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Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

Edited by Vitaly Baziyan

Copyright © 2021 Vitaly Baziyan

All rights reserved

A romance in five acts Pygmalion, written during 1912 and 1913, was first published in a translation by Bernard Shaw’s first German translator and literary agent Siegfried Trebitsch on the 16th October 1913 by S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin, simultaneously with the first performance at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna. The first edition in English was published unauthorised on the 13th November 1914 by American firm G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The first authorised edition was published on the 21st April 1916 by Brentano’s in New York. The first English edition was published on the 25th May 1916 by Constable and Company Ltd. in London (Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion).

George Bernard Shaw won The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925 “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.”

This publication from Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion, Constable and Company Ltd.: London, 1920 is a handmade reproduction from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading.

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Pygmalion contains 272 letters and entries written between 1896 and 1950. Sources of this collection are prior publications Collected Letters of Bernard Shaw published by Max Reinhardt; edition of letters published by University of Toronto Press; Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch published by Stanford University Press; Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a correspondence published by Constable and Co Ltd, London; The playwright and the pirate. Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris: a correspondence published by Pennsylvania State University Press; Shaw on Theatre published by Hill and Wang, New York; Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Granville Barker published by Theatre Arts Books, New York; Shaw published by Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh; Advice to a Young Critic published by Peter Owen Limited; Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed published by Pennsylvania State University Press; The Letters of Bernard Shaw to the Times published by Irish Academic Press; Bernard Shaw on Cinema published by Southern Illinois University Press; The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Volume Three, 1905 – 1924 “The Power to Alter Things”; Volume Four, 1924 – 1943 “The Wheel of Life” published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw published by Bernard F. Dukore; To a Young Actress: The Letters of Bernard Shaw to Molly Tompkins published by Constable, London; Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence published by Victor Gollancz, London; My life and some letters. By Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Stella Cornwallis-West) published by Hutchinson & Co.

This book represents a significant addition to modern-day understanding of Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Bernard Shaw’s punctuation and spelling were mostly kept by the editor. Italics were used for plays titles, books, newspapers and unfamiliar foreign words or phrases. Christian names, surnames, positions and ranks were added in square brackets when they were omitted but are necessary for a better understanding. Cuts of a few words are indicated by three dots and longer omissions by four dots.

As to the equivalent of £1 now and then, editor’s query has been passed onto the Enquiries team of the Bank of England. In answer to his question ‘what is the equivalent of £25,000 in 1940 today?’, he received the following response ‘This would be approximately £1,431,188.12.’ This means that £1 in 1940 would be roughly £57.25 in 2020 with an inflation averaged 5.2% a year. Bank of England’s inflation calculator might be of interest to readers in case they have any inflation calculation queries relating to any sum of money mentioned in this book.

The ebook cover was created by the editor using the picture of Sir John Everett Millais.

The play Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on the 16th October 1913 in German by Siegfried Trebitsch.

Characters

Eliza Doolittle – Lilli Marberg

Professor Henry Higgins – Max Paulsen

Colonel Pickering – Oskar Gimnig

Alfred Doolittle – Heine Eugen

Freddy Eynsford-Hill – Charles Kaiser

A Bystander – Eugen Muratori

Another one – Hermann Wawra

Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Else Haeberle

Miss Clara Eynsford-Hill – Gisela Wilke

Mrs Higgins – Auguste Wilbrandt-Baudius

Mrs Pearce – Tini Senders

Parlourmaid – Antonie Schulz

Producer – Hugo Thimig

Pygmalion was first presented in England by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s Theatre in London on the 11th April 1914.

Characters

Eliza Doolittle – Mrs Patrick Campbell

Professor Henry Higgins – Herbert Tree

Colonel Pickering – Philip Merivale

Alfred Doolittle – Edmund Gurney

Freddy Eynsford-Hill – Algernon Grieg

A Bystander – Roy Byford

Another one – Alexander Sarner

Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Carlotta Addison

Miss Clara Eynsford-Hill – Margaret Bussé

Mrs Higgins – Rosamund Mayne-Young

Mrs Pearce – Geraldine Olliffe

Parlourmaid – Irene Delisse

Producer – Bernard Shaw

A German film of Pygmalion was created by Klagemann-Film GmbH (Germany) between June and August 1935. The film was first shown on the 2nd September 1935 at the Berlin Capitol cinema.

Characters

Eliza Doolittle – Jeny Jugo

Henry Higgins – Gustaf Gründgens

Colonel Pickering – Anton Edthofer

Alfred Doolittle – Eugen Klöpfer

Mrs Higgins – Hedwig Bleibtreu

Mrs Pearce – Käthe Haack

Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Olga Limburg

Clara Eynsford-Hill – Karin Evans

Freddy Eynsford-Hill – Vivigenz Eickstedt

Betsy – Erika Glässner

Jonny – Hans Richter

Screenplay – Heinrich Oberlander, Walter Wassermann

Producer – Eberhard Klagemann

Director – Erich Engel

An English film of Pygmalion was filmed at Pinewood Studios (England) in 1938. The film was first shown in London at Leicester Square Theatre on the 6th October 1938. George Bernard Shaw won the Oscar in 1939 for Best Screenplay and Dialogue for his role in adapting his play Pygmalion for the screen.

Characters

Eliza Doolittle – Wendy Hiller

Professor Henry Higgins – Leslie Howard

Colonel Pickering – Scott Sunderland

Alfred Doolittle – Wilfrid Lawson

Freddy Eynsford-Hill – David Tree

The four bystanders – Ivor Barnard, Wally Patch, H. F. Maltby, George Mozart

Mrs Eynsford-Hill – Everley Gregg

Miss Clara Eynsford-Hill – Lueen MacGrath

Mrs Higgins – Marie Löhr

Mrs Pearce – Jean Cadell

Parlourmaid – Eileen Beldon

Extra characters

Taximan – Frank Atkinson

The Vicar – O. B. Clarence

Count Aristid Karpathy (in the published version of the film script Nepommuck) – Esmé Percy

The Ambassadress – Violet Vanbrugh

A social reporter Ysabel – Iris Hoey

Another social reporter Perfide – Viola Tree

A Duchess – Irene Browne

A Grand Old Lady – Kate Cutler

A Lady – Cathleen Nesbitt

Constable – Cecil Trouncer

Second Constable – Stephen Murray

Screenplay – Bernard Shaw

Producer – Gabriel Pascal

Directors – Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard

Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play Pygmalion

1/ A British politician, sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian, social reformer, fellow Fabian, one of the founders of the London School of Economics, and Bernard Shaw’s long-standing friend Beatrice Webb née Potter to Charlotte Payne-Townshend [later Mrs Bernard Shaw]

20th April 1896

My dear Miss Townshend

We are back from our holiday—a delightful fortnight in the Lakes—feeling ever so much stronger for the change.

The appeal for the Library Fund [of The London School of Economics and Political Science] in the Papers has produced nothing. As it happened the immense excitement caused by [John] Gorst’s revolutionary Education Bill has sickened the public of every educational institution. Moreover, the idea tho’ it appeals so markedly to the enlightened man who knows and cares for Public Administration does not recommend itself to the mere Plutocrat. We have had various subscriptions coming in from those we have written to privately and the Clothworkers Company have promised £100—altogether the fund now amounts to £3,000. I am afraid we must be content to start with that. That means either a very small house in the Charing Cross neighbourhood or a house in Bloomsbury; and a very modest beginning in the way of books. I have suggested to Sidney [Webb] that the scholars should be expected to collect and catalogue the books and papers connected with the subject they undertake to investigate—the Library of course defraying the cost of postage and purchase. Small special collections similar to our collection of trade union reports are so much more valuable to future students than a mass of stuff sent in haphazard.

Mr [William Albert Samuel] Hewins reports well of the School—there are more enquiries about it than at any previous time—there is no doubt that the appeal for the [School] Library has advertised it immensely.

Shaw [The Webbs introduced Charlotte Payne-Townshend to Bernard Shaw on the 29th January 1896.] and [Graham] Wallas are still at the Cottage—but the latter has been up and down to London writing all the articles for the Daily Chronicle on Gorst’s Bill. The last time that I saw him was immediately after it was introduced, when he and [Henry William] Massingham (the Editor, Daily Chronicle) dined with us—both were boiling over with rage at the Bill. Sidney takes a more moderate view and sees some good in it—but on the whole he thinks it will be mischievous and if it remains as drafted hopes it will not pass.

How do you find Rome and your Italian friends? [Charlotte Payne-Townshend had lived for some time in Rome and had a close relationship with the Swedish doctor Axel Martin Fredrik Munthe, best known as the author of an autobiographical account of his life and work The Story of San Michele.] Do you not find that London and the Fabians and such sordid subjects as Economics and Public Administration seem an ugly and distasteful memory, under the blue Italian sky! We shall be very glad to see you back to consult about the Library etc.

Ever yours

Beatrice Webb

P.S. By the way do you not think we might adopt the shorter address of the Christian name?

2/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 16th September 1896

—. . . Meanwhile a new friend has joined the ‘Bo’ family. [Beatrice was named ‘Bo’ by her relatives.] Charlotte Payne-Townshend is a wealthy unmarried woman of about my own age. Bred up in second-rate fashionable society without any education or habit of work, she found herself at about thirty-three years of age alone in the world, without ties, without any definite creed, and with a large income. For the last four years she has drifted about—in India, in Italy, in Egypt, in London, seeking occupation and fellow spirits. In person she is attractive—a large graceful woman with masses of chocolate-brown hair, pleasant grey eyes, ‘matte’ complexion which sometimes looks muddy, at other times forms a picturesquely pale background to her brilliant hair and bright eyes. She dresses well—in her flowing white evening robes she approaches beauty. At moments she is plain. By temperament she is an anarchist—feeling any regulation or rule intolerable—a tendency which has been exaggerated by her irresponsible wealth. She is romantic but thinks herself cynical. She is a socialist and a radical, not because she understands the collectivist standpoint, but because she is by nature a rebel. She has no snobbishness and no convention: she has ‘swallowed all formulas’ but has not worked out principles of her own. She is fond of men and impatient of most women, bitterly resents her enforced celibacy but thinks she could not tolerate the matter-of-fact side of marriage. Sweet-tempered, sympathetic and genuinely anxious to increase the world’s enjoyment and diminish the world’s pain.

