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Shaw's Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.39.1.0143

1529-1480

Roland Dietrich,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Ghosts, supposedly, are spirits of the dead who haunt the living, are external to the living, and may or may not be related to the living, as in the case of the typical “haunted house” plot where people buy a haunted house they didn't know was haunted. But “ghosts” in great literature are mostly metaphorical/symbolic, representing a haunting from within by the consequences of one's own bad ideas or mistakes that come back to haunt one in the form of harmful actions that grow worse as time goes on. In Henrik Ibsen's great play Ghosts, the ghosts are more specifically identified by Mrs. Alving in a long speech but summed up thusly to Pastor Manders, a man she once left her dissolute husband for but only to be sent back to her husband for reasons of social propriety: “I almost think we are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off.” It is her own social constraints and obligations that haunt her, aided and abetted by Pastor Manders, and that she feels she must shed. This is quintessential Shaw as well, but Ibsen got there first.“Shaw's Ghost” is more of the literal kind in that it was external to him. It was a collective ghost that haunted him, the result of an erroneous “group think” that he couldn't escape. Shaw is certainly not the only author to be haunted by a damaging and mistaken critical opinion, but perhaps none has done more undeserved harm, partly in living so long past the author's death to haunt others.Shaw's Ghost was “summoned,” it seemed, when in the summer of 1890 Bernard Shaw lectured his fellow Fabians about Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, which seems to have served its original purpose well, but it and the publications of it titled The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891, 1913, and 1922, supplemented by updating to the death of Ibsen in one case and additional Prefaces in all cases, have been much misunderstood in the last 128 years, particularly by those who think in them Shaw misrepresented Ibsen. But Ibsen scholar Joan Templeton, in Shaw's Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal, in a heroic effort to lay to rest the ghost that haunted Shaw all his life and still haunts Shaw studies and Ibsen studies, does a wonderfully thorough job of correcting the mistaken notion that Shaw misrepresented Ibsen because he was antipathetic to everything Ibsen stood for as an artist, for nothing could be falser.The general misreading, at the beginning, is summarized in the following bit of logic chopping: the original of The Quintessence had been read to socialists by a socialist, ergo it must be a preachy socialist tract (whether you've read it or not), which couldn't possibly fit Ibsen as everybody knows that Ibsen refused to join any “ism,” “socialism” among them. Moreover, Ibsen was an artist focused on depicting “real life” and “soul states” and was not interested in using his plays to promote moral ideas or social reform. Therefore Shaw must have gotten Ibsen wrong, even though another look at Mrs. Alving's opinion above disputes that.By the way, this insistence on Shaw's supposed misrepresentation of Ibsen was on the part of both those Ibsen enthusiasts who, Templeton says, didn't really understand Ibsen (“Ibsenites”) and those who did (“Ibsenists”), and thus Shaw had to contend with a bipolar ghost as well.The false understanding of Ibsen added to the false logic that a socialist couldn't possibly understand a nonsocialist and was compounded by a legitimate misunderstanding following from the fact that the Fabians misleadingly titled their series of summer talks as “Socialism in Contemporary Literature.” But in fact all but one of the talks, including Shaw's, had nothing to do with socialism. These Fabian talks over the summer were more like a vacation from socialism. In fact, Shaw began his talk by explicitly saying that “[Ibsen] is not a socialist” and that he was not going to try to fit Ibsen to such a mold (38), a statement that he unfortunately did not include in the published Quintessence. Shaw went on to say that he supposed that Ibsen would probably vote for many of the changes socialists propose, but, with Ibsen's focus on the individual soul, he would never join a socialist organization or any other political group. Shaw understood from the first that being true to the individual self in the moment of living was at the core of Ibsen's drama, which was mostly peopled by characters who tragically did not do that or were prevented from