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1 IIS LIFE AND WORKS
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A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY
(AUTHORIZED)
BY
^HIBALD HENDERSON. MA. , Ph.D.
Of the University of North Carolir.it.
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in the text.
Cincinnati
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PRINTED AT THB CHAPEL RIVER PRESS,
KINGSTON, SURREY, ENGLAND.
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AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
More than six years ago I conceived the idea of writing a book
about Bernard Shaw. The magnitude of the undertaking and
the elusiveness of the subject, had I realized them then in their
full significance, might well have made me pause. My earliest
interest in his work, aroused by his thoughtful laughter and
piqued by his elfish impudence, convinced me that this re-
markable talent was like no other I had known.
In characteristic style, Mr. Shaw once gave the following
fantastic account of the evolution of the present work. A } r oung
American professor, Shaw explained, wished to write a book
about him. Originally, he thought of beginning his task by
writing an article for a daily newspaper. But so rapidly did the
material grow that he soon saw the necessity of expanding the
newspaper article into a long essay for a monthly review. When
the essay was completed, in view of the mass of material in his
hands, it appeared totally inadequate to express what he really
wished to say about Bernard Shaw. It then occurred to him to
write a short book entitled " G. B. S." Alas ! This plan had
also to be relinquished, for it was now manifest that in no such
small compass was it possible to do justice to his subject. At last
he hit upon the brilliant scheme of his final adoption : he would
write a history of modern thought in twenty volumes. After
considering the forerunners of his hero in the first nineteen
volumes, he would devote the twentieth solely to the treatment
of George Bernard Shaw.
Such is the history of the genesis of this book — as narrated
by Shaw in the well-known Milesian manner. His whimsicalities
find gay expression in the invention of such fantastic stories,
which delight his auditors and exasperate only the persons
concerning whom the invention is concocted. For example, Mr.
Shaw once laughingly declared that " Henderson began by hailing
me as an infant prodigy, and ended by pronouncing me a genius."
And he delights in retailing the story of my chivalrously coming
vu
Author's Introduction
to his rescue under the impression that he was an unknown and
struggling dramatist who sorely needed, and greatly deserved,
enthusiastic championship.
The real history of this biography, if not so interesting or
amusing, at least possesses the merit of greater accuracy. I was
first drawn to Shaw, not because he was a Socialist, a publicist,
an economist. I was concerned with neither his fame nor his
obscurity. I had seen his plays produced in America, had fol-
lowed the ups and downs of his career as a dramatist, and was
marking the rise of his star successively in Austria and Germany.
The Shaw who caught and held my interest was the dramatist
of a new type. I planned writing a brief study of Bernard Shaw
and his plays less comprehensive in scope even than the sub-
sequent studies of Holbrook Jackson, Gilbert Chesterton and
Julius Bab. Mr. Shaw furnished me with a brief outline of his
career and I set to work. After studying his works for some
months, I sent a series of queries to Mr. Shaw. Fear fell upon
me when, some time later, I received from him a card saying that
he had only come to the forty-first page of his reply; and he
assured me that if this business was to come off, it might as well
be done thoroughly. Fear was turned to consternation when
the big budget finally arrived. " I know that you thought you
were dealing with a new dramatist," wrote Mr. Shaw, " whereas,
to myself, all the fuss about Candida was only a remote ripple
from the splashes I made in the days of my warfare long ago.
I do not think what you propose is important as my biography,
but a thorough biography of any man who is up to the chin in
the life of his time as I have been is worth writing as a historical
document ; and, therefore, if you still care to face it, I am willing
to give you what help I can. Indeed, you can force my hand to
some extent, for any story that you start will pursue me to all
eternity ; and if there is to be a biography, it is worth my while
to make it as accurate as possible."
In this way my original plan was developed and expanded.
Mr. Shaw's abundant sympathy and encouragement ; the over-
flowing measure of material afforded me ; the insight into a life
and a period of tremendous significance and vitality; all these
combined to offer an opportunity not to be neglected. My
interest in the subject deepened with my knowledge. It became
my aim to write — not a Rougon-Macquart history of modern
a*.
VUl
l5£
HI
fc
f
Author's Introduction
thought in twenty volumes — but an account of the movements
of a most interesting period, the last quarter of the nineteenth
and the opening decade of the twentieth centuries, d propos of
Bernard Shaw. As the work progressed, Shaw warned me —
and the reporters — that in attempting his biography I had under-
taken a " terrific task," an opinion endorsed by others. I
remember one day being introduced to Mr. Bram Stoker as
Bernard Shaw's biographer; whereupon he remarked with
genuine feeling in his tone : " I can only say that you have my
profoundest sympathy ! " Soon after I had fairly embarked upon
the undertaking, in fact, Shaw pointed out to me its magnitude.
" I want you to do something that will be useful to yourself and
to the world," he wrote in February, 1905 ; " and that is, to make
me a mere peg on which to hang a study of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, especially as to the collectivist move-
ment in politics, ethics and sociology; the Ibsen-Nietzschean
movement in morals ; the reaction against the materialism of Marx
and Darwin ; the Wagnerian movement in music ; and the anti-
romantic movement (including what people call realism, mate-
rialism and impressionism) in literature and art."
During the progress of the work I beheld Shaw conquer America,
then Germany, then England, and, lastly, the Scandinavian
countries and Continental Europe. I realized that my subject,
beginning as a somewhat obscure Irish author, had thrown oft
the garb of submerged renown, taken the public by storm,
and become the most universally popular living dramatist, and
the most frequently paragraphed man in the world. No British
dramatist — not even Shakespeare ! — had conquered the world
during his lifetime ; yet Shaw, just past fifty, had succeeded in
turning this cosmic trick. Clippings, pictures, journals and
books poured in upon me from every quarter of the globe. I
discovered that Shaw was a man with a past as well as a genius
with a future, and I realized the truth of his cryptic boast that
he had lived for three centuries.
Now and then, to relieve the burden of my thoughts, I would
write an essay for some German, French, or American review.
