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Bernard Shaw
and His
Contemporaries

SHAW’S IBSEN
A Re-Appraisal

Joan Templeton
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

Series Editors
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
Massachusetts Maritime Academy
Pocasset, MA, USA

Peter Gahan
Independent Scholar
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and
most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse
range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic
understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in
reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as
a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and
American following.
Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a
vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival
Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist,
lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape
­
the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No
one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as
controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In
­
many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of
the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the
subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism
that arose in the wake of World War 1.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14785
 Joan Templeton

Shaw’s Ibsen
A Re-Appraisal
Joan Templeton
New York, NY, USA

Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

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 For Eric Bentley,
The Mentor of Us All
 Preface

The Quintessence of Ibsenism is perhaps the most famous book ever

­written by one author about another. Published in 1891 and revised and
enlarged in 1913, it has been reprinted over and over and is regarded as
a classic. But the book’s value is usually considered to lie less in what it
reveals about its subject—Henrik Ibsen—than about its author—Bernard
Shaw. For many readers, this is not much of a detriment. Shaw’s latest
British biographer, Michael Holroyd, finds that the joy of reading the
Quintessence “is that of feeling Shaw’s agile and ingenious mind working
with such vitality on material so sympathetic to him.” Although Shaw’s
conversion of Ibsen “into a wholesale warrior does involve distortions
to some of the plays,” Holroyd notes, Shaw’s purpose, after all, was to
present his own “credentials as a man who was carrying on Ibsen’s busi-
ness of ‘changing the mind of Europe’” (H 1:199). The Quintessence is
­considered to be the most important of Shaw’s nondramatic works for
explaining his view of the world and a “blueprint,” in Christopher Innes’s
term, for understanding his plays.1 In a recent statement on the book’s
usefulness, Matthew Yde notes that the Quintessence “has usually been
understood as a good indicator of Shaw’s own thinking, rather than a reli-
able guide to understanding Ibsen’s dramaturgical strategy and philoso-
phy of life; the quintessence of Shavianism rather than the quintessence
of Ibsenism.”2 Eric Bentley was blunter; although he appreciated Shaw’s
understanding of Ibsen, nevertheless, in his classic Bernard Shaw (1947),
he directed readers of the Quintessence to substitute the word “Shaw”
for the word “Ibsen” throughout.3 Blunter still was Charles Carpenter,

vii
viii Preface

over twenty years later, who noted: “Despite its subject (and its value as
an analysis of Ibsen), the book is still an uncamouflaged piece of Shavian
propaganda.”4
A considerably more critical view of Quintessence is that whatever it
tells us about Shaw, it is a seriously misleading book about Ibsen. Shortly
after Shaw read a first version—a lecture to the Fabian Society—in
1890, he was accused of transforming Ibsen into a socialist like himself.
This false charge, which still lingers, is the crudest version of the popu-
lar notion that Shaw wrongly regarded Ibsen as a reformer rather than
an artist. A month after the Quintessence appeared, Shaw’s great friend
William Archer, Ibsen’s devoted champion in England, published what
was essentially a review of the book, “The Quintessence of Ibsenism: An
Open Letter to George Bernard Shaw.” In it, he noted that Shaw’s argu-
ment would “strengthen the predisposition . . . to regard Ibsen, not
as a poet, but as the showman of a moral wax-work.” He noted, how-
ever, that this “cannot be helped” because “it is a drawback inseparable
from expository criticism” (A 31). By 1905, fourteen years later, Ibsen,
now established as a great dramatist, had been the subject of a number
of books in several languages that heralded his plays as arguments for
women’s rights and other causes. Greatly irritated, Archer took it upon
himself to respond in a lengthy essay, “Henrik Ibsen: Philosopher or
Poet?,” in which he vehemently denounced the irksome critics who read
Ibsen as “primarily a thinker, and only in the second place a poet”; he
briefly named “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant little study, The Quintessence
of Ibsenism” as “the type of this method of criticism” (A 81). Other
­critics, who found the Quintessence less than “brilliant,” blamed Shaw
outright for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of social protest. In the same
year as Archer’s essay, 1905, the American critic James Huneker pub-
lished his landmark survey of early modern drama, Iconoclasts: A Book
of Dramatists, in which he claimed that in the Quintessence, Shaw had
transformed Ibsen into “a magnified image” of himself, “dropping ideas
from on high with Olympian indifference,” with the result that “we
are never shown Ibsen the artist, but always the social reformer with an
awful frown.”5
As Shaw became famous as a dramatist in the first decade of the
­twentieth century, his plays influenced his reputation as a critic, and he
was accused of being a didactic writer incapable of understanding the art-
ist Ibsen, and even, in one well-known instance, of having been Ibsen’s
“butcher.”6 By the 1930s, George Orwell could remark in passing in a
 Preface ix

letter to a friend that Shaw “had slandered Ibsen in a way that must make
poor old I[bsen] turn in his grave” (W 3), and Edmund Wilson, in The
Triple Thinkers (1938), declared that Shaw, in turning Ibsen into a social
reformer, creates “a false impression” and “seriously misrepresents him.”7
In the 1940s and 1950s, Shaw became a whipping boy of the New
Critics as a foremost example of the unpoetic soul. The movement’s
most famous arbiter of taste, T. S. Eliot, famously and somewhat nastily
attacked Shaw in his imaginary conversation, “A Dialogue on Dramatic
Poetry,” in which “B,” one of the participants, explains that “Shaw
was a poet—until he was born, and the poet in Shaw was stillborn.
Shaw has a great deal of poetry but all stillborn; Shaw is dramatically pre-
cocious and poetically less than immature.”8 Following Eliot, Raymond
Williams took on the task of saving Ibsen from the officially unpoetic
Shaw in his influential Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1953). Explaining
that his book is intended to be literary criticism in the manner of “Mr.
Eliot,” Williams offers a “revaluation of Ibsen.”9 He seems almost to be
holding his nose as he regrets that Ibsen’s mode was realism, “a tradition
which was acutely inimical to art”; in spite of this impediment, however,
Ibsen somehow managed to achieve “work as valid and as permanent as
our century has” (97). But because of the pernicious influence of The
Quintessence of Ibsenism, which “has to do with Ibsen only in the sense
that it seriously misrepresents him” (138), Ibsen has been mistaken for
sixty years as a writer who focused on moral issues that were incidental
to his art. For having committed this blunder, Williams believes, Shaw
and the other “Ibsenites” deserve to be blamed as “the disintegrators
of Ibsen” (43). Williams is especially indignant at what he claims is the
Ibsenites’ dismissal of Ibsen’s last four plays, and he cites as proof the
subtitle of Shaw’s essay on them in the Quintessence: “‘Down among the
Dead Men,’ said Shaw, and Down, Down, Down was the estimate of the
last plays as they appeared” (86). But while some of the Ibsenites were
puzzled by the late plays, others praised them, most especially Shaw him-
self, whose “Down Among the Dead Men” is among the most laudatory
of all his writings on Ibsen. Here, Shaw writes, Ibsen passes “into the
shadow of death, or rather into the splendor of his sunset glory; for his
magic is extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more
powerful” (Q2 136). Clearly, Williams did not bother to read past the
subtitle of the essay he was denigrating.
Seven years later, in 1960, James Walter McFarlane, editor of The
Oxford Ibsen, the standard scholarly edition of Ibsen’s works in English,
x Preface

reiterated Williams’s general gripe against Shaw as a reader of Ibsen,

although in a politer tone. McFarlane scolded Shaw for having claimed
that Ibsen’s plays are “first and foremost the embodiment of a lesson,
illustrations of a thesis, exercises in moral persuasion.” To “ask for the
quintessence of Ibsenism” is specious because it is “to formulate a wholly
misleading question; there is nothing to be got by boiling down, there is
no extract of wisdom that would allow us to regard [Ibsen’s] drama as a
linctus for the ills of mankind.”10
Three years after this, the American drama scholar Maurice Valency,
in his survey of modern drama, The Flower and the Castle (1963),
blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s “reputation as primarily a social dramatist”
and claimed that “a brilliant rhetorician and a wit” like Shaw could not
understand Ibsen, “an artist.”11 Another well-known American writer on
the modern theater, Robert Brustein, in The Theatre of Revolt (1964),
takes the same viewpoint: “The Ibsen who tried so hard to disassociate
himself from any consistent position would not have recognized himself
in the ‘social pioneer’ of The Quintessence, whose ‘gospel’ is designed to
save the human race.”12
Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen, appearing from 1967 to 1971,
consolidated the anti-Shaw tradition. Castigating Shaw several times
over, Meyer dismissed the Quintessence as “one of the most misleading
books about a great writer that can ever have been written. Had it been
entitled Ibsen Considered as a Socialist, or The Quintessence of Shavianism,
one would have no quarrel with it” (M 636). Like Archer, Huneker,
McFarlane, Williams, Wilson, and Valency, Meyer blamed Shaw for
Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of thesis plays, complaining that Shaw was
responsible for the notion that A Doll’s House was “a play about the
hoary problem of women’s rights” (M 457). In 1972, Michael Egan,
editor of Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, followed Meyer, noting that in
the Quintessence, “the definition of Ibsenism implicitly offered (a literary
campaign for moral reform through the exposure of middle-class hypoc-
risy) was the quintessence of Shavianism. It tells us more about Shaw and
the way he used and misunderstood Ibsen than it tells us about the com-
plexities of, say, Hedda Gabler or Little Eyolf.”13
By 1975, the notion of Shaw’s distortion of Ibsen was so widely
accepted that Daniel Dervin could write: “As we know [my italics], after
a certain point when Shaw scrutinized Ibsen, he began to see what
Narcissus saw in the pool.”14 For Dervin, Shaw’s own plays are enough
to condemn him as a bad reader of Ibsen: the famous confrontation
 Preface xi

scene between wife and husband in the third act of A Doll’s House “is
not intended to provoke thought and reform by educating the audience
to social realities as Shaw’s plays increasingly attempt to do” (185). Ten
years later, in 1985, in Ibsen and Shaw, Keith May claimed that Shaw
was wrong about Ibsen because his own optimism prevented him from
understanding that Ibsen, who believed in “timeless human weakness,”
was a skeptic: “All that mattered fundamentally to Ibsen was the noble
spirit which flickered here and there in every generation.”15
The notion that Shaw’s “Ibsenism” is merely “Shavianism” in disguise
is curiously ahistorical. In 1891, when he wrote the Quintessence, Shaw
had not yet found his way as a writer. He had been an art critic and a
music critic and had written five unknown novels. If this work were all he
produced in his lifetime, he would deserve some notice in the history of
English criticism for his brilliant writing on music, but what we know as
“Shavianism” would not exist. The Shaw of 1891, even with all his bril-
liance, could hardly set out to make Ibsen’s works contain the quintes-
sence of a way of thinking embodied in an oeuvre as yet unwritten.
A second troubling aspect of the argument against Shaw is the notion
that because he reads Ibsen as an anti-idealist like himself, he is ipso facto
wrong. Apart from the odd implication that all writers possess a sensibil-
ity that is wholly sui generis—which denies the notion of influence, let
alone movements, like Realism, or Symbolism—the assumption is that
Ibsen did not share Shaw’s anti-idealism. No critic has felt it necessary
to offer any biographical or textual support for this position, which is
presented as self-evident, but the critical logic is clear: Moral and social
questions are not concerns of art; Ibsen’s work is art; therefore, Ibsen’s
work is not concerned with moral and social issues.
My aim in this book is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that
the Quintessence is not about its subject, but its author, and that Shaw
misunderstood Ibsen and misread his works. The notion that Shaw
attempted to turn Ibsen into a socialist is surely one of the most egre-
gious errors in the literary criticism of the twentieth century, and I have
tried to establish the record of inattention, flawed scholarship, and bias
that resulted in this widespread misconception. I have also tested Shaw’s
claim that Ibsen was an anti-idealist against Ibsen’s own idea of himself
as a writer, expressed over many years in speeches and in letters, the most
important of which were written to his friend and fellow fighter for mod-
ernism, the great Danish critic Georg Brandes. I aim to show that writers
who are determined to save Ibsen the poet from the taint of social and
xii Preface

cultural history ignore Ibsen’s own interests and concerns, as well as his
strong conviction that his work was a “calling” through which he could
speak truth to lies.
But, as Inga-Stina Ewbank has written of Ibsen in another context,
“the proof of the pudding is in the eating,”16 i.e., in the text itself, and
my main subject is Shaw’s analyses of Ibsen’s plays. The Quintessence is
the first book on Ibsen in English, and of all the early books on Ibsen,
both inside and outside of Norway, it is the most ambitious, examining
Ibsen’s dramas both as an oeuvre—a collected body of works—and as
individual plays. I consider Shaw’s readings both in the context of what
his contemporaries wrote about Ibsen, in England and elsewhere, and on
their own terms. Shaw as an actual reader of Ibsen has been buried under
the idea of a Shaw who saw Ibsen as a social critic and a lecturer on mor-
als. I present the “other Shaw” of the Quintessence, the Shaw who had so
thoroughly absorbed Ibsen’s plays that they were as much a part of his
mental and spiritual universe as were the works of Shakespeare, Dickens,
Bunyan, and the King James Bible. Shaw’s great quarrel with the nine-
teenth-century theater—in his journalism, in the Quintessence, and in his
columns as drama critic for the Saturday Review—was that it was irrel-
evant to actual life. For Shaw, one of the chief glories of Ibsen’s “new
drama” was its scrupulously detailed characters: living, breathing people
who were the opposite of the stock characters of the contemporary stage.
Shaw was one of the first writers on Ibsen to offer detailed analyses of his
characters, including astute psychological studies of Nora Helmer of A
Doll’s House, Mrs. Alving of Ghosts, Rebecca West and John Rosmer of
Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, Halvard Solness of The Master Builder, and
Rita and Alfred Allmers of Little Eyolf. I want to show that Shaw read
Ibsen’s plays not from the outside in, but vice versa, and read him per-
ceptively and often brilliantly. The number of Shaw’s observations and
analyses about Ibsen’s plays that have become standard, though unac-
knowledged, in the literature on Ibsen, is an interesting phenomenon.
Equally interesting is that many of Shaw’s harshest critics echo his analy-
ses in their own readings of Ibsen’s plays.
Another goal, both historical and biographical, has been to trace
Shaw’s personal response to Ibsen from his lukewarm initial opinion to
his epiphanic reading of Peer Gynt, with William Archer, to his awaken-
ing, through A Doll’s House, to a new, modern drama that he himself
would help to create. I have tried to shed light on Shaw’s and Archer’s
deep friendship, their shared love of Ibsen, and their agreements and
 Preface xiii