doing that by “society.”That Shaw in writing the Quintessence had something far more important than socialism on his mind is clear enough to those not ghost-ridden, but all too many read the text as “the tradition” told them to, not as it really was. Their minds were made up going in by a habit-formed inheritance of group thinking, very much like the ghosts in Ibsen's Ghosts. This collective ghost was external to Shaw but often acted like it came from within Shaw because he took all the blame for making Ibsen seem concerned with “social” consequences of individual choices, as in Mrs. Alving's speech above.As for Shaw's not appreciating Ibsen as artist, Templeton debunks that by reminding us that the play that “shocked Shaw into an awareness of Ibsen's power” was Peer Gynt. “That it was the realist-expressionist-phantasmagorical verse drama that drew Shaw to Ibsen is crucial to understanding Shaw's notion of Ibsen as a writer [and that] what drew Shaw to Ibsen was ‘the magic of the great poet.’ … As Shaw listened to William Archer read Peer Gynt, Shaw was … exhilarated by him, and not because he had found a congenial social thinker but because he had discovered a great artist” (10). On the other hand, Shaw confuses some when in that section of The Quintessence titled “Needed: An Ibsen Theatre” he writes that “we want a frankly doctrinal theatre.” Which he then immediately clarifies by pointing out that “there is no more reason for making a doctrinal theatre inartistic than for putting a cathedral organ out of tune: indeed all experience shews that doctrine alone nerves us to the effort called for by the greatest art” (187, 3rd ed., Hill & Wang). If you're not noticing that, say, Brand and Peer Gynt are “doctrinal” in their indirect, artful way, then listen again to Mrs. Alving preaching to the preacher, Pastor Mandors, telling it like it is, artfully. You don't need to be a preacher in a pulpit to be “doctrinal.”To reach beyond the usual illogical slurs on socialists, some of the misunderstandings of The Quintessence might also be attributed partly to their tripartite structure, with introductory and concluding chapters framing Shaw's critical appreciations of Ibsen's plays. While the large middle of each edition is devoted to Shaw's very astute analyses of Ibsen's plays, which Templeton shows in case after case are echoed and validated by Ibsen's revelatory comments on those same plays, the introductory and concluding chapters separate Ibsen from the main argument from time to time, for the central arguments of each are indeed arguments that Shaw meant for larger application, beyond Ibsen, and that he later applied to his own plays. This could have been taken as confirming that Shaw was on Ibsen's wave length and extending it to others and into the future but unfortunately were used instead by the conditioned reflex of the ghost response to encourage the false notion that the book was not about Ibsen's plays but about Shaw's.Looked at another way, if the introductory and concluding chapters of the Quintessence (however different in each edition), with their arguments clearly attached to Ibsen, have some ideas developed in a way that later came to be called “Shavian,” that could speak to the common interrelatedness of literary texts and especially of those written by contemporaries who are allied in their thinking in many ways, as Templeton takes great pains to show Ibsen and Shaw were, as in their joint crusade against “idealism” (which Ibsen equated with “lying”). Shaw later explained that he used “idealism” rather than the preferred “idolatry” because he was following Ibsen's word choice, but the two words mean much the same in this usage. “Idealism” essentially was thinking and behaving like those walking dead in denial of reality who always haunt the present, preferring some inherited fantasy or lie about life over present reality, however miserable that may make their lives or the lives of those around them. Good examples of that were most of the English critics of Ibsen's London productions, with Clement Scott leading the parade of the walking dead. Scott hysterically denied the reality of Ibsen's presentation of life because it bore no resemblance to Scott's lying ideal of life and frightened him with its disastrous consequences for being in denial of the living truth.Further, while all great writers may stand on the shoulders of previous writers, as Shaw later said he did, Templeton's assessment that “The Quintessence of Ibsenism is perhaps the most famous book every written by one writer on another” (vii) suggests that Shaw was not so much standing on Ibsen's shoulders as striding along right beside him taking