But I only met with base ingratitude from the subject of the
essay. " Your articles have been a most fearful curse to me,"
Mr. Shaw wrote me on one occasion, after the appearance of an
article in which I had referred to his unobtrusive philanthropy.
ix
Author's Introduction
" For instance, the day before yesterday I got a typical letter.
The writer has nine children ; has lost his wife suddenly, and was
on the point of shooting himself in desperation for want of fifteen
pounds to get him out of his difficulties, when he happened to
come on a copy of your article. He instantly felt that here was
the man to give him the fifteen pounds and save his life. He is
only one out of a dozen who have had the same idea. I shall
refer them all to you with assurances that you have read your
own character into mine, and are a man with a feeling heart, a
full pocket, and a ready hand to give to the afflicted."
When the book was well under way, I came to England, at
Mr. Shaw's invitation, to " study my subject." My views of his
work and genius remained fundamentally the same, though the
personal contact with one of the most vivid and remarkable per-
sonalities of our time, quite naturally brought about some marked
modifications of my more remote impressions, and corrected some
of t,he minor misunderstandings which are inevitable in the absence
of a personal acquaintance. Many passages in his works, many
phases of his personality, hitherto obscure or incomprehensible,
became clear to me. I learned the meaning of his plays, the
purport of his philosophy, and the objects of his life not from my
viewpoint alone, but from his own. In the quiet of Ayot, he read
the finished chapters of the biography, and with frequent criticism
and comment helped me to a new and larger comprehension of
his life and work.
On my return to America I once more approached my task —
this time with the illumination of personality, and with the deeper
knowledge of his own interpretation of his life and works, even
though Mr. Shaw's views might not, and often did not, entirely
tally with my own. The biography was now written finally, from
the first chapter to the last. It has all been subjected to him for
scrutiny ; and I have profited greatly by his comment, suggestion
and criticism — whether of harsh condemnation, sharp ridicule, or
even mild approval.
One who has pursued the errant course of a Will-o'-the-wisp
may understand somewhat of my effort to follow the devious route
of G. B. S. With interest, though I confess at times with dwind-
ling patience, I have followed the lure of that occasionally some-
what impishly un-kindly light, " o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and
torrent," till after the fashion of his kind, he abandoned me,
x
I Ipf-i v
SHAW AND THE BIOGRAPHER.
.1 St. Lawrence. HertlorcUhlre. lull, 1907.
n a pheleimph laken bj Mn. Bernard Sh«v
ci
Author's Introduction
wayfaring, on the brink of the abyss to save my neck as best I
might. Which things are a parable.
Characteristically, and, it must be admitted, in a sense justly,
he remarks that a biography of a living man cannot be finished
till he is dead, or words to that effect. But the chances there are
against the Biographer as well as the Biographed ; and I have no
fancy, I confess, that the book should be, as he once maliciously
t rophesied, " a posthumous work for both of us," nor that he
should be justified in his presentiment that we should " both die
the moment we finished it."
While nothing but death can fitly end a man's life, being no
Boswell, and having my own life to attend to as well as his, I
have brought these " twenty volumes " to a close. A man who
has already, by his own account, " lived three centuries," is as
likely to live three more ; but it is less probable that I shall see
the end of them. So I take Time by the forelock and write finis
to a contribution which can only hope to cover the first three
centuries.
" Who is to tackle Mr. Bernard Shaw," Mr. Augustine Birrell
once asked, " and assign to him his proper place in the providen-
tial order of the world ? " This work is in no sense an effort to
assign to Bernard Shaw his " proper place in the providential
order of the world." Such a task it is impossible to accomplish
so long as Shaw lives to belie it. No more is it possible to say
the final word about any genius in mid-career with limitless possi-
bilities before him. Shaw's masterpiece-— even a series of master-
pieces ! — perhaps remains to be written. His career may have
only just begun.
This book is designed to give an authoritative account, bio-
graphical and critical, of Bernard Shaw's work, art, philosophy
and life up to the present time. Perhaps its appearance is not
premature. Shaw has suffered no little from the Shavians. He
has served more than once as an excuse for propaganda and
counter-propaganda. But save for one or two glaring exceptions,
the fatuities of the cult, and the image of the shrine and burning
candles have in large measure vanished — it is hoped, to return no
more. The time seems ripe for conscientious and thoughtful
consideration of the man and his work, in relation to the thought
movement of our time — irrespective of political bias and personal
prejudice. Perhaps the portrait, though neither " disparaging "
xi
Author's Introduction ,
nor " unflattering/' may present the " real Shaw/' if more " unex-
pectedly/' perhaps no less truly, in that I am " a stranger to the
Irish-British environment."
If I have succeeded in removing a legendary figure from the
atmosphere of contemporary mythology, and in portraying the
real man in the light of common day, then an earnest search for
the aurea media of true criticism will not have proved wholly
fruitless. I hope I may have succeeded, in some adequate degree,
in exhibiting in their true colours, what Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
once justly described to me in a letter as " that humour and that
courage which have cleansed so much of the intellect of to-day."
PREFACE
I have neither space nor words to express, in full measure,
my gratitude and indebtedness to the many friends, critics,
scholars and men of letters who have aided me in the preparation
of this work. First of all I wish to thank Mr. Shaw himself for
an assistance as generous in spirit as it has been valuable in fact.
The voluminous correspondence filled with criticism,' exposition
and reminiscence ; the immense trouble taken in placing ample
materials at my disposal ; the personal assistance in detailed
discussion of the every feature of the work ; the kindly sympathy
and encouragement — all this, and much more of a personal
nature of which I shall not permit myself to speak here, has
made this work possible, has made its preparation a sincere
pleasure, has made it, in a measure, what it is. In the
beginning, he expressed his willingness to give me what help he
could, saying he felt that " it was worth his while to make it
(this biography) as accurate as possible.' 1 This he has done in
full measure. For the views expressed in this biography
Mr. Shaw is in no sense responsible. On many points we are
in hearty disagreement. At this place, I take pleasure in
expressing my indebtedness to Mrs. Shaw, for kind assistance
and helpful suggestions.