This is the woman who has, for a short time or for good, entered the ‘Bo’ family. Last autumn she was introduced to us. We, knowing she was wealthy, and hearing she was socialistic, interested her in the London School of Economics. She subscribed £1,000 to the [School’s] Library, endowed a woman’s scholarship, and has now taken the rooms over the School at Adelphi Terrace, paying us £300 a year for rent and service. It was on account of her generosity to our projects and ‘for the good of the cause’ that I first made friends with her. To bring her more directly into our little set of comrades, I suggested that we should take a house together in the country and entertain our friends. To me she seemed at that time a pleasant, well-dressed, well-intentioned woman—I thought she should do very well for Graham Wallas! Now she turns out to be an ‘original’, with considerable personal charm and certain volcanic tendencies. Graham Wallas bored her with his morality and learning. In a few days she and Bernard Shaw were constant companions. For the last fortnight, when the party has been reduced to ourselves and Shaw, and we have been occupied with our work and each other, they have been scouring the country together and sitting up late at night. To all seeming, she is in love with the brilliant philanderer and he is taken, in his cold sort of way, with her. They are, I gather from him, on very confidential terms and have ‘explained’ their relative positions. Though interested I am somewhat uneasy. These warm-hearted unmarried women of a certain age are audacious and are almost childishly reckless of consequences. I doubt whether Bernard Shaw could be induced to marry: I doubt whether she will be happy without it. It is harder for a woman to remain celibate than a man.

[Beatrice Webb]

3/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 9th March 1897

—As I mounted the stairs with Shaw’s Unsocial Socialist to return to Bertha Newcombe I felt somewhat uncomfortable as I knew I should encounter a sad soul full of bitterness and loneliness. I stepped into a small wainscotted studio and was greeted coldly by the little woman. She is petite and dark, about forty years old but looks more like a wizened girl than a fully developed woman. Her jet-black hair heavily fringed, half-smart, half-artistic clothes, pinched aquiline features and thin lips, give you a somewhat unpleasant impression though not wholly inartistic. She is bad style without being vulgar or common or loud—indeed many persons, Kate Courtney for instance, would call her ‘lady-like’—but she is insignificant and undistinguished. ‘I want to talk to you, Mrs Webb,’ she said when I seated myself. And then followed, told with the dignity of devoted feeling, the story of her relationship to Bernard Shaw, her five years of devoted love, his cold philandering, her hopes aroused by repeated advice to him (which he, it appears, had repeated much exaggerated) to marry her, and then her feeling of misery and resentment against me when she discovered that I was encouraging him ‘to marry Miss Townshend’. Finally, he had written a month ago to break it off entirely: they were not to meet again. And I had to explain with perfect frankness that so long as there seemed a chance for her I had been willing to act as chaperone, that she had never been a personal friend of mine or Sidney’s, that I had regarded her only as Shaw’s friend, and that as far as I was concerned I should have welcomed her as his wife. But directly I saw that he meant nothing I backed out of the affair. She took it all quietly, her little face seemed to shrink up and the colour of her skin looked as if it were reflecting the sad lavender of her dress.

‘You are well out of it, Miss Newcombe,’ I said gently. ‘If you had married Shaw he would not have remained faithful to you. You know my opinion of him—as a friend and a colleague, as a critic and literary worker, there are few men for whom I have so warm a liking; but in his relations with women he is vulgar, if not worse; it is a vulgarity that includes cruelty and springs from vanity.’

As I uttered these words my eye caught her portrait of Shaw—full-length, with his red-gold hair and laughing blue eyes and his mouth slightly open as if scoffing at us both, a powerful picture in which the love of the woman had given genius to the artist. Her little face turned to follow my eyes and she also felt the expression of the man, the mockery at her deep-rooted affection. ‘It is so horribly lonely,’ she muttered. ‘I daresay it is more peaceful than being kept on the rack, but it is like the peace of death.’ There seemed nothing more to be said. I rose and with a perfunctory ‘Come and see me—someday,’ I kissed her on the forehead and escaped down the stairs. And then I thought of that other woman with her loving easygoing nature and anarchic luxurious ways, her well-bred manners and well-made clothes, her leisure, wealth and knowledge of the world. Would she succeed in taming the philanderer?

[Beatrice Webb]

4/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 1st May 1897

—. . . I am watching with concern and curiosity the development of the Shaw-Townshend friendship. All this winter they have been lovers—of a philandering and harmless kind, always together when Shaw was free. Charlotte insisted on taking a house with us in order that he might be here constantly, and it is obvious that she is deeply attached to him. But I see no sign on his side of the growth of any genuine and steadfast affection. He finds it pleasant to be with her in her luxurious surroundings, he has been studying her and all her little ways and amusing himself by dissecting the rich woman brought up without training and drifting about at the beck of impulse. I think he has now exhausted the study, observed all that there is to observe. He has been flattered by her devotion and absorption in him; he is kindly and has a cat-like preference for those persons to whom he is accustomed. But there are ominous signs that he is tired of watching the effect of little words of gallantry and personal interest with which he plied her in the first months of the friendship. And he is annoyed by her lack of purpose and utter incapacity for work. If she would set to, and do even the smallest and least considerable task of intellectual work, I believe she could retain his interest and perhaps develop his feeling for her. Otherwise he will drift away, for Shaw is too high-minded and too conventionally honourable to marry her for the life of leisure and luxury he could gain for himself as her husband.

[Beatrice Webb]

5/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 8th May 1897

—Silly these philanderings of Shaw’s. He imagines that he gets to know women by making them in love with him. Just the contrary. His stupid gallantries bar out from him the friendship of women who are either too sensible, too puritanical or too much ‘otherwise engaged’ to care to bandy personal flatteries with him. One large section of women, comprising some, at any rate, of the finest types, remains hidden from him. With the women with whom he has ‘bonne fortune’ he also fails in his object, or rather in his avowed object—vivisection. He idealizes them for a few days, weeks or years, imagines them to be something utterly different from their true selves, then has a revulsion of feeling and discovers them to be unutterably vulgar, second-rate, rapscallion, or insipidly well-bred. He never fathoms their real worth, nor rightly sees their limitations. But in fact it is not the end he cares for: it is the process. His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity, delight in being the candle to the moths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity. And he is mistaken if he thinks that it does not affect his artistic work. His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationships, the lack of the sterner kind of humour which would show him the dreariness of his farce and the total absence of proportion and inadequateness in some of his ideas, all these defects come largely from the flippant and worthless self-complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women. For all that, he is a good-natured agreeable sprite of a man, an intellectual cricket on the hearth always chirping away brilliant paradox, sharp-witted observation and friendly comments. Whether I like him, admire him or despise him most I do not know. Just at present I feel annoyed and contemptuous.

For the dancing light has gone out of Charlotte’s eyes—there is at times a blank haggard look, a look that I myself felt in my own eyes for long years. But throughout all my misery I had the habit of hard work and an almost religious sense of my intellectual mission. I had always my convent to fly to. Poor Charlotte has nowhere to turn. She can only wander listless through the world, with no reason for turning one way rather than another. What a comfort to be a fanatic. It is Bernard Shaw’s fanaticism to turn everything inside out and see whether the other side won’t do just as well if not better; it is this fanaticism which gives him genuine charm. He has a sort of affectionateness too, underneath his vanity. Will she touch that?

[Beatrice Webb]

6/ To a renowned English actress and actor-manager Ellen Terry

8th September 1897

. . . Are you going to do Peter [Peter the Great by Laurence Irving] on the road? You should. Think of how much anxiety it will save you if you have your difficulties with the words settled before the first night in London. [Richard] Mansfield produces “The Devil’s Disciple” at the 5th Avenue Theatre on the 6th Oct, after an experiment or two with it in the provinces. Ah, if you only would play a matinee of it with Forbes[-Robertson], I would actually go to see it (a compliment I haven’t paid Candida). Besides, I would teach that rapscallionly flower girl of his something. “Caesar & Cleopatra” has been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write for them in which he shall be a west end gentleman and she [Mrs Patrick Campbell] an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers.[It is the first documented reference to Pygmalion.]

I see you wont tell me anything about Prossy. It would be seething the kid in its mother’s milk, I suppose; but still I do want to know in general terms whether my style of work fits her. [Ellen Terry’s daughter Edith Craig played Prossy in Bernard Shaw’s play Candida.]

It is luncheon hour, and there’s a visitor.

That letter would not have surprised anybody at the hotel. Did you ever read “Rejected Addresses” [by the brothers James and Horace Smith]? I only remember three lines from “Lady Elizabeth Mugg.”

—for who would not slavery hug,

to spend but one exquisite hour

in the arms of Elizabeth Mugg!

I should write the same about you if there were any rhyme to Ellen. I love you soulfully & bodyfully, properly and improperly, every way that a woman can be loved.

GBS

7/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 27th September 1897

—These two months we have overworked for enjoyment; constantly too exhausted to care for exercise, and days when extreme exasperation from over-brainwork has made me quite incapable of enjoying the country. Also Shaw and Charlotte’s relationship is disturbing. Shaw goes on untroubled, working hard at his plays and then going long rides with her on a tandem cycle. But she is always restless and sometimes unhappy, too anxious to be with him. He is sometimes bored, but he is getting to feel her a necessary part of his ‘entourage’ and would, I think, object to her breaking away from the relationship. He persuades himself that by keeping her occupied he is doing her good. If it were not for the fact that he is Shaw I should say that he was dishonourable. But as he has always advertised his views of marriage and philandering from the housetops, every woman ought to be prepared for his logical carrying out of these principles.

