Complete Works of James Joyce (356 page)

Bernard Shaw’s Battle with the Censo
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‘THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET’

1909

Dublin, 31 August

There is one gay week every year in the Dublin calendar, the last week of August, in which the famous Horse Show draws to the Irish capital a vari-coloured crowd, of many languages, from its sister island, from the continent, and even from far-off Japan. For a few days the tired and cynical city is dressed like a newly- wed bride. Its gloomy streets swarm with a feverish life, and an unaccustomed uproar breaks its senile slumber.

This year, however, an artistic event has almost eclipsed the importance of the Show, and all over town they are talking about the clash between Bernard Shaw and the Viceroy. As is well known, Shaw’s latest play, ‘The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet’, was branded with the mark of infamy by the Lord Chamberlain of England, who banned its performance in the United Kingdom. The censor’s decision probably came as no surprise to Shaw, because the same censor did the same thing to two other of his theatrical works, ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ and the very recent ‘Press Cuttings’; and Shaw probably considers himself more or less honoured by the arbitrary proclamation which has condemned his comedies, together with Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’, Tolstoy’s ‘The Power of Darkness’, and Wilde’s ‘Salome’.

However, he would not give up, and he found a way to elude the frightened vigilance of the censor. By a strange chance, the city of Dublin is the only place in all the British territory in which the censor has no power; in fact, the old law contains these words: ‘except the city of Dublin.’ Shaw, then, offered his play to the company of the Irish National Theatre, which accepted it and announced its performance just as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The censor was apparently rendered powerless. Then the Viceroy of Ireland intervened to uphold the prestige of authority. There was a lively exchange of letters between the representative of the King and the writer of comedy, severe and threatening on the one side, insolent and scoffing on the other, while Dubliners, who care nothing for art but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy. Shaw held fast, insisting on his rights, and the little theatre was so filled at the first performance that it literally sold out more than sevenjtimes over.

A heavy crowd thronged about the Abbey Theatre that evening, and a cordon of giant guards maintained order; but it was evident at once that no hostile demonstration would be made by the select public who jammed every nook of the little
avant garde
theatre. In fact, the report of the evening performance mentioned not even the lightest murmur of protest; and at the curtain fall, a thunderous applause summoned the actors for repeated curtain calls.

Shaw’s comedy, which he describes as a sermon in crude melodrama, is, as you know, in a single act. The action unfolds in a wild and woolly city of the Far West, the protagonist is a horse thief, and the play limits itself to his trial. He has stolen a horse which he thought belonged to his brother, to repay himself for a sum taken from him unjustly. But while he is fleeing from the city, he meets a woman with a sick baby. She wants to get back to town in order to save the life of her child, and, moved by her appeal, he gives her the horse. Then he is captured and taken to the city to be tried. The trial is violent and arbitrary. The sheriff acts as prosecutor, shouting at the accused, banging the table, and threat ening witnesses with revolver in hand. Posnet, the thief, sets forth some primitive theology. The moment of sentimental weakness in which he yielded to the prayers of a poor mother has been the crisis of his life. The finger of God has touched his brain. He no longer has the strength to live the cruel, animal life he had led before this encounter. He breaks out into long, disjointed speeches (and it is here that the pious English censor covered his ears), which are theological insofar as their subject is God, but not very churchly in diction. In the sincerity of his convictions, Posnet resorts to the language of the mining camp; and, among other reflections, when he is trying to say that God works secretly in the hearts of men, to the language of horse thieves.

The play ends happily. The baby which Posnet tried to save dies, and the mother is apprehended. She tells her story to the court and Posnet is acquitted. Nothing more flimsy can be imagined, and the playgoer asks himself in wonder why on earth the play was interdicted by the censor.