Valuable assistance, especially in connection with the earlier
stages of Shaw's career as a dramatist, was derived from
Mr. William Archer's collection of Shaviana, which he freely and
most generously placed at my disposal. The chapter on Shaw
as a critic of music I could not have written without the articles
loaned me by Mr. Archer. I am likewise greatly indebted to
Mr. Holbrook Jackson, who gave me free access to his collection
of Shaviana, and loaned me valuable material hitherto unknown
to me, or inaccessible. During the entire course of the preparation
of the present work, I have received the counsel and aid of that
scholarly student of the drama, Mr. James Piatt White, of
• • •
xm
Preface
Buffalo, New York, who freely placed the services of himself
and his fine library of dramatic literature at my disposal.
To certain able students of Shaw's work, some of them not
known to me personally, and also to a few personal friends, I
am also especially indebted. To Mr. John Corbin, Professor
William Lyon Phelps and Professor £. £. Hale, Jr., in
connection with the chapters treating of the plays ; to Mr. James
Huneker, in connection with the chapter treating of Shaw as a
critic of music ; to the late Mr. Samuel L. Clemens and to Dr. C.
Alphonso Smith in connection with other critical and biographical
chapters — for reading these portions of the work, for helpful
criticism in some instances, for the loan of material in others,
to all my thanks are gratefully accorded. Needless to say, they
are in no wise responsible for any faults or errors of mine. In
various ways, in lesser degree, I am indebted to Miss Sally
Fairchild, Mr. Henry George, Jr., Mr. J. T. Grein and Mr.
Austin Lewis.
Of foreign critics, I wish especially to thank M. Augustin
Hamon, the French translator of Shaw's works, for his interesting
suggestions, his numerous acts of kindness, and for the rich mass
of documents embodying the continental criticism of Shaw with
which he has kept me supplied; and Herr Siegfried Trebitsch,
of Vienna, the German translator of Shaw's works, for detailed
information in regard to Shaw's position and recognition in
German Europe. I cannot permit myself to omit from the list
of those to whom I am especially indebted the names of M. Jean
Blum, formerly Professor at the Lycde, Oran, Algeria ; Herr
Heinrich Stiimcke, editor of Buhne und Wett ; Professor Paul
Haensel, of the University of Moscow ; Dr. Julius Brouti, of
Madrid , the Spanish translator of Shaw's works ; Herr Hugo
Vallentin, the Swedish translator of Shaw's works; Mr. J. M.
Borup, the Danish translator of Shaw's works ; Baron Reinhold
von Willebrand, editor of the Fitisk Tidskrift, Helsingfors,
Finland ; M. Auguste Filon, now resident in England, I believe ;
and Dr. Georg Brandes, of Copenhagen. In the text of the
present work, or in footnotes, I trust I have not failed to express
my indebtedness to everyone, not heretofore mentioned, who,
in one way or another, has aided me in the present work. I
should, however, like to acknowledge here my indebtedness to
the officials of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., of the
xiv
Preface
British Museum, and of the Cambridge University Library, for
their unfailing courtesy and helpfulness.
I have taken the utmost pains to include among the illustrations
the most notable representations ever made of Shaw — sculpture,
portrait, photograph and cartoon. Moreover, the thought of
presenting Shaw to the eye in the most characteristic and
representative way, as he appeared at various stages in his
career, has been constantly borne in mind. My thanks are now
expressed to M. Auguste Rodin for permission to reproduce a
photograph of his bronze bust of Shaw, the marble replica of
which, presented by Mr. Shaw, now stands in the Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin ; to Prince Paul Troubetzkoy,
Paris, for a photograph of his remarkable plaster bust of Shaw,
said to have been made in forty minutes ; to the Hon. Neville S.
Lytton, for permission to reproduce his unique portrait of
Mr. Shaw, after the Innocent X. of Velasquez ; to Mr. Bernard
Partridge for the loan of his admirable water-colour of Shaw ;
to Miss Jessie Holliday for the loan of her striking water-colour
of Shaw, her photo-drawing of Mr. Webb, and her sketch of Mr.
Archer ; to Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. £. T. Reed for permission
to reproduce cartoons of Shaw ; to Mr. H. G. Wells for permission
to reproduce his drawing of six Socialists ; to Mr. Joseph
Simpson, the artist, and Mr. J. Murray Allison, the owner, for the
loan of a black-and-white wash drawing — all the best of their
kind. I was so fortunate as to enlist the interest and co-opera-
tion of those two great American artist-photographers, Alvin
Langdon Coburn (London) and Eduard J. Steichen (Paris).
Notable portraits and pictures were taken by them especially,
for this work — one Lumiere autochrome and five monochromes
by Mr. Coburn, and two monochromes by Mr. Steichen. For
permission to photograph the first and last pages of the original
manuscript of Love Among the Artists — and also for supplying
me with much other valuable material — I am indebted to Mr.
D. J. Rider. I wish to express my thanks to Dr. M. L. Etting-
hausen, of Munich, who secured for me many playbills of the
productions of Shaw's plays in German Europe. I wish to
express my thanks also to Mr. Roger Ingpen, for his assistance
in the matter of illustrations. My thanks are likewise extended
to the proprietors of Punch and Vanity Fair for permission to
reproduce certain cartoons which originally appeared in those
xv
Preface
publications. In especial, I wish to thank Mrs. Shaw for her
intelligent aid in the selection of .likenesses of Mr. Shaw from
his own large collection.
In accordance with the original plan for the biography of
Mr. Shaw, the present volume was to contain an appendix*
treating chronologically and critically of the production of Shaw's
plays throughout the world, from the inception of his career as a
dramatist. It has proved advisable to publish this appendix
later in a separate, souvenir volume, embodying the history of
the dramatic movement inaugurated by Bernard Shaw. Conse-
quently, the chapters in the present volume dealing with Shaw's
plays are concerned primarily with critical discussion of the
genesis and art of the plays, touching upon their production only
in the most casual and adventitious way.