[Beatrice Webb]

8/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 5th February 1899

—Since we returned to England [Beatrice and Sidney Webb went away for a trip round the world.] I have been disinclined to write in my diary, having nothing to relate and having lost the habit of intimate confidences, impossible in a joint diary such as we have kept together during our journey round the world. One cannot run on into self-analysis, family gossip, or indiscreet and hasty descriptions of current happenings, if someone else, however dear, is solemnly to read one’s chatter then and there. I foresee the sort of kindly indulgence or tolerant boredom with which Sidney would decipher the last entry and this feeling would, in itself, make it impossible to write whatever came into my head at the time of writing without thought of his criticism.

With regard to our friends and relations, we found only two persons whose lives had been completely changed during our absence—our two friends GBS and Charlotte have married each other. Shaw has become a chronic invalid, Charlotte a devoted nurse. They live in an attractive house up at Hindhead. He still writes but his work seems to be getting unreal: he leads a hothouse life, he cannot walk or get among his equals. He is as witty and as cheery as of old. But now and again a flush of fatigue or a sign of brain irritation passes over him. Charlotte, under pressure of anxiety for the man she loves, has broadened out into a motherly woman and lost her anarchic determination to live according to her momentary desires. There are some compensations for the sadness of the sudden cutting-off of his activity.

[Beatrice Webb]

9/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 30th October 1899

—. . . The Shaws have taken up their residence in Charlotte’s attractive flat over the School of Economics, and Sidney and I meet there on Thursdays to dine sumptuously between our respective lectures. Charlotte and Shaw have settled down into the most devoted married couple, she gentle and refined, with happiness added thereto, and he showing no sign of breaking loose from her dominion. What the intellectual product of the marriage will be I do not feel so sure: at any rate he will not become a dilettante, the habit of work is too deeply engrained. It is interesting to watch his fitful struggles out of the social complacency natural to an environment of charm and plenty. How can atmosphere be resisted? . . .

[Beatrice Webb]

10/ To an English stage actress Mrs Patrick Campbell née Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner known informally as “Mrs Pat”

22nd November 1901

My dear Mrs Patrick Campbell

Thank you for your beautiful photograph [Mrs Patrick Campbell as Clara Sang in the play Over ævne, første stykke (Beyond Human Power) by the first Norwegian Nobel laureate Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson]; but I should have photographed you in bed, saying “It’s tempting Providence”. That was the finest passage in the play. After all, there are lots of beautiful people about; and some of them can perhaps even thread needles with their toes; but they cant take a filament of grey matter from their brains and thread it infallibly through that most elusive of eyelet holes in the top of a dramatist’s needle. Besides, that produces a new sort of beauty, compared to which natural beauty is a mere reach-me-down from Nature’s patterns. Long ago, when everybody was maudlin about your loveliness, I snapped my fingers—admired nothing bin your deft fingers and toes. Now I admire you ENORMOUSLY. You have picked the work of nature to pieces and remade it whole heavens finer. It is the power to do that that is the real gift. . . .

Yours sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

11/ Bernard Shaw’s article “Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers” contributed to the Society of Authors’ quarterly journal The Author

1st April 1902

Spelling generally

I always use the American termination or for our. Theater, somber, center, etc., I reject only because they are wantonly anti-phonetic: theatre, sombre, etc., being nearer the sound. Such abominable Frenchifications as programme, cigarette, etc., are quite revolting to me. Telegram, quartet, etc., deprive them of all excuse. I should like also to spell epilogue epilog, because people generally mispronounce it, just as they would mispronounce catalogue if the right sound were not so familiar [also Shakespear and shew instead of Shakespeare and show]. That is the worst of unphonetic spelling: in the long run people pronounce words as they are spelt; and so the language gets senselessly altered.

Contractions

The apostrophies in ain’t, don’t, haven’t, etc., look so ugly that the most careful printing cannot make a page of colloquial dialogue as handsome as a page of classical dialogue. Besides, shan’t should be sha’’n’t, if the wretched pedantry of indicating the elision is to be carried out. I have written aint, dont, havnt, shant, shouldnt and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he’ll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. I also write thats, whats, lets, for the colloquial forms of that is, what is, let us; and I have not yet been prosecuted.

Hyphens

I think some of the hyphens given are questionable. Smallpox is right; and small pox is right; but small-pox is, I should say, certainly wrong. A hyphen between an adverb and a verb, or an adjective and a noun, is only defensible when the collocation would be ambiguous without it. The rule given that compound words of more than one accent should be hyphened is, like most rules, a mere brazening-out of a mistake.

Punctuation

Stops are clearly as much the author’s business as words. The rules given here are very properly confined to matters of custom in printing. I wish, however, that the Clarendon Press, or some other leading house, would make a correct rule for the punctuation of quotations between inverted commas. The common practice is to put the points belonging to the sentence in which the quotation occurs inside the inverted commas instead of outside. For example: Was he wise to say “Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die?” The correct, but less usual punctuation is: Was he wise to say “Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die”?

Italics

This is deplorable. To the good printer the occurrence of two different founts on the same page is at best an unavoidable evil. To the bad one, it is an opportunity of showing off the variety of his stock: he is never happier than when he is setting up a title-page in all the founts he possesses. Not only should titles not be printed in italic; but the customary ugly and unnecessary inverted commas should be abolished. Let me give a specimen. 1. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. 2. I was reading “The Merchant of Venice.” 3. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. The man who cannot see that No. 1 is the best looking as well as the sufficient and sensible form should print or write nothing but advertisements of lost dogs or ironmongers’ catalogues: literature is not for him to meddle with.

On the whole, and excepting expressly the deplorable heresy about italics, these Clarendon Press rules will serve the turn of the numerous authors who have no ideas of their own on the subject, or who are still in their apprenticeship, or who, as English gentlemen, desire to do, not the sensible and reasonable thing, but the thing that everybody else does. At the same time, the poverty of the rules shews how far we still are from having an accurate speech notation. To the essayist and the scientific writer this may not greatly matter; but to the writer of fiction, especially dramatic fiction, it is a serious drawback, as the desperate phonetics of our dialect novels show. Now the Clarendon Press prints for the essayist and the professor much more than for the fictionist. I therefore suggest that some well-known printer of novels should be asked for a copy of his rules, if he has any. A Scotch printer for preference, as the Scotch intellect likes to know what it is doing.

G. Bernard Shaw

12/ To a novelist, playwright, Bernard Shaw’s first German translator and literary agent Siegfried Trebitsch

1st July 1902

My dear Trebitsch

The following information may be useful to [an Austrian writer, playwright, director, and critic] Hermann Bahr. I am an Irishman (like [a novelist, playwright and poet Oliver] Goldsmith & [a satirist, playwright, poet, and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Richard Brinsley Butler] Sheridan), born in Dublin on the 26th July 1856. I came to London in 1876. I wrote 5 novels; but nobody would publish them. I was equally unsuccessful in my attempts to get work as a journalist: no editor would touch my articles. Early in the eighteen-eighties there was a revival of Socialism in England. I plunged into the movement, having been greatly impressed by Das Kapital, which I read in the French translation. However, I soon challenged the soundness of [Karl] Marx’s economics, and threw over the traditions of the revolutionary party of 1848–71. The English Social-Democrats were as much horrified at my heresy against Marx as the German Social-Democrats now are at the similar heresies of [Eduard] Bernstein. In 1884 a society of middle class Socialists—mostly journalists and civil servants—was founded under the title of The Fabian Society. Of this society I became a leading member. Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier (now colonial secretary in Jamaica) and Graham Wallas were my colleagues; and we set to work to find a perfectly constitutional and parliamentary formula for Socialism, and to free it from the Marxian dogmas and from the old fashioned revolutionary street fighting foolishness. Bernstein was in exile in London at that time; and it was by us that he was won over from his Marxian orthodoxy to his present position. For twelve years I was very active as a public speaker and agitator, delivering addresses from all sorts of platforms, sometimes to the British Association or the literary societies, sometimes to the passers-by in the streets and parks.

In the meantime I had at last (from 1885 onward) obtained work as a critic, first of literature and then of music. My mother had been a distinguished amateur of music in Dublin; and I had acquired a good deal of knowledge of music in this way in my boyhood. I used my musical feuilletons as vehicles for political & social satire, and soon began to be known by my signature “G.B.S.” I still call myself a pupil of [Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart in comedy much more than of any of the English literary dramatists. Later on I criticised the theatre, and fought for [Henrik Johan] Ibsen as I had already fought for [Wilhelm Richard] Wagner. I also criticised pictures. The dates are, roughly, 1885 to 1889, literature in the Pall Mall Gazette & painting in The World; 1888 to 1890, music in The Star; 1890 to 1894, music in The World; 1895 to 1898, the theatre in The Saturday Review—practically ten years of criticism. In 1898 I got married.

The story of my plays is in the prefaces to Plays, Pleasant & Unpleasant; so I need not repeat it here. Besides my novels (the best known of which is “Cashel Byron’s Profession”) and the plays, I have published “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” and “The Perfect Wagnerite,” both of them rather philosophical than critical. Some of my Socialist writings, especially those in “Fabian Essays” (of which I was the editor), have been translated into German.

If there is anything else you want to know, write me a catechism & I will answer all your questions.

When the theatres come to business about the plays we can agree as to the division of the royalties. Shall we share half & half? But we must agree for each play separately, as you must always be able to tell the managers that you can do nothing without my consent and that the royalty must be enough for two. I will not promise to take half what they offer; but you must insist on their giving double what I will take. My rapacity will be your excuse for pressing them to give the full market price. By the way, what is the usual price? We must not try to get too much; but then we must not err in the opposite direction either.

In haste, yrs sincerely

G. Bernard Shaw

13/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 4th September 1906

—. . . Among the friends who have visited us are the Granville Barkers, he staying for ten days, she for Sunday. G.B. is a most attractive person, young and good-looking—good-looking in a charming refined fashion, with a subtle intellectual expression—faculties more analytic than artistic? I think with self-control, industry, freedom from vulgar desires and common fears—with varied interests, good memory; a sharp observer of human nature and above all with a delicate appreciation of music, poetry and art—a medley of talents of which I do not yet see a very definite whole. He has not yet emancipated himself from GBS’s influence or found his own soul. I think what he lacks is warmth of feeling—he is cold, with little active pity or admiration, or faithful devotion. A better acquaintance than a friend, a better friend than a husband. At least that is his pose, and it is difficult in ten days’ uneventful companionship—a companionship of talk not acts—to distinguish the pose from the reality.