disagreements regarding both his work and the “new drama” in general.
I have also tried to establish a record of Shaw’s participation in the Ibsen
campaign in London. While Michael Holroyd repeats the popular notion
that when Shaw joined the campaign, he assumed its “generalship”
(H 200), Michael Egan, editor of a 500-page anthology of pieces from
Ibsen’s early English reception, claims that Shaw was “far less important
than Archer, [Edmund] Gosse, or even Philip Wicksteed” [an economist
who was one of the first English writers on Ibsen]” (Ibsen: The Critical
Heritage, 21). Using Shaw’s diaries and letters, as well as the letters of
his friends and fellow “Ibsenites,” along with other records, I have tried
to clarify Shaw’s important role in the campaign, not as its “general”—
Archer has the right to that title—but as a journalist and drama critic
who used his columns as a bully pulpit for Ibsen, and as a man of the
theatre who tirelessly gave his support—and his criticisms—to the val-
iant men and women who introduced Ibsen to the English stage, the
most important of whom were producer J. T. Grein of the Independent
Theatre, actor-managers Charles Charrington, Elizabeth Robins, and
Florence Farr, and actress Janet Achurch.
The discussion of Shaw as a reader of Ibsen has been dominated by
the Quintessence. But Shaw is the author of other significant work on
Ibsen that merits attention, including his exuberant reporting on early
Doll’s House performances and his vehement defense of the play against
its English abusers. Among his most interesting and lively commentar-
ies on Ibsen’s plays are those in his Saturday Review columns, collected
in Our Theatres in the Nineties, a neglected body of work that is among
the best dramatic criticism in English (and hands down the wittiest). It
is hugely entertaining to follow Shaw through three and a half years of
a personal campaign in which Ibsen serves as a battering ram to attack
the “claptrap” and the “twaddle” of the London theatre, including the
stagey spectacles of Shaw’s favorite target Henry Irving. Among Shaw’s
columns are also reviews of eight productions of Ibsen’s plays that are
historical and critical gems, among which are his delightful account of
the landmark 1896 French premiere of Peer Gynt, directed by Lugné-
Poë, his skewering of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the Independent
Theatre’s calamitous 1896 production of Little Eyolf, and, in a column
of 1897, his brilliant juxtaposition of the Independent Theatre’s revival
of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
While it has been widely recognized that the dramaturgy, i.e., the
play-making, of Shaw and Ibsen is very different, it is the custom to
xiv Preface

consider Shaw’s first dramas, written in the 1890s, during the Ibsen cam-
paign, as his “Ibsenite” plays. It has been fascinating to try to identify
influence and affinity—or lack of them—in the themes and the drama-
turgy of Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Candida—the
Shaw play most associated with Ibsen—and to elucidate a drama long
deemed a puzzle, the “topical comedy” The Philanderer, Shaw’s only
direct dramatization of “Ibsenism.”
Throughout my study, I have tried to engage Shaw critically. Famous
for taking up the roles of devil’s advocate and agent provocateur, Shaw
habitually used his analytical genius in the service of polemics, and he
does not hesitate to exaggerate to bolster his positions. This is especially
marked in his arguments against Shakespeare worship, or “Bardolatry,”
as he called it, in which he habitually holds Ibsen up as a writer superior
to Shakespeare. It has been a very interesting task to examine these argu-
ments, warts and all.
Finally, a note on method: In 1913, in the second edition of the
Quintessence, Shaw’s additions and revisions were incorporated into the
original book of 1891, as though they had been there all along, and it
is this combined version that constitutes the text as we know it. But the
Shaw of 1913 was no longer the Shaw of 1891. I have studied the two
texts separately in order to establish the critical record, and, more impor-
tantly, to show how Shaw’s revisions and additions, including three new
chapters, reveal his deepened vision both of Ibsen’s dramas and Ibsen’s
revolutionary transformation of the theater.

New York, USA Joan Templeton

Notes
1. “‘Nothing but talk, talk, talk—Shaw talk’: Discussion Plays and the
Making of Modern Drama,” The Cambridge Companion to George
Bernard Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 163.
2. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 26.
3. Bernard Shaw (1947; New York: Applause Books, 2002), 139.
4. Bernard Shaw and the Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 9.
5. (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 243.
6. Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in Drama and Art (London: Frank
Palmer, 1912), 36–37.
 Preface xv

7. (New York: Farrar-Straus, 1977), 185.

8. Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 38.
9. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 95.
10. “Ibsen and Ibsenism,” from Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian
Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), reprinted in James
McFarlane, Ibsen and Meaning: Studies, Essays, and Prefaces 1953–1987
(Norwich: Norvik Press, 1989), 61.
11. (New York: Schocken, 1963), 386.
12. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 187.
13. (London: Routledge, 1972), 21.
14. Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study (Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press, 1975), 184.
15. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 120, 123. May’s book of ninety-
eight pages on Ibsen and a hundred and eight pages on Shaw is not the
comparative study its title suggests. May repeats the conventional contrast
between Ibsen the poet and Shaw the moralist, but after arguing that
Shaw misunderstood Ibsen, he offers a “reminder” that “Shaw’s analy-
sis of Ibsen’s plays was far ahead of his contemporaries, including the
shrewdly appreciative William Archer” (124).
16. “Ibsen on the English Stage: ‘The Proof of the Pudding is in the
Eating,’” Ibsen and the Theatre: The Dramatist in Production, ed. Errol
Durbach (London: New York University Press, 1980), 27–48.
 Acknowledgements

The greatest joy of finishing a book lies in thanking those who have con-
tributed to it, and it is with immense pleasure that I express my gratitude
to five Shaw scholars and friends who have made this book far better
than it would otherwise be. Richard F. Dietrich urged me long ago to
take up the subject of Shaw and Ibsen, and when I finally had time to do
it, he gave me great help along the way. Thank you, Dick, for encour-
aging me to plunge into the fascinating waters of the world of GBS; it
has been a splendid swim. I also express my deep gratitude to Martin
Meisel, who was kind enough to offer to read my manuscript and who
did so painstakingly, offering helpful emendations and suggestions, and,
most of all, saving me from errors. A thousand thanks to you, Martin. To
Michel Pharand goes my heartfelt appreciation for two different kinds of
services: his fine copy-editing skills and his support and encouragement
during a trying time. Merci infiniment. I am also very happy to thank
Ellen Dolgin for many conversations about Shaw and his plays that were
immensely helpful to me in clarifying my ideas (and a lot of fun, besides).
Finally, I express my gratitude to my editor, Peter Gahan, for his enthu-
siasm, his corrections, his excellent suggestions about organization, and
his help with the cover.
I would also like to thank my Palgrave Editor, Tomas René, and
Palgrave Assistant Editor Vicky Bates, for their enthusiastic support and
help. It was a pleasure to work with them.
My thanks go also to Michael O’Hara, President of the International
Shaw Society, and his organizing committee for the 2015 Shaw

xvii
xviii Acknowledgements

conference at Fordham University, Manhattan, and to Frode Helland,

Director of the Ibsen Center, University of Oslo, for inviting me to speak
on occasions at which I could test my argument of Shaw as a reader of
Ibsen before knowledgeable audiences. The responses I received from
both groups were immensely important to me.
Once again, I have the pleasure of acknowledging the singular impor-
tance of my “home away from home,” the New York Public Library at
42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where I did much of the work on this
book in the quiet confines of the Wertheim Room; I thank Jay Barksdale,
librarian extraordinaire, for his help. I would also like to thank the librar-
ians of the National Library, Oslo, and the British Library, London.
For help with photographs, I am grateful to Patricia Perez of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Susannah Mayor of Smallhythe
Place, the Ellen Terry Museum; the curators of the Fales Library
archives, New York University; and the rights and images departments of
the Senate House Library, University of London, the National Trust of
Great Britain, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.
I would like to signal my great debt to four exemplary collections
that were essential to my work: Dan R. Laurence’s Bernard Shaw:
Collected Letters, Stanley Weintraub’s Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, Evert
Sprinchorn’s Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, and Jonathan Wisenthal’s
Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings.
I gratefully acknowledge the Society of Authors on behalf of the
Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from his works.
Lastly, I would like to thank all the members of the International
Shaw Society who welcomed a newcomer and made her feel at home.
 Contents

The Road to the Quintessence 1

1 Becoming an Ibsen Critic: Shaw, Archer,
and the New Drama 1
2 The Fabian Society Lecture: Shaw, Ibsen, and Socialism 38

The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891 53

1 The Framing Chapters: Ibsen’s Modernism 57
2 Ibsen’s Revolutionary Calling 72
3 Reading Ibsen’s Texts: “The Plays”  85
4 The Open Mind of Ibsenism: “The Moral of the Plays” 131
5 Ibsen and the English Theatre: “The Appendix” 136

The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898 151

1 The Dramatist: Widowers’ Houses to Candida151
2 The Dramatic Critic: Our Theatres in the Nineties 184

The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed

to the Death of Ibsen, 1913 253
1 Shaw’s Obituary of Ibsen 253
2 An Old and a New Ibsen 261
3 “The Last Four Plays: Down Among the Dead Men” 271

xix
xx Contents

4 A Modernist Manifesto: “What is the

New Element in the Norwegian School?” 291
5 The Playwright as Thinker: “The Technical
Novelty in Ibsen’s Plays” 299
6 Then and Now: 1891 and 1913 308
7 Postscript: “Needed: An Ibsen Theatre” 309
8 The Last Envoy: “Preface to the Third Edition,” 1922 311

Works Cited 321

Index 329
 Abbreviations

A  William Archer on Ibsen. The Major Essays, 1889–1919. Ed. Thomas

Postlewait. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984.
CA Charles Archer. William Archer. Life—Work—and Friendships. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1931.
CL  Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874–1897; 1898–1910. Ed. Dan
H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985, 1988.
D  Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, 1885–1897. 2 vols. Ed. Stanley Weintraub.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.
H Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw. 3 vols. New York: Random House,
1988, 1989, 1991.
I  Henrik Ibsen. Samlede Verker [Collected Works]. 3 vols. Oslo:
Gyldendal, 1978.
LS  Ibsen. Letters and Speeches. Ed. and trans. Evert Sprinchorn. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1964.
M Michael Meyer. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.
OTN Bernard Shaw. Our Theatres in the Nineties. 3 vols. London: Constable,
1932.
P Margot Peters. Bernard Shaw and the Actresses. Garden City: Doubleday,
1980.
P Bernard Shaw: Prefaces. London: Constable, 1934.
Q G. Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Walter Scott, 1891.
Q2 Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism Now Completed to the Death
of Ibsen. New York: Brentano’s, 1913.
W  Shaw and Ibsen. Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and
Related Writings. Ed. J. L. Wisenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1979.

xxi
 List of Figures

The Road to the Quintessence

Fig. 1 George Bernard Shaw at 35. 1891. The National Portrait Gallery,
London 8
Fig. 2 William Archer at 35. 1891. The Elizabeth Robins Papers.
Fales Library, New York University 9
Fig. 3 Theatre Program. A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre,
London. 1889. Author’s personal collection 14
Fig. 4 Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer and Charles Charrington as
Doctor Rank in A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London.
June, 1889. Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London 15
Fig. 5 Florence Farr. 1890. The Senate House Library,
University of London 29
Fig. 6 Elizabeth Robins as Hedda Gabler. London, 1891. The Elizabeth
Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 34

The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891

Fig. 1 Title page of the first edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. 1891.
Author’s personal collection 56
Fig. 2 William. T. Stead. Ca. 1910. The W. T. Stead Resource Site.
http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk 64
Fig. 3 Marie Bashkirtseff. Self-Portrait with Palette. 1883.
Oil on canvas. 92 × 72 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice 65

xxiii
xxiv List of Figures

Fig. 4 Henrik Ibsen at the age of 35. 1863.

Author’s personal collection 73
Fig. 5 Georg Brandes. 1870s. Frontispiece. Georg Brandes,
Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Trans.
Rasmus Anderson. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1886 79

The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898

Fig. 1 Elizabeth Robins. Early 1890s. The Elizabeth Robins Papers.
Fales Library, New York University 162
Fig. 2 Janet Achurch. Early 1890s. Enthoven Collection,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London 171
Fig. 3 Henry Irving. Late 1880s. Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo 197
Fig. 4 Ellen Terry. Ca. 1890. The National Trust, Great Britain 201
Fig. 5 Edvard Munch. Theatre Program for Peer Gynt. Théâtre de
l’Oeuvre, Paris. 1896. Lithographic crayon on paper.
250 × 298 mm. The Munch Museum, Oslo 216

The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death

of Ibsen, 1913
Fig. 1 Bernard Shaw. 1913-14. George Grantham Bain Collection,
Library of Congress, Washington, D. C 262
 Author’s Note

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations, including those from Ibsen’s

Collected Works, are mine. In quoting from Shaw, I have left his spelling
and punctuation intact, except for silent corrections of very rare misspell-
ings of Norwegian names and occasional additions of commas in brack-
ets; to avoid confusion, I have also italicized the titles of works.

xxv
 The Road to the Quintessence

1  Becoming an Ibsen Critic: Shaw, Archer,

and the New Drama

It is sixty years since Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House,

and fifty since it reached England. Few people now

alive can remember, as I do, the force of its impact.