Mr. Shaw is fond of saying : " I am a typical Irishman ; my
family came from Hampshire." His lineal ancestor, Captain
William Shaw, was of Scotch descent ; lived in Hampshire,
England ; and in 1689 went to Ireland, where the family has
since lived. The strains in Mr. Shaw's ancestry are so compli-
cated and interwoven, that it has seemed important to publish
a genealogical chart of the Shaw family. The researches were
conducted by the expert genealogist, Rev. W. Ball Wright, M.A.,
Osbaldwick Vicarage, York, at the instance and under the
direction of Mr. Shaw himself. The chart, compiled from the
data of Mr. Wright, was prepared by the experts of the
Grafton Genealogical Press, New York.
To my wife, for her untiring assistance and inestimably
valuable criticism, I cannot cancel my debt of gratitude by
any expressions, however eloquent. I could not have written
this book without her aid. It is to her intellectual directness
and to her genius for suggestive criticism, that the present volume
owes very much of whatever merit it may possess.
Archibald Henderson.
Cambridge, England.
November 30th, 1910.
xvi
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
Author's Introduction vii
Preface ariii
I. — Dublin Days 3
II. — London 31
III. — The Novelist 59
IV. — The Fabian Society 89
V. — The Cart and Trumpet 121
VI. — Shavian Socialism j$L-
VII. — The Art Critic 193
VIII. — The Music Critic 229
IX. — The Dramatic Critic .250,
X. — The Playwright — I. 289
XI. — The Playwright — II 331
XII. — The Playwright — III 359
XIII. — The Technician 405
XIV. — The Dramatist 425
XV. — Artist and Philosopher 447
XVL— The Man 483
Appendix. — A Genealogy of the Shaw Family
xvh
ILLUSTRATIONS
facing p.
>>
i>
*>
»>
»>
>J
19
244
80
462
COVER DESIGN
A Satyric Mask. From an original in the Department of Greek
and Roman Antiquities, British Museum.
COLOURED PLATES
George Bernard Shaw. Lumi&re autochrome, by Alvin Langdon
Coburn ........ Frontispiece
Ahenobarbus at Rehearsal. Water-colour of G. B. Shaw,
by J. Bernard Partridge .... facing p.
PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES
George Bernard Shaw. " The Diabolonian." Monochrome
by Jiduard /. Steichen .... facing p.
George Bernard Shaw. " The Philosopher." Monochrome by
Alvin Langdon Coburn .... facing p.
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
Shaw and the biographer. Photo by Mrs. Bernard Shaw
facing p.
Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, George Carr Shaw, etc.
Shaw's first home in London (Osnaburgh Street)
Shaw at the age of twenty-three
Sidney Webb
Henry George .....
Karl Marx
Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2 .
The Socialist (George Bernard Shaw in 1891)
The Cart and Trumpet
A Study of Six Socialists
Cover design of Fabian Essays, 1890. By Walter Crane p.
Shaw's second home in London (29, Fitzroy Square) facing p.
William Morris .......
George Bernard Shaw. A Cartoon. By Max Beerbohm
Pope Innocent X. ..... .
The Modern Pope of Wit and Wisdom. By Neville
5. Lytton
John Bull's other Playwright. A Cartoon. By E.
T. Reed
xix
x
18
40
46
92
96
96
103
116
144
164
179
194
209
230
260
260
268
Illustrations
William Archer. By Jessie HoUiday . . facing p. 274
Bernard Shaw. Black and white wash sketch by Joseph
Simpson ....... „ 290
In Consultation (G. B. S. and the author). By is.
/. Steichen „ 332
H. Granville Barker. By A. L. Coburn . „ 368
Shaw's House at Ayot St. Lawrence „ 418
George Bernard Shaw. Photo by Histed . „ 430
Shaw's present home in London (10, Adelphi Terrace) „ 440
A plaster bust of Shaw. By Troubetzkoy . . „ 474
G. B. S. (A Cartoon). By Joseph Simpson p. 489
A bust of Shaw. By Rodin .... facing p. 492
A Prophet, the Press, and Some People. From a
water-colour by Jessie HoUiday. „ 498
FACSIMILES
MANUSCRIPTS
A page of a letter from Bernard Shaw to the
biographer facing p. viii
The first and last pages of original MS. of Love
Among the Artists pp. 65-66
PLAYBILLS, ETC
PAGE
Sunday Afternoon Lectures. March, 1886 .... 126
The Philanderer. Berlin ....... 297
Mrs. Warren* s Profession. Munich ..... 297
Arms and the Man. London. First performance . . 307
You Never Can Tell. Stockholm 321
The Man of Destiny. Frankfort 321
Candida. Paris 345
Candida. Brussels. 348
Man and Superman. New York 361
Candida. New York 374
The Doctor* s Dilemma. Cologne . 391
Arms and the Man. Frankfort 391
Press Cuttings. London 399
A Genealogical Chart facing p. 508
xx
DUBLIN DAYS
fi If religion is that which binds men to one another, and irreligion that
which sunders, then must I testify that I found the religion of my country
in its musical genius and its irreligion in its churches and drawing-rooms."
— In the Days of My Youth. By Bernard Shaw'. Mainly About People,
X898.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW:
HIS LIFE AND WORKS
CHAPTER I
IT is a circumstance of no little significance that Bernard Shaw
and Oscar Wilde, two dramatists whose plays have achieved
so notable a success on the European stage, should both have
been born in Dublin within two years of one another. It has
been the good fortune of no other living British or Irish dramatist
of our day to receive the enthusiastic acclaim of the most
cultured public of continental Europe. What more fitting and
natural than this sustention, by the countrymen of Swift and
Sheridan, of the Celtic reputation for brilliancy, cleverness and
wit?
George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26th, 1856 — well-nigh
a century later than his countryman and fellow-townsman,
Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Only one year before, in 1855,
was born Shaw's sole rival to the place of the foremost living
dramatist of the United Kingdom, Arthur Wing Pinero. It
is an interesting coincidence that the year which saw the
demise of that " first man of his century," Heinrich Heine, also
witnessed the birth of the brilliant and original spirit who is,
in some sense, his natural and logical successor : Bernard Shaw.