She [an actress and theatre manager Lillah McCarthy] is a strikingly handsome lady, also hard-working and dutiful—a puritan, I think, by temperament; her acting is a craft, not an art. Otherwise, I fear she is not otherwise than commonplace, and he has all the appearance of being bored by her after two months’ marriage. Her little actress ways—the gush, the over-emphasis, the odd effect of hardness which seems to follow from the perpetual publicity of an actress’s life—are to me distressingly unattractive, not to be counterbalanced by the really fine form and colouring of her person.

[Beatrice Webb]

14/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 13th March 1909

—. . . I went to Granville Barker’s Madras House this afternoon. After listening to this and to GBS’s Misalliance, one wonders whether these two supremely clever persons are not obsessed with the rabbit-warren aspect of human society? GBS is brilliant but disgusting; Granville-Barker is intellectual but dull. They both harp on the mere physical attractions of men to women, and women to men, coupled with the insignificance of the female for any other purpose but sex attraction, with tiresome iteration. That world is not the world I live in, or, indeed, think to exist outside a limited circle at the top and at the bottom of the social strata. In the quiet intermediate area of respectable working-class, middle-class and professional life, and in much ‘gentle’ society, there is not this over-sexed condition. The women are almost as intelligent as, and certainly a good deal more spiritual than, the men, and their relations to the other sex are those of true friendship and intelligent comradeship in the transaction of the affairs of life, and in the enjoyment of the interests and beauty of life. The male and the female have become the man and the woman. It is mischievous to be perpetually drawing society as even worse than it is, just because most persons are stupider than such clever mortals as GBS and Granville-Barker, and fail to express their good thoughts and feelings otherwise than in clichés and banal phrases which bore these clever ones. . . .

Where I think GBS, Granville Barker, H.G. [Herbert George] Wells, and many other of the most ‘modern’ authors go wrong, from the standpoint of realism in its best sense, is their complete ignoring of religion. By religion I mean the communion of the soul with some righteousness felt to be outside and above itself. This may take the conscious form of prayer, or the unconscious form of ever-present and persisting aspiration—a faith, a hope, and a devotion to a wholly disinterested purpose. It is this unconscious form of religion which lies at the base of all Sidney’s activity. He does not pray, as I often do, because he has not acquired so self-conscious a habit. But there is a look in his eyes when he patiently plods on through his own and other people’s work, when he unwittingly gives up what other people prize, or when he quietly ignores the spite or prejudice of opponents, that tells of a faith and a hope in the eventual meaning of human life—if not for us, then for those who come after us. He refuses to put this aspiration into words, because he would fear the untruth that might be expressed in those words. He has a dread of being even remotely irrational or superstitious. But, for all that, he believes.

Not one of GBS’s men or women, or Granville Barker’s or H.G. Wells’s, have either the conscious or unconscious form of religion. The abler of these puppets of their thoughts deny it: the stupider are oblivious of it—a few are blatant hypocrites. And, that being so, there is nothing left for them to be but intellects or brutes, and for the most part they are both. It is strange that, whatever these clever men may think and feel themselves, they don’t perceive that there is such a thing as religion and that it is a force which moulds many lives and makes the mere rabbit-warren an inconceivable horror.

[Beatrice Webb]

15/ Beatrice Webb’s diary entry for 21st April 1911

—. . . We spent a Sunday with the Bernard Shaws and he read us his last little play (Fanny’s First Play). A brilliant but slight and somewhat futile performance. He and Charlotte are getting every day more luxurious and determined to have everything ‘just so’ without regard to cost or fitting in with other people’s convenience. But they are neither of them quite satisfied with their existence. GBS is getting impatient and rather hopeless of his capacity to produce anything more of value; Charlotte is beginning to loathe the theatrical set and is even turning to us to try and interest GBS again in socialism. He and Sidney really like and appreciate each other and they might be, as they have been, of great value in mutual stimulus and criticism. But GBS is bored with discussion; he won’t give and take; he will orate and go off on to the sex question, which does not interest Sidney as GBS has nothing positive to propose. Then, Charlotte does not really like me and I do not really care for her! We respect but do not admire each other. As a matter of fact there does not seem much reason for meeting—and therefore we seldom meet, and when we do, the conversation tends to be made-up and not spontaneous. Which is somewhat sad, as he and Sidney have always cared for one another: they are perhaps each other’s most long-standing friends. Possibly if we throw ourselves into the work of the Fabian Society I might increase my intimacy with Charlotte and therefore of the two of us with Shaw. . . .

[Beatrice Webb]

16/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

27th June 1912

My dear Mr Shaw

First of all my thanks for letting me hear the play [Pygmalion], and for thinking I can be your pretty slut [Eliza Doolittle]. I wonder if I could please you.

I want you to tell me what the business proposal is—when, where, and with whom.

Perhaps you will come and see me. We said so little yesterday. I must’nt lose time—my days are numbered surely.

It was a great pleasure to me to see you again.

Yours sincerely,

B. S. Campbell

17/ To an English actor, theatre director, critic, playwright, Shakespearean scholar and intimate friend Harley Granville Barker

30th June 1912

You will have to look sharp or she [Mrs Patrick Campbell] will snatch the Queen’s out of your very jaws. Never did I make a greater sacrifice to friendship than in not warning her; for though I entered on the business with the most insolent confidence in my superiority to a dozen such Dalilas, I fell head over heels in love with her [reading Pygmalion to her on the 26th June]—violently and exquisitely in love—before I knew that I was thinking about anything but business. All yesterday I could think of nothing but a thousand scenes of which she was the heroine and I the hero. And I am on the verge of 56. There has never been anything so ridiculous, or so delightful, in the history of the world. On Friday we were together for an hour: we visited a lord; we drove in a taxi; we sat on a sofa in Kensington Square; and my years fell from me like a garment. I was in love for very nearly 36 hours; and for that be all her sins forgiven her!

Today Richard is himself again; and this word Love, which graybeards call divine, be resident in men like one another and not in me: I am myself alone (William). All the same, if she gets at [Alfred] Butt before Tuesday she will but him no buts, but hang the theatre to her apronstrings like the kitchen scissors. Your chance is her dislike of negotiations with sordid syndicalists. She will try to get Aubrey Smith (whom I want for Pickering) as her man of business; and she will have to consult [Gerald] Du Maurier (her substitute for [Robert] Loraine, whom she dreads as he dreaded Lillah [McCarthy]— ha! ha! Nemesis!) before she decides on a theatre. This means delay; and in delay lies no plenty for her and for me if you can jump the claim at once.

Now if she can reduce me so easily, what chance has [Charles] Frohman against her with [James Matthew] Barrie? His virtue will be as wax, and melt in its own fires.

Therefore, consider, fond shepherd, whether, if the Du Maurier combination fails, and no theatre is forthcoming, and Barrie can refuse her nothing, and you have the Queen’s under God & Butt, you might not step in, and, on sufficient prospect of lucre, offer to take on the enterprise even if you have to shove your Shakespear into the Savoy dustbin. It is a possible combination.

Frohman has now wiped himself out of the book of life by putting up “Rebecca Something or Other” [Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Charlotte Thompson] at the Globe [Theatre]. I meant to have the Globe for the Androcles [and the Lion] double event; and Frohman had better never have been born than thwart me in this design. I have abandoned all remorse in his regard: I cannot do business with babies. Come [Abraham Lincoln] Erlanger and young Lee Shubert come! Shall I be faithless to Lillah & spare Frohman? Nary.

G.B.S.

18/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

30th June 1912

I have written to Frohman, in the appropriate vein for commercial correspondence, that the Campbell Woman has scooped the entire proposition [for Pygmalion] and that he is financially outgeneralled and done for. And I have told him to hold Barrie against her if he can. So that communication is finally and delicately settled.

I have written to Loraine that he may sail for America as soon as he likes, but that if he finds Gerald [Du Maurier] concealed in the same ship, he had better hurry ashore.

To Barker I have broken the shattering news that you have captured me for your own theatre, and that Lillah is a widow in a manner of speaking.

As all those three were waiting for me, I had to let them know at once what to expect. That is the worst of having anything to do with me: you are dragged at once into the brazen atmosphere behind which my poor timid little soul hides and cowers and dreams. But it cant be helped. I tell you only because it is important that you should know that your plans will be known in general to everyone before this reaches you, with a romantic glamor round them and much inaccuracy of detail, but still sufficiently to make it necessary to play with your cards on the table.

Many thanks for Friday and for a Saturday of delightful dreams. I did not believe that I had that left in me. I am all right now, down on earth again with all my cymbals and side drums and blaring vulgarities in full blast; but it would be meanly cowardly to pretend that you are not a very wonderful lady, or that the spell did not work most enchantingly on me for fully 12 hours.

G.B.S.

19/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

3rd July 1912

Beatricissima

I have a frightful headache (dont be alarmed: I am not always ill: only once a month or so); and I am going to be horrid; so pity me. I wonder how your dentist manages. He must love you; and yet he cant always help hurting you—deliberately and scientifically hurting you. I should plunge a knife into my heart and die at your feet. Yet I am going to pull half your teeth out, without gas. I proceed in my professional literary manner. Hear the essayist. Silence.

The death of J.L. [John Lawrence] Toole closed a chapter in London theatrical enterprise. He and John Clarke were the last actors who knew what it was to keep a London theatre open on a single star system. Edward Terry, who tried to follow them, failed. Barry Sullivan had already failed. Mrs Patrick Campbell failed. Ellen Terry failed. Robert Loraine failed. It was always a combination that succeeded: [Henry] Irving and Ellen Terry, [Charles] Wyndham and Mary Moore, Julia Neilson & Fred Terry, [Arthur] Bourchier and Violet Vanbrugh, [George] Alexander and Fay Davis, Julia Neilson, Irene Vanbrugh, and (oh my heart!) others. Lena Ashwell half-succeeded with [Norman] McKinnel; then failed. Lewis Waller himself could not hold out single handed. [Herbert Beerbohm] Tree does not try to. In the provinces, yes. In America, certainly. But in London, NO, NO, NO, every time.

