Widowers' Houses & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play. Bernard Shaw
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for pit tickets for Mrs Hewlett 5/– Train Temple to Ravenscourt Pk 6d
29/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 9th December 1892
Production of Widowers’ Houses by the Independent Theatre at the Royalty. 20. Wind Instrument Chamber Music Society 1st concert. Prince’s Hall. 20.
I forget what I did today, except—Oh, I remember. I went over to FE [Florence Emery] at about noon and stayed there for some hours. Then I walked into town. Made a speech at the end of the play. Spent the night at Fitzroy Square. Watchkey 3d
30/ To a British actor-manager and a barrister Charles Charrington
14th December 1892
Dear Charrington
If you have seen “Widowers’ Houses” you will understand that it was altogether too experimental to be put on anywhere except at the I.T. [Independent Theatre], least of all at the theatre of any manager for whom I had a ray of personal regard. All that could be done with it would be about three matinees run by some manager who had a theatre and a staff eating their heads off in the afternoon. The third matinee would perhaps bring the performance up to the level of a bad dress rehearsal. However, I have proved myself a man to be reckoned with. I have got the blue book across the footlights. I have made [James] Welch’s reputation and blasted Florence Farr’s. I have established the fact that Moy Thomas is the greatest dramatic critic of the age, and that [William] Archer & [Arthur Bingham] Walkley are a pair of idiots. I have appeared before the curtain amid transcendent hooting & retired amid cheers. And I have spent so much time at rehearsal that I am stark ruined, and am ruefully asking myself whether a continental trip for my health would not have been far more economical than all this theatrical glory. For of what value was it to me when J. A. C. [Janet Achurch, Mrs Charrington] was not there to see. As yesterday’s matinee was for the managers, I took it for granted that you would be there. I will try hard to get over to see you in the course of the next few days, tomorrow if no musical performance claims me—failing that, Monday. I am staying for the moment with H. H. [Henry Halliday] Sparling.
31/ William Archer’s review of Widowers’ Houses contributed to a British weekly paper The World
14th December 1892
. . . It is a pity that Mr Shaw should labour under a delusion as to the true bent of his talent, and, mistaking an amusing jeu d’sprit for a work of creative art, should perhaps be tempted to devote further time and energy to a form of production for which he has no special ability and some constitutional disabilities. A man of his power of mind can do nothing that is altogether contemptible. We may be quite sure that if he took palette and ‘commenced painter,’ or set to work to manipulate a lump of clay, he would produce a picture or a statue that would bear the impress of a keen intelligence, and would be well worth looking at. That is precisely the case of Widowers’ Houses. It is a curious example of what can be done in art by sheer brain-power, apart from natural aptitude. For it does not appear that Mr Shaw has any more specific talent for the drama than he has for painting or sculpture. . . .
32/ To William Archer
14th December 1892
[Dear Archer]
I have come to the conclusion that Moy Thomas (who sat it out again yesterday, every line) is the greatest critic of the age, and [Henry William] Massingham entirely right in his estimate of you and [Arthur Bingham] Walkley. A more amazing exposition of your Shaw theory even I have never encountered than that World article. Here am I, who have collected slum rents weekly with these hands, & for 4 years been behind the scenes of the middle class landowner—who have philandered with women of all sorts & sizes—and I am told gravely to go to nature & give up apriorizing about such matters by you, you sentimental Sweet Lavendery recluse. [Sweet Lavender is a play by Arthur Wing Pinero.] Get out!
GBS
33/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 18th December 1892
SUNDAY Lecture at Kelmscott House for the Hammersmith Socialist Society. 20. (Sparling).
Revised proof of letter to the Star in reply to critics of the play. Also World proof. This involved finishing the World article. After dinner I went out intending to go over to Clapham to see [Henry William] Massingham; but I mistook the hour of the train and missed it. I went to Bedford Park and visited the Pagets [brothers Henry Marriott Paget, Sidney Edward Paget and Walter Stanley Paget]. On my return I found [Reginald] Blomfield, [James Brand] Pinker, and Miss Dalbshoff here. Pinker stayed until long after 18. I had “tea” and then lay down and slept for more than half an hour. After the lecture I went into Morris’s to supper. [Ernest Belfort] Bax, who had taken the chair for me, was there; also Catterson Smith, Touzeau Parris, [Edward Spencer] Beesly, [Emery] Walker and [Samuel] Bullock. Bertha Newcombe was one of the afternoon callers.
34/ Bernard Shaw’s letter to the editor of The Star “Bernard Shaw replies to the critics of the Widowers’ Houses”
19th December 1892
The critics of my play Widowers’ Houses have now had their say. Will you be so good as to let the author have a turn? I know that I have had a full meal of advertisement, and that to ask for more seems greedy and ungrateful; but I said at the outset that I would boom this business for all I was worth; and if I omitted a “reply to my critics” I should feel that I had not done my complete utmost.
I have read every criticism of the play I could get hold of; and I think it is now clear that “the new drama” has no malice to fear from the serious critics. A few of the humorists have, of course, shewn all the unscrupulousness of their speciality; but they have amused us; and for that be all their sins forgiven them. There has been a touch of temper, too: one gentleman’s blood boiled to such an extent that he literally “saw red,” and solemnly assured the public that I wore a coat of that revolutionary hue. But the influential critics have, it seems to me, been not merely fair, but generous in their attitude. The care with which every possible admission in my favor has been made, even in the notices of those who found the play intolerably disagreeable and the author intolerably undramatic, shews that the loss of critical balance produced by the first shock of Ibsen’s Ghosts was only momentary, and that the most unconventional and obnoxious agitator-dramatist, even when he has gone out of his way to attack his critics, need not fear a Press vendetta. I have had fair play from my opponents, and considerably more than that from my partisans; and if this is how I fare, I do not see what anybody else need fear.
However, the fairness of criticism is one thing, its adequacy quite another. I do not hesitate to say that many of my critics have been completely beaten by the play simply because they are ignorant of society. Do not let me be misunderstood: I do not mean that they eat with their knives, drink the contents of their fingerbowls, or sit down to dinner in ulsters and green neckties. What I mean is that they do not know life well enough to recognize it in the glare of the footlights. They denounce Sartorius, my house-knacking widower, as a monstrous libel on the middle and upper class because he grinds his money remorselessly out of the poor. But they do not (and cannot) answer his argument as to the impossibility of his acting otherwise under our social system; nor do they notice the fact that though he is a bad landlord he is not in the least a bad man as men go. Even in his economic capacity I have made him a rather favorable specimen of his class. I might have made him a shareholder in a match factory where avoidable “phossy jaw” was not avoided, or in a tram company working its men seventeen and a half hours a day, or in a railway company with a terrible deathroll of mangled shunters, or in a whitelead factory, or a chemical works: in short, I might have piled on the agony beyond the endurance of my audience, and yet not made him one whit worse than thousands of personally amiable and respected men who have invested in the most lucrative way the savings they have earned or inherited. I will not ask those critics who are so indignant with my “distorted and myopic outlook on society” what they will do with the little money their profession may enable them to save. I will simply tell them what they must do with it, and that is to follow the advice of their stockbroker