There is some suggestion of the workings of that wonderful law
of compensation, which Emerson preached with such high serious-
ness, in this synchronous relation of birth and death, connecting
Heine and Shaw. The circumstance might be said to proclaim
the unbroken continuity of the comic spirit.
Bernard Shaw possesses the unique faculty of befuddling the
2*
George Bernard Shaw
brains of more sane writers than any other living man. The
critic of conventional view-point is dismayed by the discovery
that Shaw is bound by no conventions whatever, with the
possible exception of the mechanical conventions of the stage.
Shaw is essentially an intellectual, not an emotional, talent ;
the critic of large imaginative sympathy discovers in him one
who on occasion disclaims the possession of imagination. Unlike
the idealist critic, Shaw is never a hero-worshipper : he derides
heroism and makes game of humanity. To the analytic critic,
with his schools, his classifications, his labellings, Shaw is the
elusive and unanalysable quantity — a fantastic original, a talent
wholly sui generis. With all his realism, he cannot be called the
exponent of a school. It would be nearer the truth to say that
he is himself a school.
It is futile to attempt to measure Shaw with the foot-rule of
prejudice or convention. Only by placing oneself exactly at
his peculiar point of view and recording the impressions received
without prejudice, preference or caricature, can one ever hope
to fathom the mystery of this disquieting intelligence. Most
mocking when most serious, most fantastic when most earnest ;
his every word belies his intent. The antipode to the farcicality
of pompous dulness, his gravity is that of the masquerader in
motley, the mordant humour of the licensed fool. Contradiction
between manner and meaning, between method and essence,
constitutes the real secret of his career. The truly noteworthy
consideration is not that Shaw is incorrigibly fantastic and
frivolous ; the alarming fact is that he is remarkably consistent
and profoundly in earnest. The willingness of the public to
accept the artist at his face value blinds its eyes to the profound,
almost grim, seriousness of the man. The great solid and central
fact of his life is that he has used the artistic mask of humour to
conceal the unswerving purpose of the humanitarian and social
reformer. The story of the career of George Bernard Shaw, in
whom is found the almost unprecedented combination of the most
brilliantly whimsical humour with the most serious and vital
purpose, has already, even in our time, taken on somewhat of
the character of a legend. It might become a fairy story, in
4
Dublin Days
very fact, if we did not finally determine to relate it, to associate
it in printed form with the life of our time.
How to write the biography of so complex a nature ? The
greatest living English dramatic critic once confessed that he
never approached a more difficult task than that of interpretation
of Shaw's plays. One of Shaw's most intimate friends once sug-
gested that the title of his biography would probably be " The
Court Jester who was Hanged."
A few years ago, in discussing with me the plan of his biography,
Mr. Shaw suggested for it the euphonious* if journalistic title —
G. B. 5. Biography and Autobiography. Though the book as a
whole is not developed along the lines originally suggested suffi-
ciently to render that title truly applicable, for this first chapter
surely none could be more suitable. These " Dublin Days "
have been reproduced by Shaw with much amplitude, and more
or less precision ; so that, accepting Shaw's definition of Auto-
biography and mine of Biography, the result will be a narrative
of much falsehood and perhaps a little truth.
" All autobiographies are lies," is Shaw's fundamental thesis.
" I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies : I mean deli-
berate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself
during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his
family and friends and colleagues. And no man is good enough
to tell the truth in a document which he suppresses until there
is nobody left alive to contradict him." The true, the real auto-
biography will never be written ; no man, no woman — Rousseau,
Marie Bashkirtseff ? — ever dared to write it. Were one to
attempt to write the book entitled, My Heart Laid Bare, as Poe
says somewhere in his Marginalia, " the paper would shrivel
and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen." Shaw once " tried
the experiment, within certain limits, of being candidly autobio-
graphical." He produced no permanent impression, because
nobody ever believed him ; but the extent to which he stood
compromised with his relations may well be imagined. His few
confidential reminiscences won him the reputation of being the
"' most reckless liar in London " ; they reeked too strongly of
5
I
George Bernard Shaw
the diabolism mentioned by Poe. And yet we must accept
Shaw's comically irreverent autobiographical details, in view
of his assertion that they are attempts at genuine autobiography.
In the autobiographical accounts of his youth and early life,
as well as in many conversations on the subject with Mr. Shaw,
I have discovered ample explanation of his scepticism concern-
ing the binding ties of blood, of the strangely unsympathetic, even
hostile, relations between parents and children displayed through-
out his entire work. These autobiographical accounts reveal
on his part less filial affection than a sort of comic disrespect for
the mistakes, faults and frailties of his parents and relatives.
Mr. Shaw's grandfather was a Dublin notary and stockbroker,
who left a large family unprovided for at his death. George Carr
Shaw, his son and Bernard Shaw's father, was an Irish Protestant
gentleman ; his rank — a very damnable one in his son's eyes —
was that of a poor relation of that particular grade of the haute
bourgeoisie which makes strenuous social pretensions. . He had
no money, it seems, no education, no profession, no manual skill,
no qualification of any sort for any definite social function.
Moreover, he had been brought up "to believe that there was
an inborn virtue of gentility in all Shaws, since they revolved
impecuniously in a sort of vague second cousinship round a
baronetcy." His people, who were prolific and numerous,
always spoke of themselves as " the Shaws " with an intense
sense of their own importance — as one would speak of the Hohen-
zollerns or the Romanoffs. An amiable, but timid man, the
father's worst faults were inefficiency and hypocrisy. His son
could only say of him that he might have been a weaker brother
of Charles Lamb. Proclaiming, and half believing, himself a tee-
totaller, he was in practice often a furtive drinker. The one
trait of his which was reproduced in his son, his antithesis in
almost every other respect, was a sense of humour, an apprecia-
tion of the comic force of anti-climax. " When I was a child,
he gave me my first dip in the sea in Killiney Bay," writes his
son. " He prefaced it by a very serious exhortation on the
importance of learning to swim, culminating in these words :
' When I was a boy of only fourteen, my knowledge of swimming
6
Dublin Days
enabled me to save your Uncle Robert's life.' Then,- seeing that
I was deeply impressed, he stooped, and added confidentially in
my ear : ' And, to tell the truth, I never was so sorry for anything
in my life afterwards.' He then plunged into the ocean, enjoyed
a thoroughly refreshing swim, and chuckled all the way home."