. . . We had to revalue all our values; and it is this

revaluation that gives Ibsen his supreme rank as a

playwright who changed the mind of Europe. (Shaw,

Nordisk Tidene [The Nordic Times], Brooklyn, June 2, 1938)

By the mid-1880s, when news of Ibsen’s dramas began to reach progressive

circles in London, Shaw had written five ignored novels and was pursuing a
thwarted career as a journalist. He was also following an assiduous program of
self-education—in political theory, economic theory, literature, art, music—
in the Reading Room of the British Museum. An active member of a host of
organizations, both political and cultural, he was a deeply committed socialist
and Fabian Society member who worked hard for the cause, speaking whenever
and wherever he was needed.
Ibsen was very much in the air in the leftist circles Shaw moved in.
In 1884, Henrietta Frances Lord’s translation of Ghosts appeared in the

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7_1
2 J. Templeton

socialist magazine To-Day, along with the first installment of a good-

natured debate on Marxist value theory between Shaw and Philip
Wicksteed, a noted economist who was on his way to becoming one of
England’s first writers on Ibsen. Wicksteed and Shaw, fellow members of
the English Land Restoration League, an organization devoted to promot-
ing the ideas of the political economist Henry George, were friends and
frequent companions. Shaw called Wicksteed his “master in economics”1
and was an active member of his prestigious “Economic Circle,” a club
which met twice a month to discuss economic reform. Shaw undoubtedly
knew about the futile attempts of Wicksteed, a popular lecturer, to speak
on Ibsen, whose reputation was so pernicious that even Wicksteed’s own
alma mater, University College, London, refused him their premises.
Shaw was also friends with another Ibsen admirer, Eleanor Marx, Karl
Marx’s daughter, who was the first translator in English of two of Ibsen’s
plays, An Enemy of the People (her title was An Enemy of Society) and
The Lady from the Sea. In 1886, Shaw participated in her Bloomsbury
lodgings in a private reading of Nora, the first full English translation,
by Henrietta Frances Lord, of the play now known as A Doll’s House.2
Eleanor Marx read the role of Nora, her common-law husband Edward
Aveling, the role of Helmer, and Shaw, the role of Krogstad. Afterwards,
Shaw took pains to establish his indifference to this event, noting that
he participated only to please Eleanor Marx and had “a very vague
notion of what it was all about.” What he mostly remembered was eat-
ing caramels back stage. His own radicalism had made him, in his word,
“immune” to “the shock of Ibsen’s advent,” which “did not exist for
me, nor indeed for anyone who was not living in the Victorian fools’ par-
adise. All the institutions and superstitions and rascalities [sic] that Ibsen
had attacked had lost their hold on me.”3
Shaw also liked to point out that he had been working along the same
lines as Ibsen before he heard of him. In 1905, when Shaw’s dramas had
begun to arouse interest in his novels, The Irrational Knot, his second
novel (1880), which had appeared serially, was published as a book; in
the “Preface,” Shaw claimed that the novel shared a great affinity with A
Doll’s House. When he was introduced to Ibsen’s play at Eleanor Marx’s
reading, he wrote, “its novelty as a morally original study of a marriage
did not stagger me as it staggered Europe. I had made a morally original
study of a marriage myself, and made it, too, without any melodramatic
forgeries, spinal diseases, and suicides” (P 657). Emphasizing his “final
chapter, so close to Ibsen,” Shaw declared: “I seriously suggest that The
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 3

Irrational Knot may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the

Life Force to write A Doll’s House in English by the instrumentality of a
very immature writer aged twenty-four.”
The Irrational Knot focuses on a misalliance between Marian Lind, a
beautiful, intelligent, and sensible upper-class lady, and Edward Conolly,
a self-made, American electrical engineer grown rich through a mechani-
cal invention. He seems efficient at everything, including playing Bach’s
fugues for organ; Marian’s best friend calls him “a cast-iron walking
machine.”4 Marian admires him greatly and marries him in spite of her
father’s horror at his working-class origins. Intellectually, Conolly is a
staunch anti-Victorian, but in his marriage, he falls short; the unhappy
Marian complains to her friend: “A courtier, a lover, a man who will not let
the winds of heaven visit your face too harshly, is very nice, no doubt; but
he is not a husband. I want to be a wife and not a fragile ornament kept
in a glass case. He would as soon think of submitting any project of his to
a judgment of a doll as to mine” (254). Marian runs away from Conolly
with an old suitor who swears adoration but turns out to be a spoiled bore
who loves only himself. They separate, after which she finds herself preg-
nant. In the end, her stalwart husband crosses the ocean to New York
to rescue her, but she refuses to go back to him. She would shame him,
she argues, and she finds him “too wise” (421). Although Marian, unlike
Ibsen’s intrepid Nora, undergoes no epiphany of the self, as a pregnant
“fallen woman” who chooses disgrace over security, she is Nora’s partner
in courage. The imperturbable Conolly insists that he would raise her child
as if it were his own, but he is so coolly imperious that Marian’s refusal
to remain his wife seems, in spite of her circumstances, understandable;
although Shaw called the anti-Victorian Conolly the “Nora” of his novel,
he also wrote that “long before I got to the writing of the last chapter I
could hardly stand him myself.”5 The novel trails off, open-ended, with the
exit of Conolly, who gets the last word: “It is impossible to be too wise,
dearest” (422). Shaw had written himself into an impasse in a genre that
was uncongenial to him, but the “very immature writer” he called himself
had indeed, like Ibsen, written “a morally original study of a marriage.”

“The Magic of the Great Poet”: William Archer and Peer Gynt
In 1888, about two years after he read the role of Krogstad, Shaw was
re-introduced to Ibsen in an entirely different way, with consequences
so important that he would write, forty-three years after the fact, in a
4 J. Templeton

slip, that he had first “heard of Ibsen from William Archer” (“An Aside,”
2). A polyglot journalist and critic who would become one of the clos-
est friends of Shaw’s life, Archer began his career at the London Figaro,
making trips to Paris to cover the Comédie Française. He then wrote for
a variety of newspapers, including the World, the Nation, the Tribune,
and the Manchester Guardian. Whenever he could find the time, he
worked on his own project of translating Ibsen’s plays into English. He
had been devoted to Ibsen since adolescence, encountering his works on
visits to the branch of the Archer clan that lived in Norway, where he
learned to speak Norwegian. In love with the theatre since childhood, on
his sixteenth birthday he wrote to a friend from Copenhagen that he had
seen eight performances in the nine days he had been there, mostly at
the “house of Holberg,” the Royal Theatre (where the fledgling dram-
atist Ibsen had gone on a study trip). He also mentioned that he was
looking forward to the next night’s performance in Hamburg (CA 37).
In December of 1881, in Rome, the twenty-five-year-old Archer
met the fifty-three-year-old Ibsen. Archer’s friends teased him that he
had gone to Italy precisely toward that end, and not as a much needed
holiday from a work schedule that had exhausted him. The verse dra-
mas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) had made Ibsen famous in
Scandinavia; now, thanks to the prose dramas Pillars of Society (1877)
and, especially, A Doll’s House (1879), he was famous in Europe. Archer
described his first meeting with Ibsen in a letter to his brother, future
biographer, and sometime co-translator of Ibsen, Charles Archer: he
had bravely asked to be introduced to “the great Henrik” one evening
in Rome’s Scandinavian Club, presenting himself as the English transla-
tor of Pillars of Society, the only Ibsen play to have been performed in
England thus far (in a single, mostly unremarked matinee in London
the preceding year). Archer undoubtedly did not tell Ibsen that he had
agreed to abridge the text for actor-manager W. H. Vernon and had
added an enticing title: Quicksands; or The Pillars of Society. Archer
reports to his brother with great satisfaction that his and Ibsen’s conver-
sation was convivial and that Ibsen invited him to call (CA 101-02).
Ibsen liked the deferential and erudite Archer, and by the end of
Archer’s Roman holiday, they had become friends. Over the years,
Archer would pay Ibsen occasional visits, and their correspondence
lasted until Ibsen’s final illness almost twenty years later. An indefatigable
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 5

champion of Ibsen for four decades, Archer was the leader of the English
Ibsen campaign and the first major translator of Ibsen’s plays into
English. Correcting the proofs of the five volumes of Ibsen’s Prose
Dramas, brought out by Walter Scott in 1890-91, Archer wrote to his
brother, making, as was his habit, a literary allusion, that they were “on
the whole the most satisfactory job of my life, even with all their imper-
fections on their heads” (CA 186). Later, Archer would provide most of
the translations for the first English edition of Ibsen’s complete works,
The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, brought out by William Heinemann
in eleven volumes (1906-08). Besides his reverence for Ibsen as a writer,
Archer was fond of him personally, and called him, affectionately (and
privately), in a Scots accent, “the old min.”
In 1883, Archer went to Christiania (later Oslo), where he saw A
Doll’s House, returning night after night to marvel at the last scene, the
confrontation between wife and husband. He also saw the Norwegian
premiere of the even more scandalous Ghosts, the great Swedish actor-
manager August Lindberg’s landmark production in which Lindberg
played the syphilitic Oswald. Both productions confirmed Archer’s con-
viction that the strict censorship exercised by the Lord Chamberlain’s
Office would make performance of both plays impossible in England.
The next London season saw a performance meant to make Ibsen
acceptable to the British playgoer. The young playwright Henry Arthur
Jones, fresh from his first success, the melodrama The Silver King
(1882), was asked by a West End manager to produce a “sympathetic”
Nora, and, with the help of his collaborator Henry Herman, Jones trans-
formed Ibsen’s disturbing play into the innocuous Breaking A Butterfly.
Harley Granville Barker, the actor, director, critic, and playwright who
would become Shaw’s beloved friend and important collaborator at the
Royal Court Theatre, called the adaptation a “perversion” and gave the
following account of it in his delightful essay, “The Coming of Ibsen”:

Nora becomes Flora, and, to her husband, rather terribly,

Flossie. . . . The morbid Dr. Rank is replaced by Charles

his-friend, called, as if to wipe out every trace of his original,

Ben Birdseye! He is not in love with Nora, of course; that

6 J. Templeton

would never do. . . . [T]he tarantella is left intact, of course.

But the third act sees the parent play stood deliberately on its

head, and every ounce of Ibsen emptied out of it. Burlesque

could do no more. Torvald-Humphrey behaves like the pasteboard

hero of Nora’ doll’s-house dream; he does strike his chest and say:

“I am the guilty one!” And Nora-Flora cries that she is a poor weak

foolish girl, “no wife for a man like you. You are a thousand times

too good for me,” and never wakes up and walks out of her doll’s

house at all.6

In his review of Breaking A Butterfly, in a quip that is often quoted,

Archer noted that the phrase in the playbill “founded on Ibsen’s Nora”
should have read “founded on the ruins of Ibsen’s Nora”; Jones and
Herman had “trivialized” Ibsen’s play. But he also added a caveat to this
judgment, one that has been largely ignored: “I am the last to blame
them for doing so. Ibsen on the English stage is impossible. He must be
trivialized, and I believe that Messrs. Jones and Herman have performed
that office as well as could reasonably be expected.”7 (To his credit,
Jones later apologized for Breaking A Butterfly.)
Shaw and Archer, both born in 1856 (Shaw was two months older),
met during the winter of 1882-83 in the Reading Room of the British
Museum, where both were habitués. Archer’s description of Shaw is now
iconic: “I frequently sat next to a man of about my own age (twenty-
five) [actually, twenty-six] who attracted my attention, partly by his
peculiar colouring—his pallid skin and bright red hair and beard—partly
by the odd combination of authors whom he used to study—for I saw
him, day after day, poring over Karl Marx’s Das Kapital [in French] and
an orchestral score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. How we first made
acquaintance I have forgotten; but one did not need to meet him twice
to be sure that George Bernard Shaw was a personality to be noted and
studied.” He adds: “At any rate, we became fast friends” (CA 119).
Recognizing Shaw’s brilliance and wanting to help him out of his pov-
erty, Archer was of primary importance in Shaw’s belated start as a jour-
nalist. He passed on to him a number of book reviewing assignments,
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 7

and in 1886, the post of art critic for the fashionable World. Archer,
who was the newspaper’s dramatic critic, had been persuaded to add
art reviewing to his task; when, as he later wrote, his “conscience could
endure it no longer” (CA 135), he suggested to Shaw, a self-taught stu-
dent of art history who had spent countless hours in Dublin’s National
Gallery, that he send the editor a writing sample. Shaw was hired on
the spot. A few years later, when the music critic of the World resigned,
Archer once again did Shaw (and the World) another good turn. Shaw
had been steeped in music since his boyhood in Dublin; his mother was
a leading amateur singer, and Shaw learned songs and operas from her
vocal scores, teaching himself to play the piano using the score of Don
Giovanni. In London, where both Shaw’s mother and sister had music
careers, Shaw continued to immerse himself in music at concerts and in
the books and scores of the British Museum library. Archer secured the
job for Shaw, he wrote, by simply telling Edmund Yates, the newspaper’s
editor, “the truth: namely that he was at once the most competent and
the most brilliant writer on music then living in England” (CA 135).
Charles Archer notes that the friendship between his brother and
Shaw was “founded on a common idealism in fundamentals” and that
it stood “the strain of radical difference of temperament and wide diver-
gence of views” (CA 119). Both men held a deep belief in the worth of
the individual, but the gentlemanly Archer, in spite of his strong anti-
clericalism, was conservative in many ways and was far less demand-
ing than Shaw as a critic, appreciating the popular, well-made plays of
Eugène Scribe and his followers and saluting Arthur Wing Pinero as
the regenerator of English drama. Shaw, one of whose pen names was
“N. G.” (No Gentleman), was an ardent socialist with critical views
on virtually everything, including the theatre, which, like Archer, he
had learned to love in his youth. He escaped from a series of dreary
schools in Dublin at the Theatre Royal, whose stock company put on
Shakespeare, farces, intrigue dramas, melodramas, and of course the
Christmas pantomime. There were touring companies as well, which
allowed him to see Henry Irving and the actor he considered the great-
est of all, Barry Sullivan. Shaw, like Archer, loved the theatre and had
very eclectic tastes, but he despised drama that pretended to be better
than it was; he scorned the artificialities of Scribean drama, which he
called “Sardoodledom,” after Victorien Sardou, Scribe’s most popular
follower, and castigated the plays of Pinero as melodrama pretending to
8 J. Templeton

be realism. One cannot imagine Shaw accepting Breaking A Butterfly on

the grounds that travestied Ibsen is better than no Ibsen. On the other
hand, Shaw himself was not immune to overpraise when it concerned
some of the plays of his friend Henry Arthur Jones. In any case, Shaw
and Archer were the best of friends, holding each other in such esteem
that they could agree to disagree, with various degrees of ardor, for
forty-three years, until Archer’s death in 1924.