Note, oh beautifullest of all the stars, that two of the failures had Shaw parts which were the very Limit of star parts for them. Ellen’s skin does not fit her body more closely than Lady Cicely in Brassbound [Captain Brassbound’s Conversion] fits her; for I am a first class ladies tailor, and I love Ellen [Terry] and Ellen loves me. Tanner in Man and Superman carried [Robert] Loraine to the uttermost extremity of what a popular actor can do single handed. His success in America was fabulous; nothing but bitter experience could convince him that it mattered a rap who played Ann or any other part in London. Result: he lost everything he made in America, and more besides; and even in the first fever of the Criterion success, he filled that little house only once. Even in America, with all the prestige of Ellen Terry’s enormously boomed farewell tour, [Charles] Frohman, certain that there would never be less than £300 in the house, found that the figure I had promised him—a little under £200—was the correct one. And in London the piece died out slowly in the suburbs. With [Henry] Irving as Brassbound it might have saved the Lyceum [Theatre].

O Stella Stellarum, there is nothing more certain in the process of the suns than that if you attempt management on the single star system, nothing—not even my genius added to your own—can save you from final defeat. Male and female created He them. Your public is more than half feminine: you cannot satisfy their longing for a male to idealize; and how can they idealize a poor salaried employee pushed into a corner and played off the stage? Do you want to be a [great Italian actress of her time Eleonora] Duse? A hammer without an anvil! a [a Prussian bodybuilder Eugen] Sandow playing with paper dumbells! Produce Pygmalion with a twenty pound Higgins, and you will have an uproarious success, just like Loraine. But the house will be under £200. At the end of 15 or 16 weeks, the business will stagger. You will be terrified, and will spend wildly on advertisements. You will drop to £120. [George] Alexander will smile: there will hardly be more than his £116 in it. You will take Pygmalion off and draw away from me. Its successor will fail, because nobody will be able to endure you in anything worse than Eliza; and the very few authors who could give you anything as good will note my fate, and go to Frohman or Alexander instead. You will struggle on until you have lost every farthing; and then it will be America with all its horrors to recoup yourself, and the provinces, or retirement, for the rest of your life, like Mrs (Madge) Kendal.

Talk of Mrs Tanqueray [Mrs Patrick Campbell played Paula Tanqueray in The Second Mrs Tanqueray by Arthur Wing Pinero.] looking into her mirror: how do you feel now? Loraine would not believe this about himself. He does now. He was here yesterday. Your dread of him is as nothing to his dread of you. I explained to him that he is a pig and a Philistine. I reminded him that when [Charles de Sousy] Ricketts did that magical production of the hell scene from Man & Superman, he (Robert) was simply wretched in his exquisite silver dress, and thought that Ricketts was making him ridiculous instead of immortal. I told him that you were the greatest artist of his time, and that only by a combination with you—to which you would strongly object—could he complete a real London theatre in the full artistic sense. I pointed out to him that if he could join you in a theatre holding £300, it was quite possible that both of you might take as your shares as much as he could get at best with great trouble in America, and more than you could get without him. I told him what you said about him (with exquisite embellishments). I sang, “Oh, that breeziness, that BREEziness!” in every key. I rehearsed him making a breezy entry to 33 Kensington Square and knocking Georgina [Mrs Campbell’s pet dog] into the area by the mere wind of his impetuosity. I played you shuddering to the inmost fibres of your bludgeoned soul on the sofa. I convinced him at last that he ought to postpone America and stay if only he could persuade you to adopt him and knock some art and some style into his amazing vitality—you talk of leaden feet! he has the feet of Mercury.

Now having told you all this, I grow reckless and will tell you still more terrible things. [Gerald Hubert Edward Busson] Du Maurier being lost to us, Loraine is indispensable, I can make the cat play Liza. It wouldnt be my Liza because it wouldnt be your Liza. But it would be a commercially possible Liza. And I cant make the dog play Higgins. That is a thing that often happens: it is not the best part that is the difficulty. And apart from the part, where am I to find a man to stand up to you on the stage?

You are happy playing with worms. [Harley Granville] Barker loves worms. Worms never give any trouble; and in plays which can be produced, they make the best casts. (Darwin proved that the earth is made of worm casts). But my plays must be acted, and acted hard. They need a sort of bustle and crepitation of life which requires extraordinary energy and vitality, and gives only glimpses and movements of the poetry beneath. The lascivious monotony of beauty which satisfies those who are slaves of art instead of masters of it is hideous in my plays. Well, a man with energy, enough to bring up my plays to concert pitch cannot be had and held for a salary. If there is a profit of a thousand a week, he is far more likely to think that he had made it all than to admit that he has made only £500 of it. It must be recognized that he is indispensable to it, just as you are indispensable to it; and indispensables must share.

You dont believe—yet. He didnt believe me when I told him that if he wouldnt have Lillah [McCarthy] as his Ann Whitefield [in Man and Superman] he should have you, or perish. He perished accordingly; but the play he killed under him was a revival. And now he knows. A new play must not be killed so.

How would you like to write all this with a headache, with even green paper searing your eyes like smoke, and with the far deeper pain of being hateful to one you adore. And all to force you into the arms of Another. But better than the workhouse, which is the end of the Single Star in London.

Who, then, is to be your complement? the John Drew to your Ada Rehan, the [Henry] Irving to your Ellen Terry? I must have a heroic Higgins, And I must not ruin you. Nor myself. I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not money more. Name your man.

I have written myself into a condition of complete Shavian fiendishness, I have lived two whole days without seeing you; and now I know that I can go through anything.

Cartloads of chaff are falling on me like snow on Mont Blanc. Barker spouts Friar Laurence at me untiringly; “Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art; thy tears are womanish: thy wild acts denote the unreasonable fury of the beast” &c. &c. &c. We were with [James] Barrie on Monday night: I told him you thought you ought to marry him. He still longs for you as The Shrew, in spite of Barker, whose heart you broke by sending a solicitor to tell him that he had abused your private friendship to take a professional advantage (what is friendship for, anyhow?). At eleven I rose and said “I must go”. Barrie replied in his slowest Scotch manner “Shall you be seeing Mrs Campbell again tonight?” Such is the ribaldry I have brought on you. I wish I could fall in love without telling everybody. I shall be 56 on the 26th of this month; and I have not yet grown up.

Edmund Gwenn & Hilda Trevelyan sent today to offer the Vaudeville on any terms you like under their management.

I know it is all vile, and that I see too far ahead to make any woman happy. But we great people have no need for happiness. Nothing like business, is there, after all?

I must now go and read this to Charlotte. My love affairs are her unfailing amusement: all their tenderness recoils finally on herself. Besides, I love an audience. Oh, forgive these blasphemies; but my head is still bad and it makes me naughty.

at your feet

G.B.S.

20/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

3rd July 1912

I have’nt had a minute to answer your many funny green pages—I wish you were’nt so early Victorian!—I see your point of view clearly.

You must let Loraine have the play if Higgins is more important than Eliza. But he and I cannot be forced into partnership—that would never do.

—one knows, only too well that a ‘two star’ show is better than a ‘one star’ and that an ‘all star’ show is fit only for Kings and Queens!!

The two star affairs you quote were more or less bound by cupid! I suggest Matheson Lang or Aubrey Smith will play with joy the 2nd part and do the easier share of the business.

Before making up your mind you would naturally like to know what theatre and the financial strength of the undertaking: this of course will be put before you, and you will be discreet—I shall know in a few days.

I would be very unhappy if I could’nt feel the very best had been done for your brilliant play—I would far rather lose “Eliza”.

My love to you and to your Charlotte too.

Beatrice Stella

21/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

5th July 1912

I dont want anything put before me. I am an artist and dont understand finance. I want my Liza and I want my Higgins. If you are unkind about them I shall sit down and cry until I get them. I wont choose between them. I must have my Liza and no other Liza. There is no other Liza and can be no other Liza. I wrote the play to have my Liza. And I must have a proper Higgins for my Liza. I wont listen to reason: I will simply sit there and howl. I can howl for twenty years, getting louder and louder all the time. I cant have [Matheson] Lang because he is in the east playing The Devil’s Disciple from Calcutta to Capetown. The other one [Charles Lowne] you insult me with is perfect and utter nonsense: you know you never saw him in your life or you wouldnt be so wicked. I wont be offered The Best and then refused poor Bobby [Robert Loraine], who is the best. I will have a better if you can find him, because nobody is good enough for my Liza; but I wont have a worse. I dont want to force anybody into anything: I only want to see my play with my Liza properly supported in it; and until I get that I want to do nothing but yell. If you had a heart you would not be so obstinate and unreasonable. All I ask is to have my own way in everything, and to see my Liza as often as possible. I have gone through my big card index, and could name you twenty far better Higginses than any you have thought of; but they are none of them good enough: I’d rather die than see you dragged down to second class by them: I’d as soon ask you to wear a contract dress at £3 4s 2d. If you wont have Miss [Marie] Löhr’s leavings, then we must wait until somebody else whom you will have comes to the front and proves his mettle. And I shall cry, cry, cry all the time, and there will be a great wave of public feeling against you for your cruelty. And I will write SUCH a play for Lena Ashwell, my dear Lena who really loves me. So there!

GBS

22/ To Beatrice Webb

10th July 1912

. . . Whilst you were away I had to force Charlotte to take a holiday from me. Being very much in need of one, she quarreled furiously with me the moment she suspected what I was at until I wished her at the South Pole; and then she took leave of me (for a month after 14 years continuous adhesion) in a way that left [King of England] Charles I taking leave of his family simply nowhere. Of course it was an enormous relief to her, and quite a beneficial change for me. . . .

[G. Bernard Shaw]

23/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

July 1912

Oh darling what a letter!

