Speech at the First International Shaw Conference
National Gallery of Ireland, 29th May 2012
Tá áthas an domhain orm an chéad Chomhdháil Idirnáisiúnta Shaw in Éirinn a oscailt agus tá súil agam go mbainfidh na rannpháirtithe taitneamh agus tairbhe as an bplé seo ar shaol, ar shaothar agus ar ré suntasach George Bernard Shaw.
[It gives me great pleasure to open the first International Shaw Conference in Ireland and I wish the participants a fruitful time as they discuss the life, work, times and significant of George Bernard Shaw.]
I thank Audrey McNamara for her invitation and I wish to pay tribute to the assistance she has received from Professor Meaney and the Humanities Institute UCD, the International Shaw Society, the School of English, Drama and Film and many others on both sides of the Atlantic not least Professor Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel and Dr. Peter Graham.
Indeed, I would like to take the opportunity to pay tribute again, having already done so at the London School of Economics and Politics, to what I consider a marvellous work of scholarship, Dr. O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s '"Shaw, Synge, Connolly and Socialist Provocation'" which is such a significant contribution to the understanding of the literary, historical and biographical themes of the early decades of the twentieth century, their intersection and Shaw’s role in the immense social and political changes that were taking place.
Nicholas Grene argued in his essay “Shaw and the Irish Theatre - An Unacknowledged Presence” that it was a peculiar phenomenon that Shaw, as one of Ireland’s most popular and most frequently performed dramatists should so long have remained the “invisible man” of Irish theatre. ‘Relegated’ may be a more appropriate word than invisible.
While the recent sell-out production in 2011 of "Pygmalion" in the Abbey Theatre directed by Annabel Comyn is testament to the enduring attraction of Shaw’s work, bearing in mind that, although Shaw was perhaps the most performed playwright throughout the history of The Abbey, this recent production was the first time that Pygmalion had been staged by The Abbey Theatre. It had, of course, been staged by The Gate Theatre in 2004. The story of the rise of Eliza Doolittle from lowly but respectable occupation through the class system to wealth and adulation has perhaps a resonance for a 21st Century audience that has been forced back on its fantasies by recent events.
I have a particular interest in Shaw as a public man – that phrase a public man includes a number of identities – presentation of the Self – as moralist, as essayist, as dramatist, as Fabian lecturer, as advocate, as ironist.
George Bernard Shaw had little time for sentimental evasion even at the height of his success in the theatre, he took time to write to the papers about the excessive romanticising that surrounded the sinking of the Titanic. It was Shaw who reminded the world that the romanticizing only obscured the real facts from the public when the facts were needed. Shaw asked, “What is the use of all those ghastly, blasphemous, inhuman, braggartly lying?” Even in 1912, at the height of his success in theatre he did not shy away from expressing his civic responsibility and views that he believed were his vocation as he saw it, to invite the public to address facts, no matter how unpopular. He did not trim his message on such issues as the slums of Dublin or in exposing the philistinism of an uninformed commerce.
And that responsibility to world citizenship fed Shaw’s plays and life’s work. Yet I believe that Shaw’s rationalism, delivered through the gradualism of the Fabians, required such a suspension of passion as would separate him from John Millington Synge, when it come to the politics of freedom, be it on national independence or gender issues.
That Shaw was very interested in the human story and championed the rights of all who were underprivileged both socially and economically is obvious from the range of his work.
A prolific dramatist, he wrote over 50 plays; those like Widower’s Houses which deals with slum landlordism, Major Barbara on capitalism, Candida and Getting Married which deal with gender relationships, St. Joan which is referred to by some critics as one of his greatest dramatic work, but for my purposes, as we are in the years of so many centenary celebrations, his great Irish play, John Bull’s Other Island has particular relevance for those later generations of scholars seeking to recover the context and the political movements of the early 20th Century.