Fig. 1 George Bernard Shaw at 35. 1891

 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 9

Fig. 2 William Archer at 35. 1891

From the beginning of their friendship, Shaw was, of course, aware

of Archer’s admiration of Ibsen and his translations of Ibsen’s plays. His
own transformative experience with Ibsen began when Archer read aloud
to him from Peer Gynt, translating as he went along, sometime in the late
summer or early autumn of 1888. Shaw would later describe his epiph-
any: “Indeed I concerned myself very little about Ibsen until, later on,
William Archer translated Peer Gynt to me viva voce, when the magic of
the great poet opened my eyes in a flash to the importance of the social
philosopher” (P 657).
10 J. Templeton

Even in another language, without the rhyme and meter of the origi-
nal, Peer Gynt shocked Shaw into an awareness of Ibsen’s power. That it
was the realist-expressionist-phantasmagorical verse drama that drew Shaw
to Ibsen is crucial to understanding Shaw’s notion of Ibsen as a writer.
While biographers and critics would later accuse Shaw of seeing in Ibsen
a mere social (and often socialist) theorist who wrote plays to advance his
ideas, what drew Shaw to Ibsen was “the magic of the great poet.” After
all, as Shaw himself explained: “I was a strong Shelleyan long before I ever
heard of Ibsen from William Archer. And long after Shelley and still yet
longer before Ibsen, came Karl Marx, whose indictment of bourgeois civi-
lization, based wholly on English facts, utterly destroyed its high moral
reputation and started throughout Europe a fire of passionate resolution
to dethrone it . . . compared to which the commotion raised by Ibsen’s
Doll’s House and Ghosts was a storm in a teacup” (“An Aside,” 2-3). Now,
listening to Archer read Peer Gynt, Shaw was no longer “immune” to
Ibsen but exhilarated by him, and not because he had found a congenial
social thinker but because he had discovered a great artist.
Shaw’s diary entry of September 14, 1888, records tersely that Archer
“read Peer Gynt to me” (D 1:412), but the epiphanic reading may have
taken place earlier, for on August 28, Shaw had approached Hans Lien
Brækstad, a bookseller and literary man who served as the Norwegian
vice consul in London, to ask him for help with a highly ambitious pro-
ject: Shaw had decided to translate Peer Gynt. “The idea is,” Shaw wrote
in his diary, “that I should go down to the [Scandinavian] club, and that
he should read out the play to me, giving me the meaning in English,
and that I should put it into shape” (D 1:406). On his own, Shaw began
to learn Ibsen’s language, Riksmaal, sometimes referred to as “Dano-
Norwegian” (which was virtually identical to Danish), making periodic
notes in his diary for September that he worked on “Danish lessons” at
the British Museum, presumably studying grammar books and diction-
aries. During October and November, he recorded six arranged meet-
ings with Brækstad at the Scandinavian Club, one that he “clean forgot”
(D 1:425) and another that was “put off” because of Brækstad’s departure
for Sweden (D 1:438). He duly records on December 4 that he had no
meeting with him. On December 18, he writes,“Brækstad. Put off,” noting
that he “set to work at the Museum transcribing Peer Gynt into longhand”
and then went to Archer’s to borrow his copy of the play to take home,
where “I set to Peer Gynt again, but found it very slow and difficult work”
(D 1:446). The next reference to the project comes six weeks later, on
February 12, 1889, when he notes that he called on Brækstad “to resume
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 11

the translation of Peer Gynt” (D 1:468). A week later, Shaw records that
a meeting with Brækstad “for Peer Gynt” has been “put off” (D 1:470),
and the last entry referring to the project is that of March 25: “Call on
Brækstad at the Scandinavian Club between 17 and 18” (D 1:482).
After six months of very sporadic work, including what seem to have
been seven or eight sessions with his tutor, Shaw abandoned his plan to
translate Peer Gynt; in all likelihood, his enthusiasm had kept him from
realizing the difficulty of the project. And it must have occurred to him
that his friend Archer had a substantial head start as an Ibsen translator.
Still, Shaw’s desire to translate Peer Gynt is a touching proof of his love
of Ibsen’s dramatic poetry.

Championing A Doll’s House

Meanwhile, the campaign for Ibsen was getting underway. Shaw’s friend
Wicksteed’s plan to introduce Ibsen to the general public began to take
shape when he was given permission to hold lectures at the Chelsea
Town Hall in December of 1888, and on January 7, 1889, Shaw records
in his diary that he attended lectures on Peer Gynt by Wicksteed and
Archer in Saint John’s Wood (D 1:456).8 Shaw had now begun to read
Ibsen’s plays in earnest, and in the spring, on a trip to Belgium and
Holland, on April 21, he saw his first Ibsen production, A Doll’s House,
at the Municipal Theatre in Haarlem, which fascinated him and which he
would soon make use of in his first contribution to the Ibsen campaign.
In the spring of 1889, Charles Charrington, a young and courageous
actor-manager, and his equally courageous wife and partner, the actress
Janet Achurch, made the daring decision to produce Nora in London.
To Archer’s great surprise, the Lord Chamberlain’s office did not ban
the play; the censor would later explain that Ibsen’s dramas were so obvi-
ously nonsense that they could do no harm. The production took place
at the aptly named Novelty Theatre, a run-down house that was cheap to
rent. In place of Mrs. Lord’s stilted translation, the Charringtons asked
Archer to provide a more playable script, which he was delighted to do.
Abandoning Mrs. Lord’s title Nora, he brilliantly translated Ibsen’s title Et
Dukkehjem (A Doll Home) into a phrase that was much more metaphori-
cally suggestive in English, A Doll’s House, the British term for the minia-
ture construction. As busy as he was, Archer also found time to help at the
rehearsals; “there are always little things in which I can put them straight,
and I want to give the production as much chance as possible,” he wrote
to his brother (CA 167). Archer’s participation was the first example of
12 J. Templeton

his providing both the script and directorial assistance for performances of
Ibsen’s plays in London. Of the twenty-four productions that took place
between 1889 and 1897, twenty-two used Archer’s translations, and his
work on the productions themselves—supervising rehearsals, giving myr-
iad notes to the actors, and in some cases, directing—was crucial to the
seven most important premieres: A Doll’s House (1889), Rosmersholm
(1891), Ghosts (1891), Hedda Gabler (1891), The Master Builder (1893),
Little Eyolf (1896), and John Gabriel Borkman (1897).9
On June 1, 1899, Shaw began a personal, unflagging nine-year effort
to promote Ibsen on the English stage. His first step was a contribution
to the column “Asides” in the popular Penny Illustrated Paper in which,
under the pen name, “N[o] G[entleman],” he encouraged the public to
see A Doll’s House. Here is the heart of Shaw’s first piece of Ibsen criticism:

The drama takes place in a charming little household,

the home of a rising young man of business . . . who

works hard to get on in the world, and finds relaxation,

recreation, and pure domestic joy in the attachment of his

wife, Nora. Her good looks are so precious to him that he

not only will not let the winds of heaven visit her face too

harshly,10 but he objects to her eating lollipops lest they

should spoil her teeth. An ideal husband, dear reader; a type

of steady, hearth-and-home, healthy, middle-class chivalry.

But what, do you suppose, comes of it all? The young

wife suddenly begins to wake up to the fact that the arrange-

ment narrows her life to a mere functioning as his plaything

and nursery-maid, a view which strikes him as extremely

unladylike, but which he is unable to deny when she makes

him face it fairly. So she, there and then, walks out of the house

which is nothing but his nursery and harem, and vanishes. (W 75)
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 13

Shaw then guesses his readers’ response—“Rather an unsatisfac-

tory ending for a play, you will say”—and counters: “Do not be too
sure of that. I saw it once, in Amsterdam [Haarlem]; and I never saw
a play listened to with closer attention. Even a knot of noisy young
Dutch bloods, who had evidently paid at the doors under a quite mis-
taken notion of the character of the entertainment, got interested, and
eventually quite absorbed. The applause had a specially-earnest tone; and
at the close, the performers were called three times before the curtain”
(W 75-76).
Shaw goes on to ask Charrington to take note that “not a word of the
play was altered except so far as was necessary to turn it from Norwegian
into Dutch; and the final situation was presented exactly as Ibsen con-
trived it” (W 76). He then comments that the play “set women think-
ing hard in Norway, and it will set them thinking equally hard here,
where the break-up of the doll’s house conception of woman’s sphere
has gone further than in Norway.” Shaw’s prophecy would come true
when A Doll’s House became an important text for the English suffrage
movement.
Shaw’s first writing on Ibsen embodies the distinct style and critical
approach that would inform both The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)
and Shaw’s dramatic criticism for the Saturday Review (1895-98). In a
straightforward, conversational, and witty tone, he offers a pithy, ana-
lytical précis of the work in question and judges it on the grounds of
its relation to the actual lives of its audience, a criterion which marks a
new era in English dramatic criticism. Writing in the authoritative voice
of a man who feels compelled to champion the truth, “No Gentleman”
expresses for the first time Shaw’s abiding regard for Ibsen as a dramatist
of modern life.
The English premiere of A Doll’s House, on June 7, 1889, like its
Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and German predecessors, was a succès de
scandale. It intrigued the public and was the talk of the town. Archer
wrote to his brother: “We have fought a good fight for the Old Min, and
have won a really glorious victory. . . . It holds the B. P. [British Public]
like a vice—and what’s more, they pay to see it. . . . Of course, Miss
Achurch has the lioness’s share in the success” (CA 181). Archer sent
Ibsen a copy of a deluxe, limited edition of his translation of A Doll’s
House and suggested that he send an autographed portrait to Achurch,
14 J. Templeton

which he did. He also sent Archer the following message: “I shall always
feel that I owe you a great debt of gratitude for all that you have done,
and are still doing, to introduce my works into England. . . . I keep the
book always lying on my table” (LS 284).

Fig. 3 Theatre Program. A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London.

June, 1889
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 15

Fig. 4 Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer and Charles Charrington as

Doctor Rank in A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London. June, 1889

The Charringtons’ Doll’s House kickstarted both the battle over Ibsen
and the personal anti-Ibsen campaign of the leader of the dramatic estab-
lishment, Clement Scott, the drama critic of the Daily Telegraph (which
had the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the world). In the
1860s, Scott had championed Tom Robertson’s “cup-and-saucer”
16 J. Templeton

plays, dramas of the domestic interior whose dialogue was based on

actual speech and which were known for using real stage properties;
Robertson’s best-known play, Caste, was famous for a scene in which
tea was poured. But Scott was unwilling to go further than Robertson’s
sentimental brand of “realism.” The probable inventor of the derogatory
term “Ibsenite,” which Ibsen’s supporters provocatively embraced, Scott
earned a place in theatrical history as Ibsen’s most important excoriator
in any language. Shaw would later caricature him as the fusty drama critic
of his second play, The Philanderer.
A Doll’s House spurred Scott to attack Ibsen both in the Daily
Telegraph and in other publications where he had influence. In the maga-
zine Truth, he wrote an anonymous attack on Ibsen’s admirers: “a scant
audience of egotists and Positivists assembled to see Ibsen . . . and to
gloat over the Ibsen theory of woman’s degradation and man’s unnatural
supremacy”; in another, signed account, in the magazine Theatre, which
he owned and edited, he lambasted Ibsen’s characters as “a congregation
of men and women without one spark of nobility in their nature, men
without conscience and women without affection, an unlovable, unlovely
and detestable crew” (M 608).
Archer would publish many of Scott’s comments in his famous sur-
vey of the inane reviews published during the first few years of the
Ibsen campaign, “The Mausoleum of Ibsen,” which appeared in the
Fortnightly Review in 1893. The title refers to a review in the Illustrated
Sporting and Dramatic News that had announced the building of a figu-
rative “mausoleum in which the Ibsen craze may be conveniently buried
and consigned to oblivion” (A 35). Among the snippets Archer gleaned
from the press on A Doll’s House are the following: “It would be a mis-
fortune were such a morbid and unwholesome play to gain the favour
of the public” (Standard); “Unnatural, immoral, and, in its conclud-
ing scene, essentially undramatic” (People); Ibsen “is too faddy and too
obstinately unsympathetic to please English playgoers” (Sunday Times)
(A 37).
Even though he refused performance royalties, Archer’s policy was
not to review Ibsen productions that used his translations (a stance
that Shaw found over scrupulous and convinced him to abandon later).
And in the case of A Doll’s House, Archer was so deeply involved in the
production itself that to review it would be to judge his own work. He
sent Shaw in his place to write the review for the Manchester Guardian,
and Shaw went to the newspaper’s London office immediately after
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 17

the performance to write his account. His earlier concern that Ibsen’s
text might not be respected had proved unwarranted, and he begins his
review by setting the record straight: this “is the first time that a play of
Ibsen’s has been presented in an English theatre exactly as the author
wrote it” (W 76). Documenting this declaration, he cites the perfor-
mance history of Ibsen in England: Quicksands, Archer’s abridged adap-
tation of Pillars of Society; Jones’s travesty Breaking A Butterfly; and a
private performance of A Doll’s House in a “literal translation” by ama-
teurs who “can scarcely be said to have acted it” (the reading in Eleanor
Marx’s lodgings in which he had participated). As a champion of Ibsen,
Shaw was particularly interested in how the audience responded:

[T]hroughout the first act the house unsuspiciously

accepted the husband, Helmer (Mr. Herbert Waring),

as a fine, manly fellow. But in the second act, when the

crucial line comes wherein he says to his wife, “Your

father, to say the least, was not unimpeachable, but I am,”

the shock was perceptible, but the situation was seized

with wonderful intelligence by the gallery, who thenceforth

saw plainly that Helmer and not Krogstad (Mr. R[oyce]

Carleton) is the true “villain” of the piece, and when the

same discovery flashes on the wife [i]n the last act they were

in perfect sympathy with the situation and with Miss Achurch

(W 77).