I call you ‘darling’ because ‘dear Mr Shaw’ means, nothing at all—whilst darling means most dear and most dear means a man, and a mind and a speaking—such as you and your mind and your speech! Now please pull yourself together and tell me whether I may get on with business or no. I too have London and provincial rights and I would like permission to play Eliza after Lorrain and Cissy Loftus have finished with it in New York—

If you say ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘No’—then add ‘but you may come and see me whenever you like and Charlotte too—we are friends.’

I long to get on with the whole thing and call rehearsals on Sept 1st or else get off—you know how much I want to work with you—and as sure as one can feel—I feel sure (Shaw)—There’s a nice original joke—

Beatrice Stella

24/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

July 1912

I must hear. Is it with Higgens he [Robert Loraine] goes? I hope he will clear up his difficulties and come back with money to burn—anyway he’s worth £60—or even £70 a week.

I suppose I must take your note as a serious answer to mine it is very sad—and very disappointing but better than that you should feel disatisfied or mistrustful—The American offer so far as I know is no longer open—but no doubt somebody will want me—

I send my love to you both and remember when Georgina’s Everilda [Mrs Campbell’s pet dog’s offspring] comes I will bring her to your wife.

Beatrice Stella

25/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

22nd July 1912

Do you know you are very foolish, and not a little mischievous—I am rather ashamed of you. Mrs [Edith Sophy] Lyttelton [née Balfour known as D.D.] told me some of the contents of your letter—she had taken your nonsense seriously and wondered why she had never heard I had got poor Laurence [Irving] sent away. What an absurd thing for you to fool inaccurately about!!—and why didn’t you tell her I would have been delighted to act with Loraine—but not to have gone into partnership with him—

Can it be that Dr Almroth Wright’s letter to The Times applies to men as well as to women—and your sense of proportion has wobbled?!!—

I am delighted Loraine takes your play with Cissy Loftus to America. She ought to play Liza BEAUTIFULLY and it would be wicked not to have it with her here when they come back—

I hope you will have a nice holiday.

My black eyes and bruises and swellings Fripp expects to have gone down by Thursday and I will play again then.—

Yours

Beatrice Stella

[PS] They tell me I missed the end by a hairs breadth, it [the taxi-cab accident] was an astonishing experience—

26/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

24th July 1912

Oh my dear don’t trouble to justify yourself. We understand—But I do wish you would’nt send me your photographs—I dislike photographs, I have given all yours away at the theatre—My dresser particularly liked the one of you as Jesus Christ playing the piano. I hope to be out of bed and playing again on Thursday, which will mean only laid up a week—after missing haemorhage of the brain by a hair’s breadth according to Sir Alfred Fripp—I can paint out my black eyes and swollen face—if only the queer pains in my head go.

Yours

Beatrice Stella

[PS] I am quite sure if Cissy Loftus will work hard she will play “Liza” splendidly—and suit Loraine’s style far better than I—and suit your style too—far better—remember—the Morbideza that will creep out in my work—so bad for yours!

27/ To an English actress and theatrical manager Lillah Emma McCarthy

2nd August 1912

. . . I am recovering my solid egotism: I only wrote about six letters to Stella in the 24 hours before my departure [with Charlotte and her younger sister Mrs Cholmondeley née Mary “Sissy” Stewart Payne-Townshend for Germany and France on the 27th July]. I also sent her my most affecting photographs. She said she gave them to her dresser; so you will see that we are getting on very nicely. The deeper fidelities are, however, untouched.

GBS

28/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

9th August 1912

Stella, Stella: all the winds of the north are musical with the thousand letters I have written to you on this journey. But at last the car’s gears got jammed at the fall of evening; and as I live (by vegetables)! I stood—stood on my straining legs on that hillside for ten hours, keeping up the spirits of my chauffeur and warding off ghosts and foreign devils from him whilst he took the whole transmission to pieces and put it together again. I found a village and a clean double bedded room in a Gasthaus for Charlotte & her sister; and they slept happily. I and the chauffeur kept up magnificently, and greeted the dawn with the exultation of men who had not turned a hair. And that day we did not turn many hairs. But the next (which was yesterday)— my word! I tell you, my good woman, that if you expect to find any romantic nonsense about me, you are greatly mistaken. My knees are out of order: my calves are like a shop assistant’s where there are no seats behind the counter. I shall not feel romantic about you again for at least ten minutes.

But this is not what you want to know. The original manuscript of Pygmalion you cannot read: it is in shorthand. The typed copy with my corrections which I read from at DD’s [Mrs Edith Sophy Lyttelton’s house] has been through the hands of the compositors in Edinburgh [R. & R. Clark Limited], and would not be fit for your lily white hands even if it were within my reach instead of—I presume—in London. And the first proof, which I brought with me, has gone back to Edinburgh, scrawled with corrections and cuts and interpolations. I posted it only a day or two ago, and cannot reasonably expect the corrected proof by Monday, when I start for an excursion down into the Tyrol. I want to cross the Stelvio Pass, where the car can get up 9000 feet into the snows of the Ortles, and I can hear a few words of Italian on the other side before turning back. It will be hard to turn back, knowing that I have only to push on to Tresenda, turn to the right, skirt Lake Como, hurry through Milan, dash through the Little St Bernard (being myself the Great St Bernard), make through Albertville to Chambery, and then be in your arms in an hour. But back I must turn for all that, leaving your arms empty and, let me hope, aching.

Now from Kissingen to Bormio, which is the Italian foot of the Stelvio, is about 400 miles, all of which has to be retraced; and when a journey of 800 miles includes crawls up endless hairpin zigzags to 9000 feet, it is likely to be a matter of ten days. That means that I shall not be back here until the last half of the week ending 24th August, when, if you are still at Aix, I will send you a rough proof of Pygmalion. I warn you beforehand, however, that if you once read it you are lost: you will be at my feet at once with your dark hair looking dyed because of the gleaming of my brown shoes through the roots. . . .

GBS

29/ To Ellen Terry

20th August 1912

Dearest Ellen—

What is a Philomathic Society? It sounds like stamp collecting. When you said you had no personal influence with me you told a wicked lie; but it served the man right for bothering you.

I am languishing here [in Nancy, France] alone, with a broken automobile. I left Charlotte at Kissingen [in Germany] doing a cure (mud baths and such like) with her sister, and made a dash for the Alps. Unluckily the dash broke something vital in the auto; and I had to drag it here by rail through custom houses and over frontiers and all sorts of bothers to get it to the factory of its makers.

I now have a grotesque confession to make to you. I wrote a play for [George] Alexander which was really a play for Mrs Patrick Campbell. It is almost as wonderful a fit as Brassbound [Captain Brassbound’s Conversion]; for I am a good ladies’ tailor, whatever my shortcomings may be. And the part is SO different, not a bit in the world like Lady Cicely [a character of the play Captain Brassbound’s Conversion]. (“I should think not” you will say.) Then came the question, would she stand it? For, I repeat, this heroine wasnt a Lady Cicely Waynflete: she was Liza Doolittle, a flower girl, using awful language and wearing an apron and three ostrich feathers, and having her hat put in the oven to slay the creepy-crawlies, and being taken off the stage and washed, like Drinkwater. I simply didnt dare offer it to her. Well, I read it to a good friend of mine [D.D. alias Dame Edith Lyttelton], and contrived that she should be there. And she was there, reeking from Bella Donna [by James Bernard Fagan]. She saw through it like a shot. “You beast, you wrote this for me, every line of it: I can hear you mimicking my voice in it, etc. etc.” And she rose to the occasion, quite fine and dignified for a necessary moment, and said unaffectedly she was flattered. And then—and then—oh Ellen; and then? Why, then I went calmly to her house to discuss business with her, as hard as nails, and, as I am a living man, fell head over ears in love with her in thirty seconds. And it lasted more than thirty hours. I made no struggle: I went in head over ears, and dreamed and dreamed and walked on air for all that afternoon and the next day as if my next birthday were my twentieth. And I said, among other things (to myself) “Now I shall amuse and interest Ellen again for at least one letter or two.” Which I am accordingly trying to do.

One thing she said pleased me better than she knew. She said that [Eleonora] Duse has leaden feet, and that the perfect people walked on air, “like Ellen Terry.” I was tempted to reply that Ellen’s feet were heavy enough when she was trampling on a man’s heart; but I didnt.

Storms soon arose. She was clever enough to see that her business was not to accept the offers of [Charles] Frohman and the others, but to get the profits of the play herself by going into management. Then came a terrible conflict over the question of the leading man. She wanted—whom do you think? Your Jim [Scottish dramatist and novelist James Barrie]! I wouldnt have him at any price, because the part is essentially an English part of a certain type; and he would have been at a disadvantage in it. She proposed all sorts of impossible people. I proposed [Robert] Loraine. She would not hear of him. I pressed my choice. She said awful things about him. I repeated them to him. He said unpardonable things about her. I repeated them to her. This sort of Shavian horse-play startled her: she said I was a mischiefmaker. I made some more; and finally they had to assure one another of their undying esteem and admiration, which was what I wanted. But Loraine had to go to America to Supermanage himself into a solvent condition before coming back to play with her. And she said that she would never never never play Liza. And so she went off to Aix-les-Bains, where she is at present. And I am plying her with the most wonderful love letters. To write love letters to you was like giving tracts to a missionary (not that I could help doing it for all that) for you could hold me at letter writing and play with me at love making; but there cannot be two women alive at the same time who could do that: she is a wonderful person in her way; but there is only one Ellen.

And now Gertrude Kingston is going to do Brassbound, having got an hour’s start of Marie Tempest, who was that much too late. I suppose it must be let go now that you have exhausted it; but what will it be to me without you?

I shall be here for a few days still. Be my good angel to the extent of throwing me a scrap of your beloved writing.

G.B.S.

30/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

September 1912

Are you safely home again? I think it is a pity you sent me “Liza” for now I am ready with her tomorrow!! When I found you really did’nt want me I cabled to America accepting their terms—alas! (thank God)—too late!

