Augustus John (122 page)

At the Theatre Royal in Dublin he had been used to seeing pantomimes, farces and melodramas involving villainous disguises and the convolutions of dense intrigue. In 1870 the great touring actor, Barry Sullivan, had arrived. George joined the crowds, emerging from the theatre with ‘all my front buttons down the middle of my back’. Of all the travelling stars, Sullivan seemed to him incomparably the grandest. A man of gigantic personality, he was the last in a dynasty of rhetorical and hyperbolical actors that had begun with Burbage.

‘His stage fights in Richard III and Macbeth appealed irresistibly to a boy spectator like myself: I remember one delightful evening when two inches of Macbeth’s sword, a special fighting sword carried in that scene only, broke off and whizzed over the heads of the cowering pit (there were no stalls then) to bury itself deep in the front of the dress circle after giving those who sat near its trajectory more of a thrill than they had bargained for. Barry Sullivan was a tall powerful man with a cultivated resonant voice: his stage walk was the perfection of grace and dignity; and his lightning swiftness of action, as when in the last scene of Hamlet he shot up the stage and stabbed the king four times before you could wink, all
provided a physical exhibition which attracted audiences quite independently of the play...’

This was not a spectacle to George, but an experience. He could feel his blood quickening during the performance, his mind beating, hurrying. This was vicarious living at its most vigorous, where ‘existence touches you delicately to the very heart, and where mysteriously thrilling people, secretly known to you in dreams of your childhood, enact a life in which terrors are as fascinating as delights; so that ghosts and death, agony and sin, became, like love and victory, phases of an unaccountable ecstasy’. He forgot loneliness in this palace of dreams. When he came to write plays himself, he instinctively went back to the grand manner and heroic stage business he had seen from the pit of the Theatre Royal.

In 1874 George spent his summer holidays at Newry with his friend McNulty. McNulty had developed what he called ‘a morbid condition of nerves’. He was so sensitive to the earth’s rotation that he could not trust himself to lie down on a sofa without falling off. ‘I fancied I could see the sap circulating in plants and trees,’ he wrote. George’s scepticism, though not always comfortable, helped to reduce this tension. On their second day the two of them had their photographs taken and they talked of the inevitability of fame. Every evening they would write something different – ‘a short story, a comedy, a tragedy, a burlesque and so forth,’ McNulty remembered, ‘and the real joy of the event lay in reading and forcefully criticizing each other’s work. This series we called: “The Newry Nights’ Entertainment”.’

The following year McNulty was transferred back to Dublin and the two of them saw a good deal of each other. McNulty would call round at Harcourt Street to stagger through duets on the grand piano. George, he observed, ‘took little or no notice of his father who still spent his evenings poring miserably over his account books’. Otherwise, his glasses low on his nose, his head tilted back, he browsed before a newspaper or smoked his one clay pipe a day, breaking it when he had finished and throwing the fragments in the grate: ‘a lonely, sad little man,’ McNulty concluded.

George had resolved never to allow the diffidence he shared with his father to cripple him. He looked to his father as a warning; otherwise, like Lee, he looked to London.

His opportunity came early in 1876. Agnes, suffering from consumption, had been taken down to Balmoral House, a sanatorium on the Isle of Wight. Though he was now getting £84 a year at Uniacke Townshend, George felt more than ever unsatisfied there. One of his colleagues, an old book-keeper, had confided that he ‘suffered so much from cold feet that his life was miserable,’ Shaw recorded. ‘I, full of the fantastic mischievousness
of youth, told him that if he would keep his feet in ice-cold water every morning when he got up for two or three minutes, he would be completely cured.’ Shortly afterwards the man died. To his horror George was then offered his job. Charles Townshend wanted to install a relative as cashier and boot George upstairs to make room for him. But George refused and had to be moved, with an increased salary, to the position of general clerk. On 29 February 1876 he gave a month’s notice. ‘My reason is, that I object to receive a salary for which I give no adequate value,’ he wrote. ‘Not having enough to do, it follows that the little I have is not well done. When I ceased to act as Cashier I anticipated this, and have since become satisfied that I was right.’