Shaw is lenient with the audience members’ naïve expectations; used to

melodrama, they naturally expected a villain. The good news was that
they were able to identify the right one.
Still, Shaw notes, it was impossible for the audience to understand the
full implications of Nora’s door slam as the result of a “duty to herself
before which all the institutions and prejudices of society must yield”;
the reason is that audiences are “not yet trained” in Schopenhauer’s
theory of the “will to live.” Thus, “when Miss Archurch said, ‘I must, I
18 J. Templeton

must’,” the audience “did not quite see it” (W 77). This is an example of
Shaw’s insistent plugging of Schopenhauer’s notion of the will, or rather
Shaw’s version of that notion, a practice that some people, including
Archer, found tedious, and others, like Shaw’s friend and Fabian com-
panion Sydney Webb, morally confused. Whereas Schopenhauer found
the force of the human will self-serving and ultimately horrifying, Shaw
chose to find it exhilarating; merging the idea of the will with the con-
ception of the soul, he created the notion of a voice within that identifies
individual purpose (the most famous example in his own plays is that of
Saint Joan). In explaining to her husband what she “must” do, Nora is
listening to her own self-will: “I have to stand all alone. That is why I
must leave you” (I 3:111).
In summarizing Nora’s explanations to her husband with “I must, I
must,” Shaw performs a subtle critical coup; he is quoting the first words
of Ibsen’s first play Catiline, spoken by the great Roman dissenter,
the first example in Ibsen’s drama of the individual who takes on the
world (I 1:9). In 1889, when Shaw wrote his review of A Doll’s House,
Catiline, written by candlelight by apothecary apprentice Ibsen in the
revolutionary year of 1848-49 and privately printed, in 1850, under a
pseudonym, was virtually unknown in England. Archer had not trans-
lated Catiline and would never do so; on the odd grounds that there
were two versions of the play, he decided to omit it from the Collected
Works. But he may have had a copy of the original and translated
parts of it to Shaw. It is also possible that Shaw had come across a lit-
tle known, anonymous book, perhaps lent him by Archer or Brækstad,
called Translations from the Norse, issued by the British Society of
Scandinavians in the late 1870s, which included the first act of Catiline
and a summary of acts two and three.11 But however Shaw came across
Ibsen’s text, his identification of Nora with the Roman conspirator is
proof of his deep understanding of Ibsen’s allegiance to the primacy of
each person, including a little Norwegian husfru, over any prescribed
doctrine, or any assigned duty, including those demanded by “all the
institutions and prejudices of society.” Here, after a year and a half’s
acquaintance with his plays, Shaw strikes to the heart of Ibsen’s work:
the refusal of all external allegiances in favor of the realization of the
self. As Ibsen wrote to his protégée Laura Petersen Kieler, the model for
Nora Helmer, “It is not a question of deciding to do this, that, or the
other thing, but of deciding to do what one must do because one is one-
self. All the rest simply leads to lies” (LS 99). In his first formal review
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 19

of an Ibsen performance, Shaw insists on precisely what James Huneker

would accuse him fifteen years later of ignoring: Ibsen’s overriding
theme of “the conflict between one’s duty to society as a unit in the
social organism and the individual’s duty to himself” (Iconoclasts, 243).
On June 11, four days after the opening, Shaw saw A Doll’s House
again and took on a self-assigned role that he would continue to play for
the next nine years: a watchdog of the integrity of Ibsen performances.
On arriving home from the theatre, he sent Archer a note: “I noticed a
good many shortcomings tonight that escaped me before, & that ought
to be remedied somehow. The cardinal one is that the situation in the
second act is not made clear. The audience does not understand her
[Nora’s] idea that Helmer will take the forgery on himself.” Shaw also
mentions that he was in the fourth row of the pit yet could not hear
all the lines, and that the scene between Nora and the nurse should be
“brought out.” He was also concerned by the actors’ failure to keep
to the natural style of acting that Ibsen’s plays required: “They are all
relapsing into their ordinary stage tricks now that they are at their ease &
the strain of the first night [is] off. Miss A[church] actually bowed to the
applause on her entrance. . . . I have resorted to the ‘last device of a cow-
ard,’ an anonymous letter, begging her not to do it again. If she shews it
to you—mum!” (CL 1:214.)
The same day, the Pall Mall Gazette published a letter to the editor
by the minor playwright and man of letters Robert Buchanan, who had
earlier gained infamy as the author of the essay “The Fleshly School of
Poetry” (1871), a vicious attack on Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Rossetti.
Buchanan’s new target was Ibsen and his letter to the editor was called
“Is Ibsen a Zola with a Wooden Leg?” (Buchanan imagined Ibsen
stumping for immoral causes.) Shaw fell on Buchanan like a tiger on a
serpent in a stinging retort, “Is Mr. Buchanan a Critic with a Wooden
Head?” Shaw’s third defense of Ibsen, his piece introduces one of Shaw’s
most important perceptions about Ibsen’s plays: their significance as a
revolutionary antidote to the contemporary theatre.
Shaw begins with a blast en masse: “It happens that the dramatic crit-
ics of London have had this month the great chance that comes once in
the lifetime of every critic—the chance that Wagner, not so long ago,
offered to the musical critics. Most of them have missed it most miser-
ably” (W 78). Buchanan, who “voluntarily concentrates all that is blind
and puerile in their notices into one intense half-column,” then becomes
a handy generic punching bag as Shaw, in the role of the complaining,
20 J. Templeton

under-served citizen, contrasts the London critics’ dominant, bad taste

with his own minor, superior one:

I represent that section of the community which is

almost cut off from the enjoyment of dramatic art because

theatrical managers refuse to provide entertainment for it,

and insist on providing entertainment for Mr. Buchanan. . . .

His description of A Doll’s House as a play in which we are

presented with a maundering physician, a cashier who has

been cashiered (mark the pun!), the unpleasant widow of an

unpleasant husband, &c., &c., is exactly the sort of work a

Texas cowboy produces when he turns “dramatic editor,”

and begins by being smart at the expense of Shakespear. Mr.

Buchanan has not the Texan felicity of epigram; but he has

the Texan inadequacy (W 78-79).

Continuing in the persona of aggrieved theatregoer, Shaw offers a

damning précis of the nineteenth-century English stage, which Buchanan
so adored and which he himself had politely refrained from denouncing:
plays full of “idle twaddling, in which mere spite against unconventional
conduct was held up as morality, in which the most serious problems
of life and conduct were either glozed [sic] or shirked, in which mar-
riage was treated as the end instead of the beginning of life, in which the
underlying assumptions were known by every one in the theatre to be
hypocrisies, and in which the whole action was devitalized by a mechani-
cal stagecraft” (W 79). In contrast to this sentimental, melodramatic
rubbish, Shaw and other like-minded theatregoers have at last been given
something to their taste:

I saw the Doll’s House on the first night. I went again

on Tuesday; I shall go again if I can get another night

free before the piece is withdrawn. I find people enjoying

 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 21

themselves there who have been practically driven from

the other theatres by the intolerable emptiness of the

ordinary performances. I miss the conventional lies of the

stage there; and I do not droop, wither, and protest I am

being poisoned for want of them. . . . [I] see a vital truth

searched out and held up in a light intense enough to dispel

all the mists and shadows that obscure it in actual life. I see

people silent, attentive, thoughtful, startled—struck to the

heart, some of them (W 79).

By creating a theatre of “vital truth” in opposition to “the conventional

lies of the stage,” Ibsen had replaced a drama of frivolity with one of
seriousness, engaging the minds and hearts of the audience. For Shaw,
Ibsen’s drama was a moving, thought-provoking mirror of life.
After the successful run of A Doll’s House, Archer devoted an essay,
“Ibsen and English Criticism,” to chastising the English reviewers who
had criticized the play on the basis that it was mere didacticism and that
Nora was a mouthpiece for women’s rights. Archer cleverly pointed
out that “Nora Helmer lives with an intense and palpitating life such as
belongs to few fictitious characters. Habitually and instinctively men pay
Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing her
as though she were a real woman. . . . The very critics who begin by
railing at her as a puppet end by denouncing her as a woman. She irri-
tates, troubles, fascinates them as no puppet ever could” (A 15). Archer
protests against the notion of Ibsen “as a dour dogmatist, a vendor of
social nostrums in pilule [pill] form” and insists that the true nature of
his genius lies in “giving intense dramatic life to modern ideas” (A 17).
The notion is widespread that Shaw is among the unnamed tar-
gets of Archer’s essay. The originator of the error seems to have been
Miriam Franc, in Ibsen in England, a doctoral dissertation written at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1918 and published the following year,
the only book on the subject of Ibsen’s early English reception and a
popular reference. The hero of Franc’s whole narrative is Archer, who,
she claims, rightly viewed Ibsen as an artist, and the villain is Shaw, who,
as “a preacher lacking all poetry . . . misread Ibsen as a moralist rather
22 J. Templeton