All the Shaws, because of that remote baronetcy, Mr. Shaw
once gravely assured me, considered it the first duty of a respect-
able Government to provide them with sinecures. After holding
a couple of clerkships, Shaw's father, by some means, finally
asserted his family claim on the State with sufficient success to
attain a post in the Four Courts — the Dublin Courts of Justice.
This post in the Civil Service must have been a gross sinecure,
for by 1850 it was abolished, and he was pensioned off. He then
sold his small pension and went into business as a wholesale
dealer in corn, a business of which he had not the slightest know-
ledge. " I cannot begin, like Ruskin, by saying that my father
was an entirely honest merchant," said his son in one of his auto-
biographical confidences. " I don't know whether he was or not ;
I do know that he was an entirely unsuccessful one." In addi-
tion to a warehouse and office in the city, he had a flour mill at a
place called Dolphin's Barn, a few miles out. This mill, attached
to the business as a matter of ceremony, perhaps paid its own
rent, since the machinery was generally in motion. But its chief
use, according to Bernard Shaw, " was to amuse me and my boon
companions, the sons of my father's partner."
When he was about forty years of age, Shaw's father married
Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, the daughter of a country gentleman.
Students in eugenics might find in their disparity in age — a differ-
ence of twenty years — some explanation of the singular qualities
and unique genius of their son. The estate in Carlow, now owned
by Mr. Shaw, descended to him from his maternal grandfather,
Walter Bagnal Gurly, through his mother's brother. Miss Gurly
was brought up with extreme severity by her maternal aunt,
Ellen Whitcroft, a sweet-faced lady, with a deformed back and
a ruthless will, who gave her niece the most rigorous training,
with the intention of subsequently leaving her a fortune. The
result of this course of education upon Miss Gurly was ignorance
7
George Bernard Shaw
alike of the value of money and of the world ; her marriage,
hastily contracted when her home was made uncomfortable for
her by her father's second marriage, gave her a sufficient knowledge
of both. Her aunt, angered by this unexpected and vexatious
conduct on the part of this absurdly inexperienced young woman,
her erstwhile paragon and protfgie, summarily disinherited her.
In many ways, Miss Gurly's marriage proved a disappointment.
Her husband, one of the most impecunious of men, was far too
poor to enable her to live on the scale to which she had been accus-
tomed. Indeed, he was anything but a satisfactory husband for
a clever woman. It was in her music that Mrs. Shaw found solace
and comfort — a refuge from domestic disappointment.
The formative influences of Shaw's early life were of a nature
to inculcate in him that disbelief in popular education, that
disrespect for popular religion, and that contempt for social
pretensions which are so deeply ingrained in his work and
character. Is it any wonder, after his youthful experience with
orthodox religion, that, like Tennyson, he cherished a contempt
for the God of the British : " an immeasurable clergyman " ?
In his own perverse and brilliant way, he has told us the history
of his progressive revolt against the religious standards of his
family:
11 1 believe Ireland, as far as the Protestant gentry are
concerned, to be the most irreligious country in the world.
I was christened by my uncle ; and as my godfather was
intoxicated and did not turn up, the sexton was ordered
to promise and vow in his place, precisely as my uncle might
have ordered him to put more coals on the vestry fire. I
was never confirmed, and I believe my parents never were
either. The seriousness with which English families take
this rite, and the deep impression it makes on many children,
was a thing of which I had no conception. Protestantism
in Ireland is not a religion ; it is a side in political faction,
a class prejudice, a conviction that Roman Catholics are
socially inferior persons, who will go to hell when they die,
and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession of ladies and
8
Dublin Days
gentlemen. In my childhood I was sent every Sunday to a
Sunday school where genteel children repeated texts, and were
rewarded with little cards inscribed with other texts. After
an hour of this, we were marched into the adjoining church,
to fidget there until our neighbours must have wished the
service over as heartily as we did. I suffered this, not for
my salvation, but because my father's respectability demanded
it. When we went to live in the country, remote from
social criticism, I broke with the observance and never
resumed it.
" What helped to make this ' church ' a hot-bed of all the
social vices was that no working folk ever came to it. In
England the clergy go among the poor, and sometimes do
try desperately to get them to come to church. In Ireland
the poor are Catholics — ' Papists/ as my Orange grandfather
called them. The Protestant Church has nothing to do
with them. Its snobbery is quite unmitigated. I cannot
say that in Ireland every man is the worse for what he calls
his religion. I can only say that all the people I knew
were."