notes from the master and discussing their next move in creating the New Drama. When Ibsen was still alive and writing new plays, Templeton shows in great detail that Shaw's intense “Ibsen campaign” in the 1890s to get translators, actors, and managers to do Ibsen plays and critics to be much more knowledgeable and sensible in reviewing them was so tireless, relentless, and sincere that there can be no question of Shaw's commitment to Ibsen's radical worldview and the dramatic methods used to embody it. Shaw and Ibsen were at one in thinking that, as Ibsen said, “we must torpedo the Ark,” with Shaw brilliantly explaining how the plays Ibsen wrote were just the torpedoes needed. In his 1913 edition, Shaw spoke in a slightly different metaphor of Ibsen's dramaturgy as employing “a terrible art of sharpshooting at the audience” (183, 3rd ed. of Quintessence, Hill & Wang) the audience being the sitting dead, you might say. Shaw was most in tune with Ibsen in understanding that it was a war out there between playwright and audience.However, Templeton starts her exorcism of Shaw's Ghost on a much milder note by calling attention to the obvious fact that it was wildly inaccurate to say of the 1891 Quintessence that Shaw was writing about his own plays rather than Ibsen's, for Shaw had not written a single play at the time. That Shaw was going to become a playwright was unknown in 1891, perhaps even to himself, for at the time he was primarily an art, music, and drama critic. If he was drawn toward playwriting, as evidenced by his unsuccessful attempt to coauthor a play with William Archer in 1884 at Archer's invitation and if that did eventually bear fruit in the publishing of Widowers' Houses in 1893 after abandoning Archer's plot, that first play of Shaw's materialized only after the 1891 Quintessence was in print. Shaw once joked that, since he had called for a New Drama in England, he was forced to produce the goods himself. Shaw's becoming a playwright was the consequence of Ibsen's inspiring him to bring the New Drama to England.As for the claim made by some that The Quintessence of Ibsenism should be renamed The Quintessence of Shavianism, the words “Shavian” and “Shavianism” also did not exist until long after Shaw wrote the original Quintessence. Shaw himself always said he was a not a Shavian because, like Ibsen, he was alive to the need to be himself in the living moment, not follow some rule. The Quintessence of Ibsenism, he said, was that there was no quintessence, just as he said the Golden Rule is that there are no Golden Rules.When, after remarkably close and thorough research, Templeton gets down to specifics about the major cause of the commission and perpetuation of the falsehood that The Quintessence was mostly about Shaw and little if any about Ibsen, she identifies one by one, historically sequenced, its many false steps, naming names as she goes, and the best detective and most dedicated prosecutor in a court of law could hardly do a better job of making the case for the commission of this falsehood and its seemingly relentless haunting of Shaw than Joan Templeton so methodically does. Detective Templeton not only is on the case but admirably prosecutes it as well.As she explains and illustrates it, there seem to be two main perpetrations of the falsehood that later combined to make for a ghost so convincing to others that Shaw could never shake it.Templeton identifies the first and most damaging falsification of The Quintessence to be the one by an unidentified reporter at London's Daily Chronicle. “The tradition that Shaw claimed Ibsen as a fellow socialist had its beginnings in an unsigned dispatch entitled ‘Ibsen and Socialism’” from this correspondent (41). This occurred about three weeks after the Fabian Society lecture, which suggests that the reporter either didn't attend Shaw's lecture and learned of it secondhand or arrived late. In the Daily Chronicle it was explained that the reporter wanted to stop “the abuse of Ibsen's name by certain moral philosophers” by reporting on an interview of Ibsen in Munich, which resulted in Ibsen's being reported as saying that “he never was nor ever would be a Social Democrat” and that “he was surprised to find his name used as a means for the propagation of Social Democrat dogmas” (42). When he read this report, Shaw was naturally dismayed by the falsification of what he had said to the Fabians but even more because he thought the report had accurately repeated Ibsen's words, which it had not. He asked Archer, traveling in Bavaria, to consult Ibsen, to which Archer replied that Ibsen was “infuriated” not against Shaw but against “the Chronicle man” for getting him