than as a poet.”12 Archer was blaming Shaw for the misreading of Ibsen,
Franc asserts, and Archibald Henderson, Shaw’s authorized biogra-
pher, follows Franc, writing that Archer was “clearly hitting at Shaw”;
at least four other scholars have followed suit, one of them claiming that
Archer’s essay was an attack on The Quintessence of Ibsenism.13 Archer’s
piece was written two years before the Quintessence, but the more impor-
tant point is that nothing in the three articles that Shaw had thus far
written on Ibsen—the piece in the Penny Illustrated Paper, the review of
A Doll’s House, or the attack on Buchanan—suggests that Shaw viewed
Ibsen as a preacher. His analysis of Ibsen’s dramatic art, in which “a vital
truth [is] searched out and held up in a light intense enough to dispel all
the mists and shadows that obscure it in actual life” is, in fact, very close
to Archer’s own analysis that Ibsen’s plays give “intense dramatic life to
modern ideas.” For Archer, as for Shaw, Ibsen’s dramas were integral
works; separating Ibsen the artist from Ibsen the dramatist of contempo-
rary life would have been as impossible as it was simplistic. Archer would
later become irritated by the influence of the Quintessence on critics who
used it to argue that Ibsen was a social reformer, and he would say so,
but attacking his great friend anonymously was not Archer’s way. Nor
was it Shaw’s; when they quarreled, which was often, they did it openly,
whether orally or in print.
It may have been Shaw’s spirited defense of A Doll’s House in “Is
Mr. Buchanan a Critic with a Wooden Head?” that procured him a seat
next to Janet Achurch at a celebratory dinner at the Novelty Theatre on
June 16. The Ibsen champion and the Ibsen actress took to each other
immediately, beginning the first of Shaw’s romantic, sometimes obsessive
relations with actresses in which he played the roles of fascinated swain,
acting instructor, and guide to life. Janet Achurch had a strong physi-
cal presence, on stage and off, and an Amazonian beauty. She was exu-
berant, and she charmed and sometimes electrified her audiences. That
she was the first English actress to play an important Ibsen role; that
the role was that of the irresistible Nora Helmer; and that she played
it triumphantly, winning accolades, made her, for Shaw, a resplendent
being. He determined to charm her and began his campaign in a letter
he wrote her the day after their meeting, using his singular blend of flat-
tery, self-deprecation, and wit: “[F]or years past every Sunday evening of
mine has been spent on some more or less squalid platform, lecturing,
lecturing, lecturing, and lecturing. . . . [I]magine the effect of being sud-
denly magnetized, irradiated, transported, fired, rejuvenated, bewitched
Another random document with
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timbres-poste. Et ainsi de suite. Mes lettres, bientôt, portèrent fruit. Mon
oncle se mit à chercher ce qu’il pourrait bien collectionner. Vous savez, sans
doute, avec quelle rapidité un goût de ce genre se développe. Le sien devint
une fureur, que j’en étais encore ignorant. Il commença à négliger son grand
commerce de porcs. Bientôt, il se retira complètement, et au lieu de prendre
un agréable repos, il se consacra avec rage à la recherche des objets curieux.
Sa fortune était considérable. Il ne l’épargna pas. Il rechercha d’abord les
clochettes de vache. Il eut une collection qui remplissait cinq grands salons,
et comprenait toutes les différentes sortes de clochettes de vache qu’on eût
jamais inventées,—excepté une. Celle-là, un vieux modèle, dont un seul
spécimen existait encore, était la propriété d’un autre collectionneur. Mon
oncle offrit des sommes énormes pour l’avoir, mais l’autre ne voulut jamais
la vendre. Vous savez sûrement la suite forcée. Un vrai collectionneur
n’attache aucun prix à une collection incomplète. Son grand cœur se brise, il
vend son trésor, et tourne sa pensée vers quelque champ d’exploration qui lui
paraît vierge encore.
«Ainsi fit mon oncle. Il essaya d’une collection de briques. Après en
avoir empilé un lot immense et d’un intense intérêt, la difficulté précédente
se représenta. Son grand cœur se rebrisa. Il se débarrassa de l’idole de son
âme au profit du brasseur retiré qui possédait la brique manquante. Il essaya
alors des haches en silex et des autres objets remontant à l’homme
préhistorique. Mais, incidemment, il découvrit que la manufacture d’où le
tout provenait fournissait à d’autres collectionneurs dans d’aussi bonnes
conditions qu’à lui. Il rechercha dès lors les inscriptions aztèques, et les
baleines empaillées. Nouvel insuccès, après des fatigues et des frais
incroyables. Au moment où sa collection paraissait parfaite, une baleine
empaillée arriva du Groenland, et une inscription aztèque du Condurado,
dans l’Amérique Centrale, qui réduisaient à zéro tous les autres spécimens.
Mon oncle fit toute la diligence pour s’assurer ces deux joyaux. Il put avoir
la baleine, mais un autre amateur prit l’inscription. Un Condurado
authentique, peut-être le savez-vous, est un objet de telle valeur que,
lorsqu’un collectionneur s’en est procuré un, il abandonnera plutôt sa famille
que de s’en dessaisir. Mon oncle vendit donc et vit ses richesses fuir sans
espoir de retour. Dans une seule nuit, sa chevelure de charbon devint blanche
comme la neige.
«Alors, il se prit à réfléchir. Il savait qu’un nouveau désappointement le
tuerait. Il se décida à choisir, pour sa prochaine expérience, quelque chose
qu’aucun autre homme ne collectionnât. Il pesa soigneusement sa décision
dans son esprit, et une fois de plus descendit en lice, cette fois pour faire
collection d’échos.»
—«De quoi?» dis-je.
—«D’échos, Monsieur. Son premier achat fut un écho en Géorgie qui
répétait quatre fois. Puis, ce fut un écho à six coups, dans le Maryland;
ensuite, un écho à treize coups, dans le Maine; un autre, à douze coups, dans
le Tennessee, qu’il eut à bon compte, pour ainsi parler, parce qu’il avait
besoin de réparations. Une partie du rocher réflecteur s’était écroulée. Il
pensa pouvoir faire la réparation pour quelques milliers de dollars, et, en
surélevant le rocher de quelque maçonnerie, tripler le pouvoir répétiteur.
Mais l’architecte qui eut l’entreprise n’avait jamais construit d’écho
jusqu’alors, et abîma celui-là complètement. Avant qu’on y mît la main, il
était aussi bavard qu’une belle-mère. Mais après, il ne fut bon que pour
l’asile des sourds-muets. Bien. Mon oncle acheta ensuite, pour presque rien,
un lot d’échos à deux coups, disséminés à travers des États et Territoires
différents. Il eut vingt pour cent de remise en prenant le lot entier. Après
cela, il fit l’acquisition d’un véritable canon Krupp. C’était un écho dans
l’Orégon, qui lui coûta une fortune, je puis l’affirmer. Vous savez sans doute,
Monsieur, que, sur le marché des échos, l’échelle des prix est cumulative
comme l’échelle des carats pour les diamants. En fait, on se sert des mêmes
expressions. Un écho d’un carat ne vaut que dix dollars en plus de la valeur
du sol où il se trouve. Un écho de deux carats, ou à deux coups, vaut trente
dollars; un écho de cinq carats vaut neuf cent cinquante dollars; un de dix
carats, treize mille dollars. L’écho de mon oncle dans l’Orégon, qu’il appela
l’écho Pitt, du nom du célèbre orateur, était une pierre précieuse de vingt-
deux carats, et lui coûta deux cent seize mille dollars. On donna la terre sur
le marché, car elle était à quatre cent milles de tout endroit habité.
«Pendant ce temps, mon sentier était un sentier de roses. J’étais le
soupirant agréé de la fille unique et belle d’un comte anglais, et j’étais
amoureux à la folie. En sa chère présence, je nageais dans un océan de joie.
La famille me voyait d’un bon œil, car on me savait le seul héritier d’un
oncle tenu pour valoir cinq millions de dollars. D’ailleurs nous ignorions
tous que mon oncle fût devenu collectionneur, du moins autrement que
d’inoffensive façon, pour un amusement d’art.
«C’est alors que s’amoncelèrent les nuages sur ma tête inconsciente. Cet
écho sublime, connu depuis à travers le monde comme le grand Koh-i-noor,
ou Montagne à répétition, fut découvert. C’était un joyau de soixante-cinq
carats! Vous n’aviez qu’à prononcer un mot. Il vous le renvoyait pendant
quinze minutes, par un temps calme. Mais, attendez. On apprit en même
temps un autre détail. Un second collectionneur était en présence. Tous les
deux se précipitèrent pour conclure cette affaire unique. La propriété se
composait de deux petites collines avec, dans l’intervalle, un vallon peu
profond, le tout situé sur les territoires les plus reculés de l’état de New-
York. Les deux acheteurs arrivèrent sur le terrain en même temps, chacun
d’eux ignorant que l’autre fût là. L’écho n’appartenait pas à un propriétaire
unique. Une personne du nom de Williamson Bolivar Jarvis possédait la
colline est; une personne du nom de Harbison J. Bledso, la colline ouest. Le
vallon intermédiaire servait de limite. Ainsi, tandis que mon oncle achetait la
colline de Jarvis pour trois millions deux cent quatre-vingt-cinq mille
dollars, l’autre achetait celle de Bledso pour un peu plus de trois millions.
«Vous voyez d’ici le résultat. La plus belle collection d’échos qu’il y eût
au monde était dépareillée pour toujours, puisqu’elle n’avait que la moitié du
roi des échos de l’univers. Aucun des deux ne fut satisfait de cette propriété
partagée. Aucun des deux ne voulut non plus céder sa part. Il y eut des
grincements de dents, des disputes, des haines cordiales; pour finir, l’autre
collectionneur, avec une méchanceté que seul un collectionneur peut avoir
envers un homme, son frère, se mit à démolir sa colline?
«Parfaitement. Dès l’instant qu’il ne pouvait pas avoir l’écho, il avait
décidé que personne ne l’aurait. Il voulait enlever sa colline, il n’y aurait
plus rien, dès lors, pour refléter l’écho de mon oncle. Mon oncle lui fit
l’objection. L’autre répondit: «Je possède la moitié de l’écho. Il me plaît de
la supprimer. C’est à vous de vous arranger pour conserver votre moitié.»
«Très bien. Mon oncle fit opposition. L’autre en appela et porta l’affaire
devant un tribunal plus élevé. On alla plus loin encore, et jusqu’à la Cour
Suprême des États-Unis. L’affaire n’en fut pas plus claire. Deux des juges
opinèrent qu’un écho était propriété personnelle, parce qu’il n’était ni visible
ni palpable, que par conséquent on pouvait le vendre, l’acheter, et, aussi, le
taxer. Deux autres pensèrent qu’un écho était bien immobilier, puisque
manifestement il était inséparable du terrain, et ne pouvait être transporté
ailleurs. Les autres juges furent d’avis qu’un écho n’était propriété d’aucune
façon.
«Il fut décidé, pour finir, que l’écho était propriété, et les collines aussi,
que les deux collectionneurs étaient possesseurs, distincts et indépendants,
des deux collines, mais que l’écho était propriété indivise; donc le défendant
avait toute liberté de jeter à bas sa colline, puisqu’elle était à lui seul, mais
aurait à payer une indemnité calculée d’après le prix de trois millions de
dollars, pour le dommage qui pourrait en résulter à l’égard de la moitié
d’écho dont mon oncle était possesseur. Le jugement interdisait également à
mon oncle de faire usage de la colline du défendant pour refléter sa part
d’écho, sans le consentement du défendant. Il ne devrait se servir que de sa
colline propre. Si sa part d’écho ne marchait pas, dans ces conditions, c’était
fâcheux, très fâcheux, mais le tribunal n’y pouvait rien. La cour interdit de
même au défendant d’user de la colline de mon oncle, dans le même but,
sans consentement.
«Vous voyez d’ici le résultat admirable. Aucun des deux ne donna son
consentement. Et ainsi ce noble et merveilleux écho dut cesser de faire
entendre sa voix grandiose. Cette inestimable propriété fut dès lors sans
usage et sans valeur.
«Une semaine avant mes fiançailles, tandis que je continuais à nager dans
mon bonheur, et que toute la noblesse des environs et d’ailleurs s’assemblait
pour honorer nos épousailles, arriva la nouvelle de la mort de mon oncle, et
une copie de son testament, qui m’instituait seul héritier. Il était mort. Mon
cher bienfaiteur, hélas! avait disparu. Cette pensée me fait le cœur gros,
quand j’y songe, encore aujourd’hui. Je tendis au comte le testament. Je ne
pouvais le lire; les pleurs m’aveuglaient. Le comte le lut, puis me dit d’un air
sévère: «Est-ce là, Monsieur, ce que vous appelez être riche? Peut-être dans
votre pays vaniteux. Vous avez, Monsieur, pour tout héritage une vaste
collection d’échos, si on peut appeler collection une chose dispersée sur
toute la surface, en long et en large, du continent américain. Ce n’est pas
tout. Vous êtes couvert de dettes jusque par-dessus les oreilles. Il n’y a pas
un écho dans le tas sur lequel ne soit une hypothèque... Je ne suis pas un
méchant homme, Monsieur, mais je dois voir l’intérêt de mon enfant. Si
vous possédiez seulement un écho que vous eussiez le droit de dire à vous, si
vous possédiez seulement un écho libre de dettes, où vous puissiez vous
retirer avec ma fille et que vous puissiez, à force d’humble et pénible travail,
cultiver et faire valoir, et ainsi en tirer votre subsistance, je ne vous dirais pas
non; mais je ne puis donner ma fille en mariage à un mendiant. Quittez la
place, mon cher. Allez, Monsieur. Emportez vos échos hypothéqués, et
qu’on ne vous revoie plus.»
 —«Ma noble Célestine, tout en larmes, se cramponnait à moi de ses bras
aimants, jurant qu’elle m’épouserait volontiers, oui, avec joie, bien que je
n’eusse pas un écho vaillant. Rien n’y fit. On nous sépara, elle pour languir
et mourir au bout d’un an, moi pour peiner, tout le long du voyage de la vie,
triste et seul, implorant chaque jour, à chaque heure, le repos où nous serons
réunis dans le royaume bienheureux. On n’y redoute plus les méchants, et les
malheureux y trouvent la paix. Si vous voulez avoir l’obligeance de jeter un
coup d’œil sur les cartes et les plans que j’ai là dans mon portefeuille je suis
sûr que je puis vous vendre un écho à meilleur compte que n’importe quel
autre commerçant. En voici un qui coûta à mon oncle dix dollars il y a trente
ans. C’est une des plus belles choses du Texas. Je vous le laisserai pour...»
—«Souffrez que je vous interrompe, dis-je. Jusqu’à ce moment, mon cher
ami, les commis voyageurs ne m’ont pas laissé une minute de repos. J’ai
acheté une machine à coudre dont je n’avais nul besoin. J’ai acheté une carte
qui est fausse jusqu’en ses moindres détails. J’ai acheté une cloche qui ne
sonne pas. J’ai acheté du poison pour les mites, que les mites préfèrent à
n’importe quel autre breuvage. J’ai acheté une infinité d’inventions
impraticables. Et j’en ai assez de ces folies. Je ne voudrais pas un de vos
échos quand même vous me le donneriez pour rien. Je n’en souffrirai pas un
chez moi. J’exècre les gens qui veulent me vendre des échos. Vous voyez ce
fusil? Eh bien! prenez votre collection et déguerpissez. Qu’il n’y ait pas de
sang ici.»
Il se contenta de sourire doucement et tristement, et entra dans d’autres
explications. Vous savez très bien que lorsqu’une fois vous avez ouvert la
porte à un commis voyageur, le mal est fait, vous n’avez qu’à le subir.
Au bout d’une heure intolérable, je transigeai. J’achetai une paire d’échos
à deux coups, dans de bonnes conditions. Il me donna, sur le marché, un
troisième, impossible à vendre, dit-il, parce qu’il ne parlait qu’allemand.
C’était autrefois un parfait polyglotte, mais il avait eu une chute de la voûte
palatine.
 HISTOIRE DU MÉCHANT PETIT GARÇON
Il y avait une fois un méchant petit garçon qui s’appelait Jim. Cependant,
si l’on veut bien le remarquer, les méchants petits garçons s’appellent
presque toujours James dans les livres de l’école du dimanche. C’était
bizarre, mais on n’y peut rien. Celui-là s’appelait Jim.
Il n’avait pas non plus une mère malade, une pauvre mère pieuse et
poitrinaire, et qui eût souhaité mourir et se reposer dans la tombe, sans le
grand amour qu’elle portait à son fils, et la crainte qu’elle avait que le
monde fût méchant et dur pour lui, quand elle aurait disparu. Tous les