The honour that Shaw’s plays and public life brought to Ireland went far beyond his 1904 play. He was part of the dialogue in Dublin and London with William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Dublin socialists such as Frederick Ryan, the trade union organiser William O’Brien, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, James Larkin and James Connolly.
He shared with them an admiration for Ibsen and an appreciation of Ibsen’s universal themes but Shaw’s circumstances were different from some of those such as Synge. The difference in life circumstances could not be greater. It was reflected in the gradualism of the one and the passion of the other. Yet those who differed on tactics could come together on a principle – as in 1913, for example, when Shaw shared a platform in London with James Connolly, A.E. George Russell in a rally in support of Larkin and locked out Dublin workers. This testifies to Shaw’s commitment, politics and his role as a public intellectual.
Shaw, of course, also wrote in the immediate aftermath of 1916 to the London press in an attempt to prevent or suspend the executions of the rebel leaders, including Connolly. He also ran a huge correspondence with contacts in the establishment in his efforts to save Roger Casement.
George Bernard Shaw remains one of Ireland’s, and particularly Dublin’s most illustrious sons. Having emigrated from Dublin in 1876 to London where he established himself as a music and theatre critic, he was to carve out a space as a public intellectual engaging with the social issues and, indeed, the confrontations in the discourse of the times. A Fabian socialist he was one of the four founders of the London School of Economics with Sydney and Beatrice Webb and a regular lecturer on Fabian themes.
Bhí saol poiblí ag George Bernard Shaw mar mhorálaí, mar dhrámadóir agus mar raconteur. Ba dhuine mór le rá é ag an am agus b’shin an chúis go bhfuair sé léirmheas dímholta ó fhoinsí mar The Irish Independent nó Arthur Griffith.
[George Bernard Shaw had a public life as a moralist, dramatist, and raconteur. He was a celebrity of his time, and this would be the regular basis for the most virulent criticism of him from such sources as The Irish Independent or Arthur Griffith.]
The Irish Independent caricatured Shaw’s form of presentation at his lectures and mocked his humour. That humour with its belief of subverting the middle classes notions of themselves, their ‘respectability’ and its repressions was seized on as a means to dislodge his arguments delivered at his lectures. For William Martin Murphy it was a short distance from this to referring to Shaw’s presentations as ‘anti Catholic’.
The debate as to whether the public in general might benefit from public provision in the arts, as they had in the provision of public parks, The National Gallery debate is a good example William Martin Murphy had written in the Irish Independent that the project was one promoted by ‘dilettantes’ and as he put it in an editorial in relation to the National Gallery proposal:
“There is no popular demand and one which will never be of the smallest use to the common people of the city.”
George Russell (A.E.) was pithy in his castigation of such opponents Murphy. He referred to them as ‘the meanest, the most uncultured, the most materialistic and carping crowd what ever made a citizen ashamed of his fellow countrymen.’
The Gallery of course went on even in its earliest years to receive extraordinarily generous donations and bequests.
Being as we now are at the beginning of a series of centenary celebrations of significant events in the second decade of the twentieth century that includes the Home Rule Acts, the founding of the Ulster Volunteers, the Irish Volunteers, the founding of the Labour Party in 1912, the 1914 World War; the Rising of 1916 and much more, we are challenged as to what we should remember, what we should revise, what we should emphasize, and how we should execute this challenge.
Recovering the plural and tolerant discourse necessary for an ethical contemplation on all of these events of which Shaw was a part is a valuable part of the necessary act of remembering. We must do so in an ethical, flexible, pluralist and even forgiving way.
We are well capable of such an ethical exercise I believe and it will be, I hope our choice, rather than any evasive blandness which would be neither authentic nor valuable.
The launch of Dr. O’Ceallaigh Ritchel’s book Shaw, Synge, Connolly and Socialist Provocation is well placed at the centre of your deliberations, engaging as it does, both the promise and the contradictions of those two early decades that preceded Independence.
Preparing for the opening of your Conference’s constituted its own provocation for myself.