wrong. Ibsen then sent a letter that the Chronicle published that straightened things out (see p. 45 for the whole of it), making it clear that Ibsen just meant that he would never be a member of any political party, even one that he agreed with, as seemed to be the case with the English social democrats, who had arrived “by scientific processes” at some of the same conclusions he had arrived at.Despite this official correction, which was generally ignored, Shaw was continually haunted by the lie that he had treated Ibsen as a socialist in his lecture, even by friends such as Arthur Bingham Walkley, the chief drama critic of the time in London. And, astonishingly, the list of major drama critics, literary critics, and biographers who repeated this calumny could now go on for several more paragraphs. It was an epidemic. Most outrageously, in his 1911 biography, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works, Archibald Henderson repeated the lie as fact, presenting it as common knowledge. For unknown reasons, Henderson took it all back in his 1932 biography, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet, praising The Quintessence to the skies; but, strangely, in his third biography, in 1956, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century, Henderson then doubled down on the lie, perhaps, Templeton speculates, to appease the New Critics of the day in order to be “on the right side of critical history.” See “Henderson's Apostasy and Its Aftermath” (46–48).In 1912 Shaw's supposed “Fabianizing” of Ibsen was “blisteringly attacked by a writer devoted to the aesthetic movement of the fin de siècle,” Huntley Carter, who claimed that Ibsen “was butchered to make a Fabian holiday” (45). This view was heartily approved of by Miriam Franc, next up as the originator of the second line of perpetrators of the falsehood. But first, some confusing chronology needs clearing up.An amusing but exasperating note is that in this list of Shaw's disparagers are also people misidentified as critics of Shaw, such as his good friend William Archer, who wrote “Ibsen and English Criticism” (1889) to scold the same critics that Shaw was simultaneously attacking more vehemently for their gross misunderstandings of the first London production of A Doll's House (1889), in which Ibsen is dismissed as a preacher for women's rights, followed by more scurrilous characterizations of his drama. Shaw actually used Archer's denunciations and samplings of such critics in the first Quintessence. When Shaw was later falsely charged with misrepresenting Ibsen as a moralist and preacher in The Quintessence (1891), this was somehow conflated with Archer's 1889 essay in which Shaw is not named as one of those under attack, a mistake multiplied many times over when picked up on by future critics and biographers of Shaw. However, the person most responsible for keeping this mistake alive for the future to multiply its errors was Miriam Franc.As Templeton sums it up, “The originator of this error seems to have been Miriam Franc, in Ibsen in England, a doctoral dissertation written at the University of Pennsylvania in 1918 and published the following year, the only book on the subject of Ibsen's early English reception and a popular reference. The hero of Franc's whole narrative is Archer, who, she claims, rightly viewed Ibsen as an artist, and the villain is Shaw, who, as ‘a preacher lacking all poetry … misread Ibsen as a moralist rather than a poet’” (21–22). This then was later cited as gospel by many more critics, as Shaw's Ghost became habit-forming.With these two misguided sources to depend on, the Chronicle reporter and Miriam Franc, the many decades to follow were crowded with major figures in criticism, journalism, and literature echoing those sources in falsely blaming Shaw for his misrepresentation of Ibsen. This long and scandalous list, for which see Templeton's preface and chapter 1, may astound you at how fast a snowball rolling downhill can bury a person.At the end of this long list of “Shaw's Ghost” enablers Templeton provides a revelation that may be the crowning blow. Templeton points out the irony of how many of the people who agreed with the general characterization of Shaw as misrepresenting Ibsen and emphatically said so in print then went on to use analyses of Ibsen's life and work that are echoes if not direct quotations of what is to be found in The Quintessence. She provides a long list of critics, including big names in Ibsen studies and Shaw studies, who damned Shaw for his misleading Quintessence but who used his Quintessence anyway: “Many of Shaw's harshest critics echo his analyses in their own readings of