BERNARD SHAW AND REPARTEE: UNDESERVING SUCH PRAISE.

A few weeks ago, my faithful Google Alerts brought to my email inbox an article in The New Indian Express that illustrates the concept of repartee by providing a number of examples. Notably, two of them have Bernard Shaw as one of the necessary protagonists. The first of them has already been discussed here, and has been discarded as completely apocryphal. The other one, however, I had never heard of. It goes like this: 

"Cornelia Otis Skinner won critical acclaim in the lead role of Shaw’s play Candida. Shaw cabled, “Excellent. Greatest.” Skinner, overjoyed, replied, “Undeserving such praise.” Shaw cabled back, “I meant the play.” Pat came the reply, “So did I.”"

If you Google the key words in this exchange, you will quickly realize that the anecdote has been quoted countless times, even if we only list articles that are available online, like this one, this one, or this one. However, no source is provided in any of the instances I've come across. Not even in books that claim to have researched the question, or in the secondary sources they cite.  

Of course, the first thing I did was to check my database and, there it was! There is at least one book that makes reference to this witty repartee. Although, as we shall see, it is not the most reliable of sources. The exact details follow. 

On page 249 of Allan Chappelow's Shaw the Villager and Human Being, we read how Dr. William Maxwell recounts a story that Shaw told him when he was staying with him in Edimburgh: 

"The scene was the 90's, when he was a music critic. He had been invited to a soirée in the house of a noted society lady. She had engaged a violinist (in whose career she had taken an interest) to entertain her guests—there were hundreds of them—and at the end of the evening, asked Shaw what he thought of her protégé. He replied that the violinist reminded him of Paderewski. 'But Paderewski is not a violinist,' she said. ' Exactly,' replied G.B.S. !"

This paragraph ends with a footnote where the author goes on to say that "this amusing story prompted me to tell Dr. Maxwell the following one of a similar flavour." Of course, "the following one" is the story we have quoted at the beginning of this post.

Admittedly, Chappelow does not provide any other source but his own knowledge, and we cannot take his words as confirmation that the exchange between Shaw and Skinner ever took place. As we all know, Chappelow made Shaw's aquaintance when he visited him in 1950 (the year of Shaw's death) and took the last known photographs of him. Therefore, he can only have learned about this anecdote from secondary sources, and it is unlikely that Shaw should have ever mentioned this to him in person - Chappelow would  have probably included that information in his book.

In all, it seems that this quotation may well be apocryphal or, ultimately, impossible to confirm. There is nonetheless evidence to give credibility to this repartee. In 1943 (during Shaw's and Skinner's own lifetimes) Isabella Taves published a book entitled Successful Women and How They Attained Success. The chapter devoted to Cornelia Otis Skinner (pp. 69-78) also contains the same story, practically in the same words. 

Although I know of no data to confirm this, it is plausible to believe that either Shaw or Skinner (or both) might have come across this book - if the author did not send a complimentary copy herself. Wouldn't they have corrected Taves if the story weren't true? Who knows?

WE HAVE NO MORE RIGHT TO CONSUME HAPPINESS WITHOUT PRODUCING IT THAN TO CONSUME WEALTH WITHOUT PRODUCING IT

Shaw aficionados will surely know that the above quotation is from Candida (1898). Morell was explaining his views on happiness and how "An honest man feels that he must pay Heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard, unselfish work to make others happy." That is the rationale for his words, although there's always room for some socialist / anti-capitalist discourse. 

By the way, if you want to see some really nice photos of two German productions of Candida, the Deutsche Fotothek contains a large collection of digitized Shaviana, including pictures of the playwright and productions of many of his plays.  

However, my interest in beginning with the Candida quotation is purely syntactic. As I write these lines, King Philip VI of Spain is ascending to the throne of my country, which reminds me of another Shaw quotation with a very similar syntactic structure:

"The established Government has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the weather."

These words, taken from Shaw's A Manifesto. Fabian Tract 2 (1884), reveal themselves as particularly relevant, now that the Spanish government - just as all the other governments in monarchies all over the world experience every so often - has suddenly realized they are also subjects of a monarch that embodies the State. Of course, Shaw was probably referring to the transiency of governments (whether democratic or not) - the State being the only relatively permanent institution. 

Well, at least we're lucky that the new king  only has two daughters, for we learnt from Shaw that 

"Women make the best sovereigns. The Salic law is a mistake: it should be the other way about. Constitutional monarchy is not a man’s job: it is a woman’s. The relation of a king to his ministers is intolerable: the relation of a queen to them is much better."

These words have been extracted from a 1913 letter to Sylvia Brooke, quoted in Stanley Weintraub's Shaw's People: Victoria to Churchill, and remain the only consolation for many in Spain. However, it has always been the custom everywhere not to follow Shaw's advice, and so we find ourselves "up to our necks in trouble."