This letter shows the paradoxical device of his new authority. It has the regretful air of an employer dismissing an employee. Its succinct superiority must have been galling. But anxious not to offend George’s Uncle Frederick at the Valuation Office, Charles Townshend offered him his job back as cashier. George thanked him – however ‘I prefer to discontinue my services’.

In retrospect G.B.S. applied a blinding Shavian polish to his arrival in England. Armed with the English language he proposed to advance on London and become ‘a professional man of genius’. ‘When I left Dublin I left (a few private friendships apart) no society that did not disgust me,’ he wrote. ‘To this day my sentimental regard for Ireland does not include the capital. I am not enamored of failure, of poverty, of obscurity, and of the ostracism and contempt which these imply; and these were all that Dublin offered to the enormity of my unconscious ambition.’

‘Like Hamlet I lack ambition and its push,’ he wrote. Yet it was not ambition he lacked: it was (like Hamlet) advancement. He insisted that he never struggled, but was pushed slowly up by the force of his ability. ‘It is not possible to escape from the inexorable obligation to succeed on your own merits,’ he confessed. He did not cross the Irish Sea for love of the English. ‘Emigration was practically compulsory,’ he told St John Ervine.

Agnes died of phthisis on 27 March. Between the two opportunities offered by her death and that of the book-keeper, George had never hesitated. Looking back on his twenty years in Ireland he summed up: ‘My home in Dublin was a torture and my school was a prison and I had to go through a treadmill of an office.’

He packed a carpet bag, boarded the North Wall boat and arrived in London. It was a fine spring day and he solemnly drove in a ‘growler’ from Euston to Victoria Grove. Shortly afterwards he travelled down to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight following Agnes’s funeral there. The family selected a headstone and an epitaph to be cut on it: ‘
TO BE
WITH CHRIST WHICH IS FAR BETTER
’ – from a passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians
where Paul compares the folly of living with the wisdom of dying. Nearly sixty years later Shaw was to write to Margaret Mackail, exposing what he felt about his own childhood: ‘as the world is not at present fit for children to live in why not give the little invalids a gorgeous party, and when they have eaten and danced themselves to sleep, turn on the gas and let them all wake up in heaven?’

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D
ESECRATION OF
S
AINT
P
AUL
’
S

To the Art-Students of London

Since the so-called decorations of Saint Paul’s have been encroaching actually on the substructure of the mighty Dome itself, a great feeling of indignation has arisen. The atrocities of the design, the meanness of the patterns, the crudity of the colour, and the vulgarity of the whole is too evident to those who have inspected the results of Sir William Richmond’s scheme of decoration. Even
good
decoration would be out of place, superfluous, and utterly contrary to the expressed wish of Wren.

But what are we to say to the treatment in Romanesque Style of a Renaissance building, the Petroleum Stencilled Frieze (already condemned), the false accentuation of architectural features nullifying the Master’s intended effect, but, above all, the audacious demolishing of the stonework of the structure itself to provide a bed for these detestable Mosaics?

We feel assured none who have at heart the preservation of the Masterpiece can submit to see the glorious memory of its illustrious Author thus insulted, or can do less than their utmost to avert what can only be regarded as a National Calamity.

The initiators of this movement call upon the Students of the various Art Schools in London to send their representatives to join with them in determining the most effective means of making their protest.

A Meeting will be held to that end at Mr A. Rothenstein’s Rooms, No. 20 Fitzroy Street, Fitzroy Square, W., on Saturday, May 6. from 5.P.M. till ———

Secretary, MAX WEST,

Slade School, Gower Street.

J
OHN
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S
P
ICTURES AT THE
N
EW
E
NGLISH
A
RT
C
LUB

As a non-member, John exhibited the following pictures at the NEAC: