attack barbed wire defended by machine guns, even after the costliest bombardments and minings.”17Book reviewing was another type of journalism Shaw pursued to the end of his life. Now among the best known of writers, he was no longer dependent on the whims of literary editors about which books to review as when he started out at the Pall Mall Gazette. Again, Massingham at The Nation offered him a ready outlet for these occasional pieces. An essay on “Edgar Allan Poe,” for instance, appeared in The Nation's “Life and Letters” column on 16 January 1909, in which Shaw offered intriguing insights into the early nineteenth-century American poet, fiction writer, and practicing journalist. [Poe] was the greatest journalistic critic of his time, placing good European work at sight when the European critics were waiting for somebody to tell them what to say. His poetry is so exquisitely refined that posterity will refuse to believe that it belongs to the same civilization as the glory of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's lilies or the honest doggerel of Whittier, who was nothing if not a virtuoso, never produced a success that will bear reading after Poe's failures. Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest contemporaries produced only beauty. Tennyson's popular pieces, The May Queen and The Charge of the Six Hundred, cannot stand hackneying: they become positively nauseous after time. The Raven, The Bells, and Annabel Lee are as fascinating at the thousandth repetition as at the first.Shaw concludes his assessment of Poe as a writer by stating what sets him apart: Above all, Poe is great because he is independent of cheap attractions, independent of sex, of patriotism, of fighting, of sentimentality, snobbery, gluttony, and all the rest of the vulgar stock-in-trade of his profession. This is what gives him his superb distinction. One vulgarized thing, the pathos of dying children, Poe touched in Annabel Lee, and devulgarized it at once. He could not even amuse himself with detective stories without purifying the atmosphere of them until they became more edifying than most of Hymns, Ancient and Modern.18The detective story allusion may have been directed at Arthur Conan Doyle, who had been a neighbor of the Shaws when they lived for a year in Hindhead, Surrey. Doyle, of course, was also a journalist, with much of his best-known fiction appearing first in magazines.Ireland was another major topic that loomed large in Shaw's journalism. In London, he and Charlotte personally kept up with Irish people, events, newspapers, and other publications, which resulted not only in letters from Shaw appearing in the correspondence columns of Irish newspapers, but also in his stray comments and speeches on Irish affairs reported in Irish as well as American (with its burgeoning Irish-American population) and English papers. As a result, and despite having left Ireland in 1876, Shaw figured as a conspicuous presence in Irish public discourse during the historically turbulent period between 1890 and 1923. Much of his Irish journalism is collected in The Matter with Ireland, edited by Dan H. Laurence and David Greene (2nd ed., 2001).19Among his earliest Irish journalistic efforts were letters to The Star about the divorce scandal involving the Irish parliamentary leader Parnell in 1890, but Ireland came to figure more prominently in his journalism after he wrote John Bull's Other Island in 1904, during the period of his frequent returns to Ireland (1905–23). In anticipation of an influential 1910 lecture he delivered in Dublin, “The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland,” he deployed one of his favored journalistic genres: the self-interview. This interview was titled, “Mr. Bernard Shaw, Special Interview,” and was published in Dublin's The Freeman's Journal and Evening Telegraph, on the day of the lecture, 3 October 1910. Laurence and Greene reprinted a partial excerpt from the interview in the second edition of The Matter with Ireland, which they titled, “My Motto is Ireland for All.” The full interview is reprinted in this volume, along with two further Irish self-interviews, “Mr. Bernard Shaw on Syndicalism,” from The Irish Worker, 30 March 1912, and the “Municipal Art Gallery” in the Irish Times, 12 April 1913—both of which are not included in The Matter with Ireland and are reprinted here for the first time. These three reprinted interviews are accompanied by separate introductions by Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel, explaining the contexts of each, from publicizing his 1910 lecture, revealing early ties to Dublin's labor movement with the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, and the complex chains of events leading to Shaw's interventions in the Municipal Art Gallery debate. It was a debate that involved many of the day's significant Irish cultural and political figures and served as a cultural prelude to a decade of revolutions. The three interviews not only reflect Shaw's interactions with Ireland during the early 1910s, which expanded into the 1920s, but also reveal how Shaw endeavored to portray himself to Dublin.Shaw's most significant contribution to Irish journalism came as the 1917 Irish Convention chaired by his friend Horace Plunkett was meeting in Dublin in what, in hindsight, was a futile attempt to decide the constitutional future of Ireland peacefully. Shaw wrote a series of three articles, “The Matter with Ireland,” which were commissioned for a considerable sum (surprising even Shaw, who had driven a hard bargain in the belief it would be rejected) by the notoriously conservative Daily Express, edited by American Max Blumenthal. The articles criticized both Unionists and Nationalists before proposing a federal solution for the four nations in the two islands. Published simultaneously not only in London's Daily Express, but in the Belfast Evening Telegraph, the Cork Examiner, the Irish Independent in Dublin, the New York American, and Maclean's in Toronto, the three articles were brought together and issued as a separate pamphlet titled “How to Settle the Irish Question” by the Talbot Press in Dublin, and Constable in England, later in the year.From the mid-1890s, Bernard Shaw became as much a presence in the American as in the British and Irish press, no matter whether radical or capitalist. The same also held true in Europe, especially in the German-language press once his plays began to be regularly produced in Berlin and Vienna from the middle of the first decade of the new century on. In an age of syndication, Bernard Shaw, or more simply “G.B.S.,” was fast becoming best known as a global commentator.Anarchist Benjamin Tucker of Boston pirated as early as 1885 a Shaw article on anarchy for publication in his Liberty paper, and over the next ten years or so, Tucker periodically reprinted big and small Shaw pieces that had first appeared in the British, usually the socialist press. Unbothered in this case by piracy, and not displeased with his American exposure, Shaw wrote a major essay on art specifically for Tucker's Liberty, in which he critiqued Max Nordau's influential book on modern artists, Entartung (Degeneration). Taking the form of an open letter to Liberty's editor, “A Degenerate's View of Nordeau” (later “Sanity of Art”) was published on 27 July 1895.As noted earlier, much of Shaw's copy was written for publication in outlets whose politics were the opposite of his, the politics of any paper or journal always being those of its proprietor. That this well-known socialist could become one of the best paid of journalists in the first half of the twentieth century by writing for William Randolph Hearst's American newspapers should not, therefore, be a surprise. Hearst's New York American (known as The New York Journal American from 1937), in particular, was happy to pay Shaw huge sums. The first Shaw New York American piece appeared in 1906, a statement of vindication by Shaw following the acquittal of the personnel involved in the production of his originally banned 1893 play about prostitution, Mrs. Warren's Profession, while his last, a statement issued in 1950, insisted that he would ignore his ninety-fourth (and last) birthday the following day. In between came major articles, sometimes series of articles, many extended or partial verbatim reports (revised by Shaw for publication) of the annual Fabian lectures (a major end-of-year fixture in London, in which Shaw usually featured as main speaker if not the sole speaker) before, during, and after World War I. Among the most significant of these was the 1914 series of six Fabian lectures “On Redistribution” (reprinted in SHAW 36), which Shaw worked on at the very same time as he was drafting Common Sense about the War at the beginning of the Great War.20At any period of his career as a journalist, Shaw could feel moved to write a comprehensive statement on a major issue of the day. Such statements often