Shaw is right; it is a sermon. Shaw is a born preacher. His lively and talkative spirit cannot stand to be subjected to the noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwriting. Indulging himself in wandering prefaces and extravagant rules of drama, he creates a dramatic form which is much like a dialogue novel. He has a sense of situation, rather than of drama logically and ethically led to a conclusion. In this case he has dug up the central incident of his ‘Devil’s Disciple’ and transformed it into a sermon. The transformation is too abrupt to be convincing as a sermon, and the art is too poor to make it convincing as drama.

And may not this play reflect a crisis in the mind of its writer? Earlier, at the end of ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, the crisis was set forth. Shaw, as well as his latest protagonist, has had a profane and unruly past. Fabianism, vegetarianism, prohibitionism, music, painting, drama — all the progressive movements in art and politics — have had him as champion. And now, perhaps, some divine finger has touched his brain, and he, in the guise of Blanco Posnet, is shewn up.

James Joyce

The Home Rule Come
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1910

The idea of Irish autonomy has gradually become surrounded with a pallid and tenuous substantiality, and just a few weeks ago, when a royal decree dissolved the English parliament, something pale and wavering was seen dawning in the East. It was the Home Rule comet, vague, distant, but as punctual as ever. The sovereign Word which in an instant made twilight fall on the demi-gods at Westminster had called from the darkness and the void the obedient and unknowing star.

This time, however, it could be made out very poorly because the skies were cloudy. The fog which usually covers the British shores grew so thick that it cloaked them in a fixed and impenetrable cloud bank, behind which could be heard the orchestral music of the electoral elements in discord — the fiddles of the nobles agitated and hysterical, the raucous horns of the people, and, from time to time, a passing phrase on the Irish flutes.

The uncertainty of the political situation in England is evident from the fact that their agencies hurl forth from morning to night enigmatic dispatches which contradict themselves. In fact, the tenor of the debates held recently in the United Kingdom makes an impartial examination of the situation very difficult. Aside from the three party heads, Asquith, Balfour, and Redmond, who always know how to maintain a certain dignified bearing not unbecoming to fatuous leaders, the electoral campaign which has just ended indicates a significant lowering of the tone of English public life. Has such a speech ever been heard from the lips of the Chancellor of the Exchequer? the Conservatives are asked. But the jibes of the warlike Welsh minister pale before the vulgar vituperations of Conservatives like representative Smith, and the well known lawyer Carson and the director of the ‘National Review’, while the two Irish factions, forgetting their common enemy, have waged underground war in an attempt to exhaust the gamut of coarse language.

Another cause of confusion is that the English parties no longer answer to their names. It is the Radicals who want to continue the present political tariff policy of free trade, while the Conservatives champion tariff reform at the top of their voices. It is the Conservatives who want to take away the legislative power from Parliament and give it instead to the nation as a whole by means of the plebiscite. Finally, it is the clerical and intransigent Irish party which comprises the majority of an anticlerical and Liberal government.

This paradoxical situation is accurately reflected in the characters of the party heads. Not to speak of Chamberlain or Rosebery, who have gone, respectively, from extreme Radicalism and Glad- stonian Liberalism to the ranks of Imperialism (while the young minister Churchill has made his ideal voyage in the opposite direction), we find the causes of Anglican Protestantism and of conciliatory Nationalism led by a religious renegade and a converted Fenian.

Balfour, in fact, a worthy disciple of the Scottish school, is a sceptic rather than a politician, who, urged more by the instinct for nepotism innate in the Cecil family than by individual choice, assumed the leadership of the Conservative party after the death of his uncle, the lamented Marquis of Salisbury. Not a day passes that the reporters fail to point out his distracted and quibbling attitude. His tricks make his own followers laugh. And even if the orthodox army has met with three consecutive clashes under his vacillating flag, each more serious than the last, his biographer (who perhaps will be another member of the Cecil family) will be able to say of him that in his philosophical essays he dissected and laid bare with great art the intimate fibres of the religious and psychological principles whose champion he became by a turn of the parliamentary wheel. O’Brien, the ‘leader’ of the Irish dissidents, who calls his band of 10 representatives the ‘All for Ireland’ party, has become what every good fanatic becomes when his fanaticism dies before he does. Now he fights in league with the Unionist magistrates who would probably have issued a warrant for his arrest twenty years ago; and nothing remains of his fiery youth except those violent outbursts which make him seem epileptic.