méchants petits garçons dans les livres de l’école du dimanche s’appellent
James, et ont une mère malade qui leur enseigne à répéter: «Maintenant, je
vais m’en aller...» et chantent pour les endormir d’une voix douce et
plaintive, et les baisent, et leur souhaitent bonne nuit, et s’agenouillent au
pied du lit pour pleurer. Il en était autrement pour notre garçon. Il s’appelait
Jim. Et rien de semblable chez sa mère, ni phtisie, ni autre chose. Elle était
plutôt corpulente, et n’avait nulle piété. En outre elle ne se tourmentait pas
outre mesure au sujet de Jim. Elle avait coutume de dire que s’il se cassait
le cou, ce ne serait pas une grande perte. Elle l’envoyait coucher d’une
claque, et ne l’embrassait jamais, pour lui souhaiter bonne nuit. Au
contraire, elle lui frottait les oreilles quand il la quittait pour dormir.
Un jour ce méchant petit garçon vola la clef de l’office, s’y glissa,
mangea de la confiture, et remplit le vide du pot avec du goudron, pour que
sa mère ne soupçonnât rien. Mais à ce moment même un terrible sentiment
ne l’envahit pas. Quelque chose ne lui sembla pas murmurer: «Ai-je bien
fait de désobéir à ma mère?» «N’est-ce pas un péché d’agir ainsi?» «Où
vont les méchants petits garçons qui mangent gloutonnement la confiture
maternelle?» Et alors, il ne se mit pas à genoux, tout seul, et ne fit pas la
promesse de n’être plus jamais méchant; il ne se releva pas, le cœur léger et
heureux, pour aller trouver sa mère et tout lui raconter; et demander son
pardon, et recevoir sa bénédiction, elle ayant des pleurs de joie et de
gratitude dans les yeux. Non. C’est ainsi que se comportent les autres
méchants petits garçons dans les livres. Mais chose étrange, il en arriva
autrement avec ce Jim. Il mangea la confiture et dit que c’était «épatant»
dans son langage grossier et criminel. Et il versa le goudron dans le pot, et
dit que c’était aussi «épatant» et se mit à rire, et observa que la vieille
femme sauterait et renâclerait, quand elle s’en apercevrait. Et quand elle
découvrit la chose, il affirma qu’il ignorait ce qu’il en était; elle le fouetta
avec sévérité; il se chargea de l’accompagnement. Tout s’arrangeait
autrement pour lui que pour les méchants James dans les histoires.
Un autre jour, il grimpa sur le pommier du fermier Acorn, pour voler des
pommes. La branche ne cassa pas. Il ne tomba pas et ne se cassa pas le bras,
et ne fut pas mis en pièces par le gros chien du fermier, pour languir de
longues semaines sur un lit de douleur, et se repentir, et devenir bon. Oh!
non! Il prit autant de pommes qu’il voulut, et descendit sans encombre. Et
d’ailleurs, il était paré pour le chien, et le chassa avec une brique lorsqu’il
s’avança pour le mordre. C’était bizarre. Rien de semblable jamais dans ces
aimables petits livres à couverture marbrée, où l’on voit des images qui
représentent des messieurs en queue-de-pie et chapeaux hauts en forme de
cloche, avec des pantalons trop courts, et des dames ayant la taille sous les
bras et sans crinolines. Rien de pareil dans les livres de l’école du
dimanche.
Il déroba, une autre fois, le canif du maître d’école, et, pour éviter d’être
fouetté, il le glissa dans la casquette de Georges Wilson, le fils de la pauvre
veuve Wilson, le jeune garçon moral, le bon petit garçon du village, qui
toujours obéissait à sa mère et qui ne mentait jamais, et qui était amoureux
de ses leçons et infatué de l’école du dimanche. Quand le canif tomba de la
casquette, et que le pauvre Georges baissa la tête et rougit comme surpris
sur le fait, et que le maître en colère l’accusa, et était juste au moment de
laisser tomber le fouet sur ses épaules tremblantes, on ne vit pas apparaître
soudain, l’attitude noble, au milieu des écoliers, un improbable juge de paix
à perruque blanche, pour dire: «Épargnez ce généreux enfant. Voici le
coupable et le lâche. Je passais par hasard sur la porte de l’école, et, sans
être vu, j’ai tout vu.» Et Jim ne fut pas harponné, et le vénérable juge ne
prononça pas un sermon devant toute l’école émue jusqu’aux larmes et ne
prit pas Georges par la main pour déclarer qu’un tel enfant méritait qu’on
lui rendît hommage, et ne lui dit pas de venir habiter chez lui, balayer le
bureau, préparer le feu, faire les courses, fendre le bois, étudier les lois,
aider la femme du juge dans ses travaux d’intérieur, avec la liberté de jouer
tout le reste du temps, et la joie de gagner dix sous par mois. Non. Les
choses se seraient passées ainsi dans les livres, mais ce ne fut pas ainsi pour
Jim. Aucun vieil intrigant de juge ne tomba là pour tout déranger. Et
l’écolier modèle Georges fut battu, et Jim fut heureux de cela, car Jim
détestait les petits garçons moraux. Jim disait qu’il fallait mettre à bas ces
«poules mouillées». Tel était le grossier langage de ce méchant et mal élevé
petit garçon.
La plus étrange chose arriva à Jim, le jour qu’il était allé, un dimanche,
faire une promenade en bateau. Il ne fut pas du tout noyé. Une autre fois, il
fut surpris par l’orage, pendant qu’il pêchait, toujours un dimanche, et ne
fut pas foudroyé. Eh bien! Vous pouvez consulter et consulter d’un bout
jusqu’à l’autre, et d’ici au prochain Christmas, tous les livres de l’école du
dimanche, sans rencontrer chose pareille. Vous trouverez que les méchants
garçons qui vont en bateau le dimanche sont invariablement noyés, et que
tous les méchants garçons qui sont surpris par un orage en train de pêcher
un dimanche sont infailliblement foudroyés. Les bateaux porteurs de
méchants garçons, le dimanche, chavirent toujours. Et l’orage éclate
toujours quand les méchants petits garçons vont à la pêche ce jour-là.
Comment Jim toujours échappa demeure pour moi un mystère.
Il y avait dans la vie de Jim quelque chose de magique. C’est sans doute
la raison. Rien ne pouvait lui nuire. Il donna même à un éléphant de la
ménagerie un paquet de tabac au lieu de pain, et l’éléphant, avec sa trompe,
ne lui cassa pas la tête. Il alla fouiller dans l’armoire pour trouver la
bouteille de pippermint, et ne but pas par erreur du vitriol. Il déroba le fusil
de son père et s’en alla chasser le jour du sabbat; le fusil n’éclata pas en lui
emportant trois ou quatre doigts. Il donna à sa petite sœur un coup de poing
sur la tempe, dans un accès de colère, elle ne languit pas malade pendant
tout un long été, pour mourir enfin avec sur les lèvres de douces paroles de
pardon qui redoublèrent l’angoisse dans le cœur brisé du criminel—non.
Elle n’eut rien. Il s’échappa pour aller au bord de la mer, et ne revint pas se
trouvant triste et solitaire au monde, tous ceux qu’il aimait endormis dans la
paix du cimetière, et la maison de son enfance avec la treille de vigne
tombée en ruines et démolie. Pas du tout. Il revint chez lui aussi ivre qu’un
tambour et fut conduit au poste à peine arrivé.
Et il grandit et se maria, et eut de nombreux enfants. Et il fendit la tête à
tous, une nuit, à coup de hache, et s’enrichit par toutes sortes de fourberies
et de malhonnêtetés. Et à l’heure actuelle, c’est le plus infernal damné
chenapan de son village natal, il est universellement respecté, et fait partie
du parlement.
 HISTOIRE DU BON PETIT GARÇON
Il y avait une fois un bon petit garçon du nom de Jacob Blivens. Il
obéissait toujours à ses parents quelque absurdes et déraisonnables que
fussent leurs ordres. Il apprenait exactement ses leçons, et n’était jamais en
retard à l’école du dimanche. Il ne voulait pas jouer au croquet, même aux
heures où son jugement austère lui disait que c’était l’occupation la plus
convenable. C’était un enfant si étrange qu’aucun des autres petits garçons
ne pouvait l’entraîner. Il ne mentait jamais, quelque utilité qu’il y eût. Il
disait simplement que le mensonge était un péché, et cela suffisait. Enfin il
était si honnête qu’il en devenait absolument ridicule. Ses bizarres façons
d’agir dépassaient tout. Il ne jouait pas aux billes le dimanche, il ne
cherchait pas des nids, il ne donnait pas des sous rougis au feu aux singes
des joueurs d’orgue. Il ne semblait prendre intérêt à aucune espèce
d’amusement raisonnable. Les autres garçons essayaient de se rendre
compte de son naturel, et d’arriver à le comprendre, mais ils ne pouvaient
parvenir à aucune conclusion satisfaisante. Comme j’ai déjà dit, ils se
faisaient seulement une sorte de vague idée qu’il était «frappé». Aussi
l’avaient-ils pris sous leur protection, et ne permettaient pas qu’on lui fît du
mal.
Ce bon petit garçon lisait tous les livres de l’école du dimanche. C’était
son plus grand plaisir. C’est qu’il croyait fermement à la réalité de toutes les
histoires qu’on y racontait sur les bons petits garçons. Il avait une confiance
absolue dans ces récits. Il désirait vivement rencontrer un de ces enfants,
quelque jour, en chair et en os, mais il n’eut jamais ce bonheur. Peut-être
que tous étaient morts avant sa naissance. Chaque fois qu’il lisait l’histoire
d’un garçon particulièrement remarquable, il tournait vite les pages pour
savoir ce qu’il était advenu de lui, il aurait volontiers couru des milliers de
kilomètres pour le rencontrer. Mais, inutile. Le bon petit garçon mourait
toujours au dernier chapitre, il y avait une description de ses funérailles,
avec tous ses parents et les enfants de l’école du dimanche debout autour de
la tombe, en pantalons trop courts et en casquettes trop larges, et tout le
monde sanglotant dans des mouchoirs qui avaient au moins un mètre et
demi d’étoffe. Ainsi le bon petit garçon était toujours désappointé. Il ne
pouvait jamais songer à voir un de ces jeunes héros, car ils étaient toujours
morts en arrivant au dernier chapitre.
Jacob, cependant, avait la noble ambition d’être mis un jour dans les
livres. Il souhaitait qu’on l’y vît, avec des dessins qui le représenteraient
refusant glorieusement de faire un mensonge à sa mère, qui pleurait de joie.
D’autres gravures l’auraient montré debout sur le seuil de la porte, donnant
deux sous à une pauvre mendiante, mère de six enfants, et lui
recommandant de les dépenser librement, mais sans profusion, car la
profusion est un péché. Et ailleurs, on l’aurait vu refusant généreusement de
dénoncer le méchant gars qui l’attendait chaque jour au coin de la rue à son
retour de l’école, et lui donnait sur la tête des coups de bâton, et le
poursuivait jusqu’à sa maison, en criant «Hi! hi!» derrière lui. Telle était
l’ambition du jeune Jacob Blivens. Il souhaitait de passer dans un livre de
l’école du dimanche. Quelque chose seulement lui faisait éprouver une
impression manquant de confortable: il songeait que tous les bons petits
garçons mouraient à la fin du livre. Sachez qu’il aimait à vivre, et c’était là
le trait le plus désagréable dans la peinture d’un bon garçon des livres de
l’école du dimanche. Il voyait qu’il n’était pas sain d’être saint. Il se rendait
compte qu’il était moins fâcheux d’être phtisique que de faire preuve de
sagesse surnaturelle comme les petits garçons des livres. Aucun d’eux,
remarquait-il, n’avait pu soutenir longtemps son personnage, et Jacob
s’attristait de penser que si on le mettait dans un livre, il ne le verrait jamais.
Si même on éditait le livre avant qu’il mourût, l’ouvrage ne serait pas
populaire, manquant du récit de ses funérailles à la fin. Ce n’était pas
grand’chose qu’un livre de l’école du dimanche où ne se trouveraient pas
les conseils donnés par lui mourant à la communauté. Ainsi, pour conclure,
il devait se résoudre à faire le mieux suivant les circonstances, vivre
honnêtement, durer le plus possible, et tenir prêt son discours suprême pour
le jour.
Cependant, rien ne réussissait à ce bon petit garçon. Rien ne lui arrivait
jamais comme aux bons petits garçons des livres. Ceux-là avaient toujours
de la chance, et les méchants garçons se cassaient les jambes. Mais, dans
son cas, il devait y avoir une vis qui manquait au mécanisme, et tout allait
de travers. Quand il trouva Jim Blake en train de voler des pommes, et qu’il
vint sous l’arbre pour lui lire l’histoire du méchant petit garçon qui tomba
de l’arbre du voisin et se cassa le bras, Jim tomba de l’arbre lui aussi, mais
il tomba sur Jacob et lui cassa le bras, et lui-même n’eut rien. Jacob ne put
comprendre. Il n’y avait rien de semblable dans les livres.
Et un jour que des méchants garçons poussaient un aveugle dans la boue,
et que Jacob courut pour le secourir et recevoir ses bénédictions, l’aveugle
ne lui donna aucune bénédiction, mais lui tapa sur la tête avec son bâton et
dit: «Que je vous y prenne encore à me pousser et à venir ensuite à mon
aide ironiquement!» Cela ne s’accordait avec aucune histoire des livres.
Jacob les examina tous pour voir.
Un rêve de Jacob était de trouver un chien estropié et abandonné, affamé
et persécuté, et de l’emmener chez lui pour le choyer et mériter son
impérissable reconnaissance. A la fin, il en trouva un et fut heureux. Il le
prit à la maison et le nourrit. Mais quand il se mit à le caresser, le chien
sauta après lui et lui déchira tous ses vêtements, excepté sur le devant, ce
qui fit de lui un spectacle surprenant. Il examina ses auteurs, mais ne put
trouver d’explication. C’était la même race de chien que dans les livres,
mais se comportant très différemment. Quoi que fît ce garçon, tout tournait
mal. Les actions même qui valaient aux petits garçons des histoires des
éloges et des récompenses devenaient pour lui l’occasion des plus
désavantageux accidents.
Un dimanche, sur la route de l’école, il vit quelques méchants gars partir
pour une promenade en bateau. Il fut consterné, car il savait par ses lectures
que les garçons qui vont en bateau le dimanche sont infailliblement noyés.
Aussi courut-il sur un radeau pour les avertir. Mais un tronc d’arbre à la
dérive fit chavirer le radeau, qui plongea, et Jacob avec lui. On le repêcha
aussitôt, et le docteur pompa l’eau de son estomac, et rétablit sa respiration
avec un soufflet, mais il avait pris froid, et fut au lit neuf semaines. Ce qu’il
y eut de plus incroyable fut que les méchants garçons du bateau eurent un
temps superbe tout le jour, et rentrèrent chez eux sains et saufs, de la plus
surprenante façon. Jacob Blivens dit qu’il n’y avait rien de semblable dans
ses livres. Il était tout stupéfait.
Une fois rétabli, il fut un peu découragé, mais se résolut néanmoins à
continuer ses expériences. Jusqu’alors, il est vrai, les événements n’étaient
pas de nature à être mis dans les livres, mais il n’avait pas encore atteint le
terme fixé pour la fin de la vie des bons petits garçons. Il espérait trouver
l’occasion de se distinguer en persévérant jusqu’au bout. Si tout venait à
échouer, il avait son discours mortuaire, en dernière ressource, prêt.
 Il examina les auteurs et vit que c’était le moment de partir en mer
comme mousse. Il alla trouver un capitaine et fit sa demande. Quand le
capitaine lui demanda ses certificats, il tira fièrement un traité où étaient
écrits ces mots: «A Jacob Blivens, son maître affectueux.» Mais le capitaine
était un homme grossier et vulgaire. «Que le diable vous emporte! cria-t-il;
cela prouve-t-il que vous sachiez laver les assiettes ou porter un seau? J’ai
comme une idée que je n’ai pas besoin de vous.» Ce fut l’événement le plus
extraordinaire de la vie de Jacob Blivens. Un compliment de maître, sur un
livre, n’avait jamais manqué d’émouvoir les plus tendres émotions des
capitaines, et d’ouvrir l’accès à tous les emplois honorables et lucratifs dont
ils pouvaient disposer. Cela n’avait jamais manqué dans aucun des livres
qu’il eût lus. Il pouvait à peine en croire ses sens.
Ce garçon n’eut jamais de chance. Rien ne lui arriva jamais en accord
avec les autorités. Enfin, un jour qu’il était en chasse de méchants petits
garçons à admonester, il en trouva une troupe, dans la vieille fonderie, qui
avaient trouvé quelque amusement à attacher ensemble quatorze ou quinze
chiens en longue file, et à les orner de bidons vides de nitro-glycérine
solidement fixés à leurs queues. Le cœur de Jacob fut touché. Il s’assit sur
un bidon (car peu lui importait de se graisser quand son devoir était en jeu)
et, prenant par le collier le premier chien, il attacha un œil de reproche sur
le méchant Tom Jones. Mais juste à ce moment, l’alderman Mac Welter,