Ibsen's plays” (xii). She also notes how some of Shaw's innovations, such as his categorizing of Ibsen's works, came to be standard in the field.Part of Templeton's defense of Shaw derives from her reading of Shaw's drama reviews in the Saturday Review, which, never mind The Quintessence, reveals Shaw continuing to talk about and promote Ibsen's plays through the nineties and with an ever improving grasp of the master's dramaturgy that she finds hitting the nail on the head quite often, and in the number and length of which reviews she finds further proof of Shaw's absolute dedication to Ibsen and to creating an Ibsen theater in England. And she understands the vigorous partiality of Shaw's approach to this goal, as has been recorded in the three volumes of Our Theatres in the Nineties, beginning on its opening page with “The Author's Apology,” in which Shaw confesses that his reviews are “not a series of judgments aiming at impartiality, but a siege laid to the theatre of the XIXth Century by an author who had to cut his own way into it at the point of a pen, and throw some of its defenders into the moat” (v). Although citing this “apology” with understanding and considerable sympathy, Templeton has reservations about aspects of it, such as Shaw's rating Ibsen above Shakespeare.All well and good, but here's where this wonderful book of Templeton's leaves us, no fault to its author. Templeton's case against the misreading of Shaw's Quintessence is so overwhelming that there should be no question going forward that Shaw has been vindicated. But scholars will go on reading opinions to the contrary in the very same scholarly and journalistic works cited here as mistaken, and which, do you think, will win the day? Shaw's Ghost represents a very bad habit prolonged beyond belief, but it's everywhere conceded that man is a creature of habit and most will die rather than change habits.And then there's the question of what makes the best story? Shaw, sometimes to his exasperation, was of the opinion that myth tends to triumph over reality because it makes for a more compelling story, as he loved to point out in many works of history. But such misrepresentation Shaw himself sometimes played with in his own writing (see any of his history plays for many examples, although justified as fictional, not historical), and his hyperbole is all over his own writing. Floundering as we presently are in the post-truth world of Donald Trump, which has landed on all our heads with an astonishing force, it does make one wonder about the efficacy of “setting the record straight.” We may certainly be rooting for Shaw's Ghost to be vanquished as we thank Joan Templeton for her valiant attempt to set this record straight. But what will be the critical consensus fifty years from now? Will Templeton's book be overlooked by new critics writing new books and articles on this subject and thus perhaps reviving the old Dracula in a new form?All we can do is rest on this hope: Shaw's Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal is nearly four hundred pages long; my commentary for the most part has been largely focused on the first fifty pages or so, with only general reference to the strong and informative chapters to come. What a treat you have in store for you if you read the rest, as the proof for Detective Templeton's argument comes rolling in, page after page, play analysis after play analysis, fact check after fact check. It is a powerful book, worthy of a prize.Not that Shaw doesn't get taken to task occasionally for his “invidious comparisons” (as in his hyperbolical reasons for preferring Ibsen to Shakespeare) and for that general hyperbolic, take-no-prisoners approach of his. Joan Templeton has gone out of her way to be fair. She dedicated this book to the great Eric Bentley, “The Mentor of Us All,” who got so many things right about Shaw in his 1947 (amended in 1957) Bernard Shaw but who fed Shaw's hungry ghost by advising readers of The Quintessence to substitute the word “Shaw” for the word “Ibsen” throughout. Yes, Bentley too!So you see what we are up against. Shaw's Ghost should be sent to perdition, but will it?Let's let Shaw have the last word in his presentation of Ibsen's staunch individualism, in reply to those who think socialism and individualism are contradictory. Near the end of the section of The Quintessence titled “The Lesson of the Plays,” Shaw writes, “What Ibsen insists on is that there is no golden rule; that conduct must justify itself by its effect upon life and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal…. [The] quintessence is that there is no formula” (157, 3rd ed., Hill & Wang). Amen and avaunt ye ghost!