Some afternoon when you are not tired out by rehearsals please come and eat some grapes and nuts—my son [Alan “Beo” Urquhart Campbell] and his wife [Helen] are here and they are both quite “off their heads” to meet you. As for Helen she bursts into shrieks and shrieks over Liza and whenever I look a little pale and tragic she says “say Aaaaaaah ow ooh, Aaeeeeeeeeeeh ow-ooh” and then she laughs and laughs until her hair comes down—you wont be able to withstand Helen—I miss your eight sheets of green paper—you easily tire!—

I thought Loraine had gone to America, what a pity we can’t meet and let him see what a really charming harmless person I am—I’d have a nice grousy or pheasanty supper with bananas and apples and nuts, any time you say—and Charlotte too if she will cease to regard me as a middleaged minx—

It is sad to think Florence [Farr] has gone [to Ceylon]—and so happy she was saying Goodbye to the lot of us!—

Yours

Beatrice Stella

[PS] I wrote dear Jim [James Barrie] an insulting letter meant for the two of you.

31/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

23rd October 1912

Stella

You must be either better or dead. Say, oh fairest, is your excellent white bosom still straitened, or are you up and about? If you are, it is your duty to write to me. I hope you have lost your good looks; for whilst they last any fool can adore you; and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No: give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins and a farmyard of crows’ feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me come out strong. . . . I shall never quite get over it—I don’t mean the failure; I mean the falling in love. I havnt been quite the same man since. Have you been quite the same devil? for I suppose you are a devil: they all tell me so when I go on raving about you. Well, I dont care. I have always said that it is the devil that makes the hell; but here is a devil who makes heaven. Wherefore I kiss your hands and praise Creation for you, and hope you are well as this leaves me at present thank God for it. This is the Irish formula, which by the way I should have adopted earlier in this letter, as every sentence would then have begun with Dear Stella. . . .

G.B.S.

32/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

4th November 1912

I am very unhappy because I hoped you would send me a word saying I hadn’t behaved abominably—

I feel now you didn’t want D.D. [Mrs Lyttelton] to hear that play at all—and that it was only the horror of my thin green face that made you say “as you like”—my temperature is going up to 105 point 6—telephone something that will make me feel less a culprit—I have lost your telephone number—

Remember how you snatched away Eliza—sending the news by Loraine, and I only turned the other cheek.

Be patient with me. I have been a widow for 12 years and a grandmother for four days and within the last few weeks I nearly gave life the slip.

I send you my love and I am sorry I was a churl and you had no tea and your hands were cold.

Stella

33/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

8th November 1912

Stella, Stella

Shut your ears tight against this blarneying Irish liar and actor. Read no more of his letters. He will fill his fountain pen with your heart’s blood, and sell your most sacred emotions on the stage. He is a mass of imagination with no heart. He is a writing and talking machine that has worked for nearly forty years until its skill is devilish. I should have warned you before; but I thought his white hairs and 56 years had made his philanderings ridiculous, and that you would beat him at his own game and revenge his earlier victims. I pray still that you, great actress as you are, are playing with him as he is playing with you. He cares for nothing really but his mission, as he calls it, and his work. He is treacherous as only an Irishman can be: he adores you with one eye and sees you with the other as a calculated utility. He has been recklessly trying to please you, to delight you, to persuade you to carry him up to heaven for a moment (he is trying to do it now); and when you have done it, he will run away and give it all to the mob. All his goods are in the shop window; and he’ll steal your goods and put them there too.

But don’t cut him off utterly. He is really worth something, even to you, if you harden your heart against him. He will tell you that you are too great a woman to belong to any man, meaning, I suppose that he is too great a man to belong to any woman. He will warn you against himself with passionate regard for you—sincerely too, and yet knowing it to be one of his most dangerous tricks. He will warn you against his warning you, not meaning you to take any warning; and he will say later on “I told you so”. His notion of a woman in love with him is one who turns white and miserable when he comes into the room, and is all one wretched jealous reproach. Oh dont, dont, DONT fall in love with him; but dont grudge him the joy he finds in being in love with you, and writing all sorts of wild but heartfelt exquisite lies—lies, lies, lies, lies to you, his adoredest.

G.B.S.

34/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

14th November 1912

You didn’t really think that I believed you came to see me because you were interested in me. I knew it was Liza and I was delighted that you should be so businesslike in such a bewilderingly charming way—

I see how things are going—and you musn’t think of me anywhere but still in bed gazing at the cracked Kensington Square ceiling—and a calm and safe peace too!—

No indeed—not for one minute did I flatter myself!—Cissy Loftus—Lillah [McCarthy]—Dolly Minto—Gertrude Kingston—or Lady Bancroft [Marie Effie Wilton] (she would be the best). I can see them all in “Liza”.

My love to you

Stella

[PS] I hope all is going well tonight and our dear friends not killing themselves.

35/ Mrs. Patrick Campbell to Bernard Shaw

18th November 1912

No more shams—a real love letter this time—then I can breathe freely, and perhaps who knows begin to sit up and get well—I haven’t said “kiss me” because life is too short for the kiss my heart calls for. . . All your words are as idle wind—Look into my eyes for two minutes without speaking if you dare! Where would be your 54 years? and my grandmothers heart? and how many hours would you be late for dinner?—If you give me one kiss and you can only kiss me if I say “kiss me” and I will never say “kiss me” because I am a respectable widow and I wouldn’t let any man kiss me unless I was sure of the wedding ring—

Stella (Liza, I mean)

36/ To a great friend of both Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell Mrs Edith Sophy Lyttelton née Balfour known also as D.D.

22nd December 1912

I hear, O beautiful and gracious DD, that Stella has made you angry by accusing you, on my behalf, of narrowness of mind. Dont believe it. Not that Stella is a liar (at least to you—we are all liars to people we dont care for); but she is an Italian savage as far as about nine tenths of my—of our—activities are concerned, and cannot be tamed to admit that the least part of her dignity consists in the opinion of other people. Let me illustrate, in the Fabian manner, by a diagram. The two hearts in the middle are yours and mine. The circle is our whole range of interests and activities and sympathies and ties and knowledges.

The white segment is that part which is common to us and to Stella; and you will remark that it goes right in to our hearts, and that it is flooded with light. But the rest of the circle is darkness to her—doesnt exist for her. Consequently, when I was rash enough to point out that if I abused Stella’s reckless hospitality I should not be treating her quite respectfully, and that (for instance) you would think so, and that I really could not bear that, the fat was in the fire directly; and—well, you know better than I do the form in which my conduct was reported to you.

I dont know what’s going to happen now, with all that black part of the diagram building in the part that she understands. It was clear, wasnt it, when she had nothing to do but lie there staring at the ceiling and waiting for what she calls, with her barbarous humor, the tureen, that nothing could occupy and distract her and give her an interest in life but a thrilling love affair. And you will admit also that a more desperate enterprise for an elderly gentleman of 56 than to make himself the Romeo of such an affair could hardly be imagined. It was like Richard III and Lady Ann. However, I plunged in head over ears and literally wrote off my 56 years, and talked my whitening hairs red again. I never before deliberately tried to make any woman fall in love with me. With Stella I tried all I knew—or rather all I could devise. When the hour for that threatened operation came I was like the lady in Man & Superman: I concentrated all my magic. I guessed mystically that with your wonderful gift of affection and my Irish power of weaving love spells we could kill the poison in her blood and raise her out of her illness by a sort of apotheosis. And we have done it: and the glory of the cure justifies the desperation of the remedy.

BUT—what next? No sooner had I succeeded in interesting Stella than she resolved that I should not only fall in love with her—for of course I had done that already—but that all my poor little tricks should be trumped and all my snares tied round my own neck and heels by her enormously superior enchantments. When she was very ill [after the taxi-cab accident] she was half a child and half an angel: all the mischief in her was dead; and no feeling for her was possible except one of anxious affection. But now that she has sprung into complete life again, the reaction is tremendous: her witcheries and devilries are inconceivable: she plays cat and mouse with me: she teases poor [daughter-in-law] Helen fiendishly: she asks her unlucky brother [Edmund] to play for her and then rolls him in the mud because she has used me to make him nervous; and if one of the worms dares to turn, she is noble and sincere again in a flash, and—since one cannot shut eyes and ears and hammer her with the poker as she deserves—everyone is not only disarmed but infatuated.

This is a nice situation for a respectable married man, whose wife, though neither so beautiful (to other people) nor so subtle nor so delightful nor so lots of other fascinating things as Stella, is none the less a part of himself. I have no scruples about breaking up marriages that are mistakes (perhaps all marriages are, by the way); but if I break up with Charlotte I break with everything that holds all of us together. But Stella is such an utter individualist that she would eat up all the faiths in the world as she would eat a Neapolitan ice, if she took a fancy to the ice. However, I havnt the very faintest intention of breaking with Charlotte, nor of cooling one jot to Stella, nor of risking one atom of your regard. How I shall trample my way through, goodness knows; but I shall manage it somehow. Forgive me for burdening you with my confidences; but I want you to know authentically.

G.B.S.

PS By the way I am bound to add that Stella seems to have cured me of my headaches; so the balance of benefit is on my side. She knows too—the witch! —that she has loaded me with debts of this kind.

PPS Why dont you let me read your plays sometimes, since I seem never to hear of their performances until too late?

37/ To Mrs Edith Lyttelton

27th December 1912

My dear DD

Playing Romeo has given me an ill-divining soul: I cannot foresee the happy ending. It is a delightful game, and oh! so beautifully acted; but she makes me feel my part so deeply that I sometimes forget that I am on the stage. She is so horribly improvident, or rather so shortsighted (Henry Arthur Jones once told me that she could see more clearly than any other woman alive for just six inches in front of her nose); and I, though as improvident as you please, just live in the future. Think of all our fortifications! you with your [husband] Alfred, and your social position, and your income, and your deep-rooted home; and I with my work, my copyrights, my home, and the lady she elegantly called “my old Dutch.” And she a widow, unprovided for, an actress, fortyeight, with a man’s responsibilities and more than a man’s work, dancing on precipices! Who is to be responsible if her heart and her pockets find themselves empty? For a long time yet there will be adorers and worshippers and even offerers of substantial salaries; but where is to be the corner stone of her home? Charles II will die affectionately saying “Dont let Nelly [Gwyn] starve”; and [Admiral] Nelson will die heroically saying! “I bequeath Emma [Hamilton] to my country’s care”; but what good is that, especially to a proud woman like Stella? I am no use: I am, as you kindly say, kind, or at least not unkind; but my powers force me to a savage selfishness, since I must get my appointed work done before I die or decay much further; and I simply feed on her to nourish my own soul. I am going to get replunged into Socialism by this new paper [The New Statesman] of Webb’s—replunged even into journalism, perhaps: a horror at my age. I have a book on Socialism to write—the book on Socialism. I may have plays to write which will be of no use to her—in fact, I know that I must give up writing Fannys and Lizas and become again commercially impossible. She is, people think, perfectly able to take care of herself; but I feel, outside all the romance (or perhaps inside it) that she is a starving, unprotected, resourceless daughter or mother or sister of mine whom I must provide for or else be a monster. So it is perhaps lucky for me that I am a monster, capable of sprite-like heartlessness. At least I used to be; and the leopard does not change his spots.