In the midst of such confusions it is easy to understand how the dispatches contradict themselves, and announce that Home Rule is at the door, and write its obituary six hours later. The uninitiated cannot be too sure in the case of comets, but at any rate the passage of the celestial body so long awaited has been communicated to us by the official observatory.

* * * *

Last week, the Irish leader Redmond proclaimed the happy news to a crowd of fishermen. English democracy, he said, has broken the power of the Lords once and for all, and within a few weeks, perhaps, Ireland will have her independence. Now, it is necessary to be a voracious nationalist to be able to swallow such a mouthful. As soon as it is seated on the ministerial benches, the Liberal cabinet will be confronted by a conglomeration of troubles, among which the foremost is the double balance. When this matter is settled for good or for bad, peers and commoners will declare a treaty of peace in honour of the coronation of George V. So far the way is clear, but only prophets can tell us where a government as heterogeneous as the present one will end. To remain in power, will it try to appease the Welsh and the Scots with ecclesiastical and agrarian measures? If the Irish exact autonomy as the price for the support of their votes, will the cabinet hasten to blow the dust off one of their many Home Rule bills and present it to the House again?

The history of Anglo-Saxon liberalism teaches us the answer to these and similarly ingenuous questions very clearly. The Liberal ministers are scrupulous men, and once again the Irish problem will cause symptomatic rifts in the body of the cabinet, in the face of which it will plainly appear that the English electorate really did not authorize the government to legislate in its favour. And, following the Liberal strategy (which aims to wear down the separatist sentiment slowly and secretly, while creating a new, eager social class, dependent, and free from dangerous enthusiasms, by means of partial concessions), if the government introduces a reform bill, or the semblance of one, which Ireland will haughtily refuse, will not that be the propitious moment for the intervention of the Conservative party? Faithful to its cynical tradition of bad faith, will it not take this occasion to declare the Irish dictatorship intolerable, and start a campaign to reduce the number of Irish members from 80 to 40 on the basis of the depopulation, more unique than rare in a civilized country, which was and still is the bitter fruit of misgovernment?

The connection, then, between the abolition of the Lords’ veto and the granting of autonomy to the Irish is not as immediate as some would have us believe. In the final count, that is the business of the English themselves, and admitting that the English people no longer have the worship for their spiritual and temporal fathers that they once had, it is still probable that they will proceed with the reform of the upper house as slowly and cautiously as they are proceeding with the reform of their medieval laws, with the reform of their pompous and hypocritical literature, with the reform of their monstrous judicial system. And in anticipation of these reforms, it will matter very little to the credulous ploughman in Ireland whether Lord Lansdowne or Sir Edward Grey rules the lot of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

* * * *

The fact that Ireland now wishes to make common cause with British democracy should neither surprise nor persuade anyone. For seven centuries she has never been a faithful subject of England. Neither, on the other hand, has she been faithful to herself. She has entered the British domain without forming an integral part of it. She has abandoned her own language almost entirely and accepted the language of the conqueror without being able to assimilate the culture or adapt herself to the mentality of which this language is the vehicle. She has betrayed her heroes, always in the hour of need and always without gaining recompense. She has hounded her spiritual creators into exile only to boast about them. She has served only one master well, the Roman Catholic Church, which, however, is accustomed to pay its faithful in long term drafts.

What long term alliance can exist between this strange people and the new Anglo-Saxon democracy? The phrase-makers who speak so warmly about it today will soon see (if they do not see it already) that between the English nobles and the English workers there is a mysterious communion of blood; and that the highly praised Marquis of Salisbury, a refined gentleman, spoke not only for his caste but for his race when he said: ‘Let the Irish stew in their own juice.

James Joyce