One must beware of the error of exaggerating the influence of
Puritanism upon Shaw's character in his youth. Mr. Shaw has
laughed consumedly at Mr. Chesterton for speaking of his " narrow,
Puritan home." A little incident may serve to reflect the tone
of the heated religious controversies that went on in Shaw's home
when he was a lad. Shaw's father, one of his maternal uncles,
and a visitor engaged one day in a discussion over the raising of
Lazarus. Mr. Shaw held the evangelical view : that it took place
exactly as described. The visitor was a pure sceptic, and dis-
missed the story as manifestly impossible. But Shaw's uncle
described it as a put-up job, in which Jesus had made a confederate
of Lazarus — had made it worth his while, or asked him for friend-
ship's sake to pretend he was dead and at the proper moment to
pretend to come to life. " Now imagine me as a little child," said
Shaw in narrating the story, " in my ' narrow, Puritan home,'
listening to this discussion. I listened with very great interest,
and I confess to you that the view which recommended itself most
9
George Bernard Shaw
to me was that of my maternal uncle, and I think, on reflection,
you will admit that that was the right and healthy point of view
for a boy to take, because my maternal uncle's view appealed to
a sense of humour, which is a very good thing and a very human
thing, whereas the other two views — one appealing to my mere
credulity and the other to mere scepticism — really did not appeal
to anything at all that had any genuine religious value. . . . Now
that was really the tone of religious controversy at that time, and
it almost always showed us the barrenness on the side of religion
very much more than it did on the side of scepticism." This
anecdote brings irresistibly to mind Mark Twain's story of the
old sea-captain who declared that Elijah had won out in the altar
contest, not because of his superiority over the other prophets, or
of his God to theirs, but because, under the pretence that it was
water, he had had the foresight to inundate his altar with —
petroleum J
A short while after he entered a land office in Dublin as an
employee, a position secured for him by his uncle, Frederick Shaw,
a high official in the Valuation Office, it was discovered that the
young Shaw, then in his teens, instead of being an extremely
correct Protestant and churchgoer, was actually what used to
be known in those days as an " infidel." Many were the argu-
ments, on the subject of religion and faith, that arose among the
employees of the firm, arguments that usually went hard for young
Shaw, the novice, untrained in dialectic. " What is the use of
arguing," one of the apprentices, Humphrey Lloyd, said to Shaw
one day, " when you don't know what a syllogism is ? " As he
once told me, Mr. Shaw promptly went and found out what it
was, learning, like Moltere's hero, that he had been making syl-
logisms all his life without knowing it. Mr. Uniacke Townshend,
Shaw's employer, a pillar of the church — and of the Royal Dublin
Society — so far respected his freedom of conscience as to make no
attempt to reason with him, only imposing the condition that the
subject be not discussed in the office. Although secretly chafing
under the restraint, young Shaw for a time honourably submitted
to the stern limitation ; but an outbreak of some sort was inevit-
able. The immediate occasion of his first alarming appearance
10
Dublin Days
in print was the visit of the American evangelists, Moody and
Sankey, to Dublin. Their arrival in Great Britain created a
considerable sensation, and young Shaw went to hear them when
they came to Dublin. Not only was he wholly unmoved by
their eloquence, but he actually felt bound to inform the public
that, if this were Religion, then he was, on the whole, an Atheist.
Imagine the extreme horror of his numerous uncles when they
read his letter, solemnly printed in Public Opinion* These
evangelistic services, he maintained, " were not of a religious, but
a secular, not to say profane, character." Further, he said :
" Respecting the effect of the revival on individuals I may men-
tion that it has a tendency to make them highly objectionable
members of society, and induces their unconverted friends to
desire a speedy reaction, which either soon takes place or the
revived one relapses slowly into his previous benighted condition
as the effect fades ; and although many young men have been
snatched from careers of dissipation by Mr. Moody's exhortations,
it remains doubtful whether the change is not merely in the nature
of the excitement rather than in the moral nature of the indi-
vidual."
The complete story of his " honest doubts," and his conscientious
revolt against the hollowness and inhuman frigidity of the religion
* This letter, signed " S," appeared in Public Opinion on April 3rd, 1875.
It is a criticism of the methods adopted by Messrs. Moody and Sankey,
and an attempt to show that the enormous audiences drawn to the evange-
listic services were not proof of their efficacy. Shaw then proceeds to explain
the motives which induced many people to attend, predominant among
them being " the curiosity excited by the great reputation of the evan-
gelists and the stories, widely circulated, of the summary annihilation by
epilepsy and otherwise of sceptics who had openly proclaimed their doubts
of Mr. Moody's divine mission." This letter has been reprinted in Public
Opinion, November 8th, 1907.
In his monograph on Shaw (pp. 42-3), Mr. Holbrook Jackson has pointed
out that this was not Shaw's first bid for publicity. In the Vaudeville Maga-
zine of September, 1871, there appeared among the Editorial Replies the
following : " G. B. Shaw. Torca Cottage, Torca Hill, Dalkey, Co. Dublin,
Ireland. — You should have registered your letter ; such a combination of
wit and satire ought not to have been conveyed at the ordinary rate of
postage. As it was, your arguments were so weighty, we had to pay
twopence extra for them."
II
George Bernard Shaw
he saw practised around him, he has related in the most ludicrously
irreverent vein :
" When I was a little boy, I was compelled to go to church
on Sunday ; and though I escaped from that intolerable
bondage before I was ten, it prejudiced me so violently against
church-going that twenty years elapsed before, in foreign
lands and in pursuit of works of art, I became once more a
church-goer. To this day, my flesh creeps when I recall that
genteel suburban Irish Protestant church, built by Roman
Catholic workmen who would have considered themselves
damned had they crossed its threshold afterwards. Every
separate stone, every pane of glass, every fillet of ornamental
ironwork — half dog-collar, half-coronet — in that building
must have sowed a separate evil passion in my young heart.
Yes ; all the vulgarity, savagery, and bad blood which has
marred my literary work, was certainly laid upon me in that
house of Satan ! The mere nullity of the building could
make no positive impression on me ; but what could, and
did, were the unnaturally motionless figures of the congrega-
tion in their Sunday clothes and bonnets, and their set faces,
pale with the malignant rigidity produced by the suppression
of all expression. And yet these people were always moving
and watching one another by stealth, as convicts communicate
with one another. So was I. I had been told to keep my
restless little limbs still all through the interminable hours ;
not to talk ; and, above all, to be happy and holy there and
glad that I was not a wicked little boy playing in the fields
instead of worshipping God. I hypocritically acquiesced ;
but the state of my conscience may be imagined, especially
as I implicitly believed that all the rest of the congregation
were perfectly sincere and good. I remember at the time
dreaming one night that I was dead and had gone to Heaven.