There! You see that the game has possibilities of earnestness; but we—you & I—cannot stay the march of destiny; therefore let us not be in a hurry to bid the devil goodmorning; for “thy kindness shall not depart” from her; and I can amuse her for a time yet.

You got me into a terrible row by shewing her that letter (dont shew her this); for she does not like crumples in her roseleaves; and I had to scud close reefed before the storm, for a full hour before the sun shone again.

As to the boots, that was the Italian savage. She wanted to know where my telephone is (could anyone hear me speaking to her?) and I thoughtlessly explained that it was on the wall between Charlotte’s bedroom and mine, and that I had to resort to railway telephone cabins and to the club for our more private conversations. Then, great Heavens! what a storm! To the Italian savage, separate bedrooms are mountains of ice, insults, cruelties, ingratitudes, contemptible impotences. I was overwhelmed with ridicule, and accused of and pitied for never having known any women but Suffragets. In a feeble attempt to explain I said that a woman must have some room into which a man had not a right to burst without knocking and throw his boots about. The scornful audacities which this provoked she has apparently reported to you. For the wretched dastard who would hesitate to fill her bed with his muddiest boots she had nothing but derision. I pity the man who ever presumes on these bravuras; but the Suffraget comparison was sincere and significant.

Now may I devote two lines to you? I am not anxious about you, and hope I never shall be; but if I can be of any use in your theatrical projects, come in at any time without knocking and throw your boots about without ceremony if you want a play read or anything else done that is within the power of your very devoted

G.B.S.

38/ To Siegfried Trebitsch

29th January 1913

My dear Trebitsch

There is no legal difficulty about performing an English play in Germany before it is performed in England. Your lawyer is wrong—lawyers always are wrong—in supposing that an English play cannot be copyrighted in America until it is printed and bound there. That regulation applies only to books. Dramatic compositions were exempted from this regulation in the Copyright Act because very few plays are printed and published: they are almost all performed from typewritten copies. Therefore all that has to be done is to deposit a typewritten copy, or even a copy printed in England, at the Library of Congress in Washington, with a small registration fee; and the trick is done. Consequently, there is no difficulty on the score of copyright provided you give me sufficient notice. What you have usually done in the past is to publish the play as a literary composition, without giving me any notice at all, and without securing the American copyright, with the result that it would be possible for an American pirate to treat your translations as a non-copyright work, to retranslate it into English, and treat the translation as his own property. Hence my urgent adjurations to you never under any circumstances to deal with any unpublished work of mine without giving me ample warning beforehand.

I am much puzzled at your not having received Overruled. I thought I had sent you a copy with a letter about various things. The proposal to produce Androcles [and the Lion] had nothing to do with [Max] Reinhardt. The idea was that Granville Barker was to visit a few German towns beginning at the Kunstlertheater in Munich, with an English company playing in English, and that the first performance of Androcles was to be one of the attractions of this tour. Barker was very hot on this when he was at [Garmisch-] Partenkirchen at Christmas. But now the proposal seems to have dropped; and even if it be revived, it is hardly likely to be carried out before October next.

I have no general objection to Pygmalion making his first debut at the Burgtheater; on the contrary I should rather like the English production of one of my plays to be anticipated abroad. But it is very important that a foreign production of this kind should not be a failure. Pygmalion is not suited to a large theatre; and the Burgtheater is a very large theatre; besides, Pygmalion is essentially a star play: unless you have an actress of extraordinary qualifications and popularity, failure is certain. There is another very serious objection. It is my intention to produce Pygmalion here anonymously. The part of Eliza is to be played by Mrs Patrick Campbell; and the play will be announced as “By a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.” This will give the idea that it is a classical play, and that Mrs Campbell is to appear as Galatea. As she has never appeared in a low life part, the surprise will be complete. But of course this would be all spoilt if the play were first produced in Vienna with my name on the program. This objection seems to me to be fatal: I see no means of getting round it. Androcles is just the sort of play for Reinhardt to produce; and if Barker’s project is dropped, Reinhardt had better have the refusal of it. But I think you ought to make him give up Misalliance. He has lost interest in productions of that sort; and if he produces it now, he will do it half-heartedly, and aim not at making it a success but simply at preventing anybody else from getting it. Therefore I think you had better tell him to tear up the Misalliance contract, and that if he doesnt, he shall not have Androcles. Do not reproach him or quarrel with him: there is no use in that; and he and I are personally on friendly terms which I dont want to disturb; but tell him quite frankly that he is not serious about Misalliance and must give it up.

As far as I can foresee at present I shall be in London at the end of April; and I shall certainly be very glad to see you then or at any other time.

yours ever

G. Bernard Shaw

P.S. I will send you a copy of Androcles [and the Lion] as soon as I can get one printed. At present there exists only one imperfect and uncorrected copy, without any stage directions, and with the dialogue quite unfinished. Until I complete it and get it printed it would be of no use to you, even if I had a second copy to send.

39/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

6th February 1913

Stella, Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella what is there left to say?

I have just played all sorts of things, almost accurately, I dont believe I could get a headache if I tried. I drove from Hatfield faster than a man should drive in the dark.

What an enormous meal of happiness! They will wish you many happy returns of Sunday. Sunday! I laugh hollowly. When I am dead let them put an inscription on 12 Hinde St HERE A GREAT MAN FOUND HAPPINESS. [Richard] Wagner wrote up on his house Hier wo mein Wähnen Frieden fand—Wahnfried—sei dieses Haus von mir benannt (if I recollect it aright). Nobody can translate it; but I understand it. I will write on the sky someday.

I was only twenty minutes late for my appointment; and if I had been wise enough to miss it altogether I should have saved £300; for that is just what keeping it cost me in money. What it cost me in absence three hundred millions could not pay for.

Her last words as we parted (very affectionately on my part) were “I never know where you spend your afternoons. Once I never thought about it—never doubted. Now—I always imagine—” I see you, like the Flying Dutchman, once in seven years; and I am supposed to see you every seven minutes. It is amazing to myself that I dont. How is it that I will get up and trudge through the mud to any sort of miserable work, but that I must always let heaven come to me? I should not have come up today but for that silly committee and two other utterly frivolous businesses. It is incredible. How did I get it ground into me that happiness is always picked up on the way and must not be sought? Yet there is something in it: it came nobly off today. Stella: I WAS happy. Was! I am. I shall never be unhappy again.

You cannot have this in the morning because the evening post, at six, had gone before I returned; so this must wait until morning (12) and will reach you in the afternoon—oh Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella Stella

G.B.S.

40/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

26th March 1913

. . . Loraine cables that he wants to produce Pygmalion in London in April, and “is Campbell available?” I have replied “Campbell supreme April impossible”. I read Pygmalion (very badly) to the Scott Gattys yesterday. It’s amusing and effective; but oh how utterly inadequate! It was good enough for that strange woman; but now, now, now, now, NOW!

I must stop, though I have a million things to say, as the accident involves correspondence and business before bed.

For nights past I have sat down to write to you, and thought of you instead until I had to lay down the pen without a word written. It is past letter writing with me. There are things one cannot put on paper. I have written everything that is writeable: The rest must be viva voce.

Goodnight, oh beautifullest and adoredest.

G.B.S.

41/ To Harley Granville Barker

31st March 1913

I believe I owe you various sums for theatre tickets; but I can remember nothing except £2:2:—for a box for the Russian Ballet, and a stall which I guess at 15/–. The rest you must treat me to.

After the smash and the adventure of the drunken chauffeur I completed the triad by a blighting headache. We then got across here without mishap. This house, which looks exactly like a picture by Picasso, is delightfully situated. I wish you were here. Do you know [Horace Curzon] Plunkett?

Charlotte is in high spirits—almost in health. The domestic fiend of the last few months has become a green-eyed angel of the fireside. She actually gibes at her rival.

Is the [Wilson] Barrett play [The Sign of the Cross] a success?

Revises of Androcles [and the Lion] have just come from the printer. Has that matter advanced at all? What about Lawd Ahrd [Howard Hallam is a character of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.]? On going through the play again I have become convinced that you would make a perfect Androcles. You would pat the lion to perfection; and you could turn on your ghastly terror-of-death effect in the arena. So if you like to understudy [Oliver Peters] Heggie, or even overstudy him, £5 an act shant part us.

Is [James] Barrie going to be faithful to Stella [Mrs Patrick Campbell] in the matter of that murderess play, or will he betray her with Irene [Vanbrugh]? I want to know before I move again in the matter of Pygmalion. I really dont see why Pygmalion should go out of the family. If we cant manage Mrs Pattikins [Mrs Patrick Campbell], whom (of the first order) can we manage? “Love will find out the Way.” Lillah [McCarthy], I assume, is in Trafalgar Bay.

G.B.S.

42/ To Mrs Patrick Campbell

3rd April 1913

This is only a supplementary letter to send you a scrap of a communication just received from Barker—in reply to my, enquiry about Barrie. I enclose also an article which may amuse you as a specimen of the way the young lions now roar—at the old pioneer. I get a certain pleasure from this sort of rebellion: when things are alive young men go on like this. And I have, still, only to raise my paw—!