tout en fureur, arriva. Tous les méchants garçons s’enfuirent, mais Jacob
Blivens, fort de son innocence, se leva et commença un de ces pompeux
discours comme dans les livres, dont le premier mot est toujours: «Oh!
Monsieur!» en contradiction flagrante avec ce fait que jamais garçon bon ou
mauvais ne commence un discours par «Oh! Monsieur!» Mais l’alderman
n’attendit pas la suite. Il prit Jacob Blivens par l’oreille et le fit tourner, et le
frappa vigoureusement sur le derrière avec le plat de la main. Et subitement
le bon petit garçon fit explosion à travers le toit et prit son essor vers le
soleil, avec les fragments des quinze chiens pendus après lui comme la
queue d’un cerf-volant. Et il ne resta pas trace de l’alderman ou de la vieille
fonderie sur la surface de la terre. Pour le jeune Jacob Blivens, il n’eut pas
même la chance de pouvoir prononcer son discours mortuaire après avoir
pris tant de peine à le préparer, à moins qu’il ne l’adressât aux oiseaux. Car,
quoique le gros de son corps tombât tout droit au sommet d’un arbre dans
une contrée voisine, le reste de lui fut dispersé sur le territoire de quatre
communes à la ronde, et l’on dut faire quatre enquêtes pour le retrouver, et
savoir s’il était mort ou vivant, et comment l’accident s’était produit. On ne
vit jamais un gars aussi dispersé.
Ainsi périt le bon petit garçon, après avoir fait tous ses efforts pour vivre
selon les histoires, sans pouvoir y parvenir. Tous ceux qui vécurent comme
lui prospérèrent, excepté lui. Son cas est vraiment remarquable. Il est
probable qu’on n’en pourra pas donner d’explication.
 SUR LES FEMMES DE CHAMBRE
Contre toutes les femmes de chambre, de n’importe quel âge ou pays, je
lève le drapeau des célibataires parce que:
Elles choisissent, pour l’oreiller, le côté du lit invariablement opposé au
bec de gaz. Ainsi, voulez-vous lire ou fumer, avant de vous endormir (ce
qui est la coutume ancienne et honorée des célibataires), il vous faut tenir le
livre en l’air, dans une position incommode, pour empêcher la lumière de
vous éblouir les yeux.
Si, le matin, elles trouvent l’oreiller remis en place, elles n’acceptent pas
cette indication dans un esprit bienveillant. Mais, fières de leur pouvoir
absolu et sans pitié pour votre détresse, elles refont le lit exactement comme
il était auparavant, et couvent des yeux, en secret, l’angoisse que leur
tyrannie vous causera.
Et chaque fois, inlassablement, elles détruisent votre ouvrage, vous
défiant et cherchant à empoisonner l’existence que vous tenez de Dieu.
S’il n’y a pas d’autre moyen de mettre la lumière dans une position
incommode, elles retournent le lit.
Quand vous avez placé votre malle à cinq ou six pouces du mur, pour
que le couvercle puisse rester debout, la malle ouverte, elles repoussent
invariablement la malle contre le mur. Elles font cela exprès.
Il vous convient d’avoir le crachoir à une certaine place où vous puissiez
en user commodément. Mais il ne leur convient pas. Elles le mettent
ailleurs.
Vos chaussures de rechange sont exilées à des endroits inaccessibles.
Leur grande joie est de les pousser sous le lit aussi loin que le mur le
permet. Vous serez forcé ainsi de vous aplatir sur le sol, dans une attitude
humiliante et de ramer sauvagement pour les atteindre avec le tire-bottes,
dans l’obscurité, et de jurer.
Elles trouvent toujours pour la boîte d’allumettes un nouvel endroit.
Elles dénichent une place différente chaque jour, et posent une bouteille, ou
quelque autre objet périssable, en verre, où la boîte se trouvait d’abord.
C’est pour vous forcer à casser le verre, en tâtonnant dans le noir, et vous
causer du trouble.
 Sans cesse elles modifient la disposition du mobilier. Quand vous entrez,
dans la nuit, vous pouvez compter que vous trouverez le bureau où se
trouvait la commode le matin. Et quand vous sortez, le matin, laissant le
seau de toilette près de la porte, et le rocking-chair devant la fenêtre, de
retour aux environs de minuit, vous trébucherez sur la chaise et vous irez à
la fenêtre vous asseoir dans le seau. Cela vous dégoûtera. C’est ce qu’elles
aiment.
Peu importe où vous placiez quelque objet que ce soit, elles ne le
laisseront jamais là. Elles le prendront pour le mettre ailleurs à la première
occasion. C’est leur nature. C’est un moyen de se montrer fâcheuses et
odieuses. Elles mourraient si elles ne pouvaient vous être désagréables.
Elles ramassent avec un soin extrême tous les bouts de journal que vous
jetez sur le sol et les rangent minutieusement sur la table, cependant
qu’elles allument le feu avec vos manuscrits les plus précieux. S’il y a
quelque vieux chiffon de papier dont vous soyez particulièrement
encombré, et que vous épuisiez graduellement votre énergie à essayer de
vous en débarrasser, vous pouvez faire tous vos efforts. Ils seront vains.
Elles ramasseront sans cesse ce vieux bout de papier, et le remettront
régulièrement à la même place. C’est leur joie.
Elles consomment plus d’huile à cheveux que six hommes. Si on les
accuse d’en avoir soustrait, elles mentent avec effronterie. Que leur importe
leur salut éternel? Rien du tout absolument.
Si, pour plus de commodité, vous laissez la clef sur la porte, elles la
descendront au bureau et la donneront au garçon. Elles agissent ainsi sous le
vil prétexte de garder vos affaires des voleurs. Mais en réalité, c’est pour
vous forcer à redescendre à la recherche jusqu’au bas de l’escalier, quand
vous rentrez fatigué, ou pour vous causer l’ennui d’envoyer un garçon la
prendre. Ce garçon comptera bien recevoir quelque chose pour sa peine.
Dans ce cas, je suppose que ces misérables créatures partagent le gain.
Elles viennent régulièrement chercher à faire votre lit avant que vous
soyez levé, détruisant ainsi votre repos, et vous réduisant à l’agonie. Mais
dès que vous êtes levé, elles ne reparaissent plus jusqu’au lendemain.
Elles commettent toutes les infamies qu’elles peuvent imaginer, cela par
perversité pure, et non pour quelque autre motif.
Les femmes de chambre sont mortes à tout sentiment humain.
 Si je puis présenter une pétition à la chambre, pour l’abolition des
femmes de chambre, je le ferai.
 LA GRANDE RÉVOLUTION DE PITCAIRN
Que le lecteur me permette de lui rafraîchir un peu la mémoire. Il y a
cent ans, à peu près, l’équipage d’un vaisseau anglais, le Bounty, se révolta.
Les matelots abandonnèrent le capitaine et les officiers, à l’aventure, en
pleine mer, s’emparèrent du navire et firent voile vers le sud. Ils se
procurèrent des femmes parmi les naturels de Tahiti, puis allèrent jusqu’à
un petit rocher isolé au milieu du Pacifique, appelé île de Pitcairn, brisèrent
le vaisseau, après l’avoir vidé de tout ce qui pouvait être utile à une
nouvelle colonie, et s’établirent sur le rivage de l’île.
Pitcairn est si écarté des routes commerciales qu’il se passa des années
avant qu’un autre navire y abordât. On avait toujours regardé l’île comme
inhabitée. Aussi, lorsqu’en 1808 un navire y jeta l’ancre, le capitaine fut
grandement surpris de trouver la place occupée. Les matelots mutinés
avaient, il est vrai, lutté ensemble, et leur nombre avait graduellement
diminué par des meurtres mutuels, tant qu’il n’en était resté que deux ou
trois du stock primitif. Mais ces tragédies avaient duré assez longtemps
pour que quelques enfants fussent nés; aussi, en 1808, l’île avait-elle une
population de vingt-sept personnes. John Adams, le chef des mutinés, vivait
encore, et devait vivre encore longtemps, comme gouverneur et patriarche
du troupeau. L’ancien révolté homicide était devenu un chrétien et un
prêcheur, et sa nation de vingt-sept personnes était maintenant la plus pure
et la plus dévouée à Christ. Adams avait depuis longtemps arboré le
drapeau britannique, et constitué son île en apanage du royaume anglais.
Aujourd’hui la population compte quatre-vingt-dix personnes, seize
hommes, dix-neuf femmes, vingt-cinq garçons et trente filles, tous
descendants des révoltés, tous portant les noms de famille de ces révoltés,
tous parlant exclusivement anglais. L’île s’élève haut de la mer, et ses bords
sont escarpés. Sa longueur est environ de trois quarts de mille, et, par
places, sa largeur atteint un demi-mille. Les terres labourables qu’elle
renferme sont distribuées entre les différentes familles, suivant un partage
fait depuis de longues années. Il y a quelque bétail, chèvres, porcs, volaille,
chats. Pas de chiens, ni de grands animaux. Il y a une église dont les
constructions servent aussi de capitole, de maison d’école, et de
bibliothèque publique. Le gouverneur s’est appelé, pendant une ou deux
générations, «Magistrat et chef suprême, en subordination à Sa Majesté la
reine de Grande-Bretagne». Il avait la charge de faire les lois et de les
exécuter. Ses fonctions étaient électives. A dix-sept ans révolus, tout le
monde était électeur, sans distinction de sexe.
Les seules occupations du peuple étaient l’agriculture et la pêche; leur
seul amusement, les services religieux. Il n’y a jamais eu dans l’île une
boutique, ou de l’argent. Les mœurs et les vêtements du peuple ont toujours
été primitifs; les lois, d’une puérile simplicité. Ils ont vécu dans le calme
profond d’un dimanche, loin du monde, de ses ambitions, de ses vexations,
ignorants et insoucieux de ce qui se passait dans les puissants empires situés
au delà des solitudes illimitées de l’océan.
Une fois, en trois ou quatre ans, un navire abordait là, les émouvait avec
de vieilles nouvelles batailles sanglantes, épidémies dévastatrices, trônes
tombés, dynasties écroulées, puis leur cédait quelque savon et flanelle pour
des fruits d’igname ou d’arbre à pain, et refaisait voile, les laissant à
nouveau se retirer vers leurs songes paisibles et leurs pieuses dissipations.
Le 8 septembre dernier, l’amiral de Horsey, commandant en chef de
l’escadre anglaise dans le Pacifique, visita l’île de Pitcairn. Voici comment
il s’exprime dans son rapport officiel à l’amirauté: «Ils ont des haricots, des
carottes, des navets, des choux, un peu de maïs, des ananas, des figues et
des oranges, des citrons et des noix de coco. Les vêtements leur viennent
uniquement des navires qui passent, et qui prennent en échange des
provisions fraîches. Il n’y a pas de sources dans l’île, mais comme il pleut
en général une fois par mois, ils ont abondance d’eau. Cependant, parfois,
dans les premières années, ils ont souffert de la soif. Les liqueurs
alcooliques ne sont employées que comme remèdes, et un ivrogne est chose
inconnue.
«Quels sont les objets nécessaires que les habitants ont à se procurer du
dehors? Le mieux est de voir ceux fournis par nous en échange de
provisions fraîches: c’est de la flanelle, de la serge, des vrilles, des bottines,
des peignes et du savon. Il leur faut aussi des cartes et des ardoises pour
leur école. Les outils de toute sorte sont reçus avec plaisir. Je leur ai fait
livrer un drapeau national de notre matériel, afin qu’ils puissent le déployer
à l’arrivée des vaisseaux, et une longue scie, dont ils avaient grand besoin.
Cela sera approuvé, je crois, de Vos Seigneuries. Si la généreuse nation
anglaise était seulement informée des besoins de cette petite colonie si
méritante, il y serait pourvu avant peu.
«Le service divin a lieu chaque dimanche à dix heures et demie et à trois
heures, dans l’édifice bâti pour cet usage par John Adams, et où il officia
jusqu’à sa mort en 1829. Il se célèbre exactement suivant la liturgie de
l’église anglicane; le pasteur actuel est M. Simon Young. Il est fort respecté.
Un cours d’instruction religieuse a lieu tous les mercredis. Tous ceux qui
peuvent y assister le font. Il y a aussi une réunion générale de prière le
premier vendredi de chaque mois. Les prières familiales se disent dans
chaque maison. C’est la première chose qu’on fait au réveil, la dernière
avant le coucher. On ne prend sa part d’aucun repas sans invoquer les
bénédictions divines avant et après. Nul ne peut parler sans profond respect
des vertus religieuses de ces insulaires. Des gens dont le plus grand plaisir
et le plus estimé est de communier par la prière avec Dieu, et de s’unir pour
chanter des hymnes à sa gloire, des gens qui sont, en outre, aimables, actifs,
et probablement plus exempts de vice que toute autre réunion d’hommes,
n’ont pas besoin de prêtres parmi eux.»
J’arrive maintenant à une phrase, dans le rapport de l’amiral, qu’il laissa
tomber de sa plume négligemment, j’en suis sûr, et sans arrière-pensée.
Voici la phrase:
«Un étranger, un Américain, est venu s’installer dans l’île. C’est une
acquisition douteuse.»
Une acquisition douteuse, certes! Le capitaine Ornsby, du navire
américain Hornet, toucha à Pitcairn quatre mois à peine après la visite de
l’amiral, et par les faits qu’il y a recueillis, nous sommes tout à fait
renseignés, maintenant, sur cet Américain. Réunissons ces faits, par ordre
chronologique. Le nom de l’Américain était Butterworth Stavely. Dès qu’il
eut fait connaissance avec tout le peuple,—et cela, naturellement, ne lui
demanda que quelques jours,—il s’occupa de se mettre en faveur par tous
les moyens possibles. Il devint excessivement populaire, et très considéré.
La première chose qu’il fit, en effet, fut d’abandonner ses mœurs profanes
et de mettre toutes ses énergies dans l’exercice de la religion. Il était sans
cesse à lire sa Bible, à prier, à chanter des hymnes, à demander les
bénédictions divines. Pour la prière, nul n’avait plus de facilité que lui.
Personne ne pouvait prier aussi longtemps et aussi bien.
 Enfin, quand il pensa que son projet était mûr, il commença à semer
secrètement des germes de mécontentement parmi le peuple. Son dessein
caché était, dès le début, de renverser le gouvernement; mais il le garda
pour lui, comme il convenait, pendant quelque temps. Il usa de moyens
divers avec les différents individus. Il éveilla le mécontentement de certains
en appelant leur attention sur la brièveté des offices le dimanche. Il
prétendit que, chaque dimanche, on dût avoir trois offices de trois heures
chacun, au lieu de deux. Beaucoup de gens, en secret, avaient eu la même
idée auparavant; ils formèrent dès lors un parti occulte pour le triomphe de
ce projet. Il démontra à certaines des femmes qu’on ne leur accordait pas
assez de voix aux prières dans les réunions. Ainsi se forma un autre parti.
Aucune arme ne lui échappait. Il alla même jusqu’aux enfants, éveillant
dans leur cœur une amertume, parce que, trouva-t-il pour eux, l’école du
dimanche était trop courte. Cela fit un troisième parti.
Dès lors, chef de ces trois partis, il se trouva maître de la situation, et put
songer à la suite de son plan. Il ne s’agissait de rien moins que de la mise en
accusation du premier magistrat, James Russell Nickoy, homme
remarquable par son caractère et son talent, fort riche, car il possédait une
maison pourvue d’un salon, trois acres et demie de terrain planté d’ignames,
et le seul bateau de l’île, une baleinière. Malheureusement, un prétexte
d’accusation se présenta juste au même temps. Une des lois les plus vieilles
et les plus sacrées de l’île était celle sur la violation de propriété. On la
tenait en grand respect. Elle était le palladium des libertés populaires.
Quelque trente ans auparavant, un débat fort grave, qui tombait sous cette
loi, s’était présenté devant la cour. Il s’agissait d’un poulet appartenant à
Élizabeth Young (alors âgée de cinquante-huit ans, fille de John Mills, un
des révoltés du Bounty); le poulet passa sur des terres appartenant à Jeudi
Octobre Christian (âgé de vingt-neuf ans, petit-fils de Fletcher Christian, un
des révoltés). Christian tua le poulet. D’après la loi, Christian pouvait
garder le poulet, ou, à son choix, rendre sa dépouille mortelle au
propriétaire, et recevoir, en nature, des dommages-intérêts en accord avec le
dégât et le tort à lui causés par l’envahisseur. Le rapport de la cour
établissait que «le susdit Christian délivra la susdite dépouille mortelle à la
susdite Élizabeth Young, et demanda un boisseau d’ignames en réparation
du dommage causé». Mais Élizabeth Young trouva la demande exorbitante.
Les parties ne purent s’accorder, et Christian poursuivit. Il perdit son procès
en première instance; du moins on ne lui accorda qu’un demi-boisseau