I was set to thinking, for example, of the extraordinary influence of writers at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Ibsen, and in particular his Doll’s House on so many writers and politicians, and in so many different ways.
I was intrigued by an image that occurred to me of five Nora’s – the Nora’s of Ibsen, Synge, Shaw, O’Casey and the living Nora of James Joyce.
Through these characters so much can be understood, not only of the writer’s intention, but of the enduring value of the moral principles involved. Ibsen’s Nora, after all leaves, and rejects, any sentimental forgiveness. Shaw’s Nora – was her decision representative of a sophisticated calculated rationalism or is it a defeat?
It is so appropriate that your conference has a paper that deals with the ‘Woman Question’.
Dr. O’Ceallaigh Ritschel has, of course, dealt with the contrasting treatment of the Nora question, and to the contrasting treatments of its enslavement and its dilemma of loveless bondage. In the contrasting strategies of John Millington Synge’s Nora of In the Shadow of the Glen and Shaw’s Nora of John Bull’s Other Island. In the former a confrontation of bourgeois morality with a celebration of life, sexuality, freedom and language itself, results in the choice of the freedoms, in the latter Shaw’s rationalism asserts itself with its necessary concession to reformism , his choosing to subvert the audience with a subtle irony that is, perhaps at times, lost.
Synge’s Nora is prophetic perhaps in valuing words, a stranger with a fine piece of talk over the propertied relations that would be recounted in later rural Ireland or the anthropology of Nancy Scheper Hughes – the uncomfortable silences of loveless unions cemented by property, respectability and duty.
Shaw’s belief in Fabian gradualist change, however, I repeat, did not exclude him from those issues that combined both radical and reformist socialists – such as the Lockout of 1913 or the provision of a Gallery for the Arts in Dublin.
Your conference is timely and emphasises the importance of us never forgetting the centrality of the literature debate in the events that led up to 1916 and Independence.
The differences between Shaw, Synge and O’Casey as they responded to the context and policy of their times, are of first order importance, not only to literary scholarship but to students of history and political theory, and above all to our citizens now and in the future.
The line that was crossed by some writers of course, who sought to make literature an instrument of emancipation is worthy of debate as is the later extreme alternative response that separates literature from life, and that ends up, with at best, an evasion. The freedom of the writer’s imagination will always be in tension with the curve of historical change but it is never determined. When the balance works literary brilliance can be both emancipatory of past and present, but above all, an invitation to the life of the spirit in a world waiting to be born, and makes of literature a celebratory emancipation.
Your conference will, I hope, spark an enduring debate. There are so many good questions. The Ibsen influence is but one theme in the literary heritage, nevertheless an important one.
Writing in Shaw’s time was often in the flux of life and change. One can only imagine the atmosphere that prevailed in the public debate on the response to the Lockout of 1913, the executions of 1916, or indeed the debate about the public and art. These debates must be regarded, when all the excesses of revisionism gone wrong have been taken into account, to have been about in their time, about the promise of democracy and the public world.
As I finish I am anxious to recognise and remind us all again as how we come to be in this beautiful setting. The legacy of the residual, George Bernard Shaw estate or the Hugh Lane estate is of such benefit to generation after generation of Irish people, but it was made possible only by the debate being won and such words as those I quoted from the editorial of a leading Irish newspaper of 22nd January 1913 in relation to the proposal for a National Art Gallery being defeated.
The forces that decide democratic rights of workers and the rights of the public to the liberating power and pleasure of art were from the same stable. The people of Dublin were not only to be denied trade union rights but to be locked away from the Arts and their liberating power as well. That the writers’ views won out with the public is something for which we should be grateful. I regret that the fact that I will not be able to be present for what promises to be a series of papers that engages with such rich themes. I look forward, however, to perhaps reading them in the near future.
Tá áthas an domhain go bhfuil díospóireacht ar George Bernard Shaw ar siúl agus guím gach rath ar bhur gcomhdháil.
[I am so pleased George Bernard Shaw is being debated and I wish your conference success.]