The picture of Heaven which the efforts of the then Estab-
lished Church of Ireland had conveyed to my childish
imagination, was a waiting-room with walls of pale sky-
coloured tabbinet, and a pew-like bench running all round,
12
Dublin Days
except at one comer, where there was a door. I was, some-
how, aware that God was in the next room, accessible through
the door. I was seated on the bench with my ankles tightly
interlaced to prevent my legs dangling, behaving myself with
all my might before the grown-up people, who all belonged
to the Sunday congregation, and were either sitting on the
bench as if at church or else moving solemnly in and out as
if there were a dead person in the house. A grimly-handsome
lady, who usually sat in a corner seat near me in church, and
whom I believed to be thoroughly conversant with the
arrangements of the Almighty, was to introduce me pre-
sently into the next room — a moment which I was supposed
to await with joy and enthusiasm. Really, of course, my
heart sank like lead within me at the thought ; for I felt
that my feeble affectation of piety could not impose on
Omniscience, and that one glance of that all-searching eye
would discover that I had been allowed to come to Heaven
by mistake. Unfortunately for the interest of this narra-
tive, I woke, or wandered off into another dream, before
the critical moment arrived. But it goes far enough to show
that I was by no means an insusceptible subject : indeed,
I am sure, from other early experiences of mine, that if I had
been turned loose in a real church, and allowed to wander
and stare about, or hear noble music there instead of that
most accursed ' Te Deum ' of Jackson's and a senseless
droning of the ' Old Hundredth/ I should never have seized
the opportunity of a great evangelical revival, which occurred
to me when I was still in my teens, to begin my literary
career with a letter to the Press, announcing with inflexible
materialistic logic, and to the extreme horror of my respect-
able connections, that I was an atheist. When, later on, I
was led to the study of the economic basis of the respect-
ability of that and similar congregations, I was inexpressibly
relieved to And that it represented a mere phase of industrial
confusion, and could never have substantiated its claims to
my respect, if , as a child, I had been able to bring it to book.
To this very day, whenever there is the slightest danger of
13
George Bernard Shaw
my being mistaken for a votary of the blue tabbinet waiting-
room or a supporter of that morality in which wrong and
right, base and noble, evil and good, really mean nothing
more than the kitchen and the drawing-room, I hasten to
claim honourable exemption, as atheist and socialist, from
any such complicity."*
The lesson of the selfishness and insincerity of society ineradicably
impressed upon Ibsen's mind in his childhood days is paralleled
by a similar experience in the youth of Shaw. The ingrained
snobbery of society as he saw it, the contempt for those lower in
social pretensions, if not in social station, revolted the lad's whole
nature. He soon became animated with a Carlylean contempt
for the snobbery of " respectability in its thousand gigs." As
in the case of the disconsolate Stendhal, Shaw was not long in
discovering that his family revered what he despised, and
detested what he enthusiastically admired. An incident he
relates, in illustration of this trait in his father, serves in great
measure to explain Shaw's scorn s in after life, of the blandishments
of the drawing-room, his intolerance of fashionable society.
" One evening I was playing on the street with a school-
fellow of mine, when my father came home. He ques-
tioned me about this boy, who was the son of a prosperous
ironmonger. The feelings of my father, who was not pro-
sperous and who sold flour by the. sack, when he learned that
his son had played on the public street with the son of a man
who sold nails by the pennyworth in a shop are not to be
described. He impressed on me that my honour, my self-
respect, my human dignity, all stood upon my determination
not to associate with persons engaged in retail trade.
Probably this was the worst crime my father ever committed.
And yet I do not see what else he could have taught me,
short of genuine republicanism, which is the only possible
school of good manners.
* On Going to Church. This essay appeared originally in the Savoy
Magazine, January, 1896 ; it is now published in book form by John W.
Luce and Co., Boston, Mass.
14
Dublin Days
" Imagine being taught to despise a workman, and to
respect a gentleman, in a country where every rag of excuse
for gentility is stripped off by poverty ! Imagine being
taught that there is one God — a Protestant and a perfect
gentleman — keeping Heaven select for the gentry ; and an
idolatrous impostor called the Pope, smoothing the hell-ward
way for the mass of the people, only admissible into the
kitchens of most of the aforesaid gentry as ' thorough ser-
vants ' (general servants) at eight pounds a year ! Imagine
the pretensions of the English peerage on the incomes of
the English lower middle-class ! I remember Stopford
Brooke one day telling me that he discerned in my books
an intense and contemptuous hatred for society. No
wonder ! though, like him, I strongly demur to the usurpation
of the word ' society ' by an unsocial system of setting class
against class and creed against creed."*
As to education, in the ordinary sense, the lad had none : he
never learned anything at school. He found no incentive to
study under the tutelage of people who put Ccesar and Horace
into the hands of small boys and expected the result to be an
elegant taste and knowledge of the world. His first teacher was
his uncle, the Rev. William George Carroll, Vicar of St. Bride's,
Dublin — reputed the first Protestant clergyman in Ireland to
declare for Home Rule. We have one brief but comprehensive
glimpse of his school life at this period of immaturity : " The
word education brought to my mind four successive schools where
my parents got me out of the way for half a day. In these cr&ches
— for that is exactly what they were — I learned nothing. How I
could have been such a sheep as to go to them, when I could just
as easily have flatly refused, puzzles and exasperates me to this
day. They did me a great deal of harm, and no good whatever.
However, my parents thought I ought to go, being too young to
have any confidence in my own instincts. So I went. And if
you can in any public way convey to these idiotic institutions my
hearty curse, you will relieve my feelings infinitely. ... As a
schoolboy I was incorrigibly idle and worthless. And I am proud
* In the Days of My Youth. By Bernard Shaw. Mainly About People, 1898-
15
George Bernard Shaw
of the fact." In the preface to John Bull's Other Island, Shaw
has referred in particular to the Wesleyan Connexional School,
now Wesley College, Dublin. Here the Wesleyan catechism was
taught without protest to pupils, the majority of whom were
Church (Protestant Irish) boys ! So long as their sons were taught
genuine Protestantism, the parents didn't bother about the parti-
cular brand. The school's most famous alumni are Sir Robert
Hart and Bernard Shaw. In the school roll-book Shaw is entered
for the first time as attending on April 13th, 1867. Unfortunately,
only a bare record of his class marks is given. " He seems to have
been generally near or at the bottom of his classes," said the prin-
cipal, the Rev. William Crawford, in a letter to me of date August
6th, 1909 ; " but, perhaps typically of the man, he jumped up sud-
denly to second place once in his first quarter, and does not seem
to have aspired again. He was entered in the ' First Latin Class,'
I suppose the most junior division on the classical side." Shaw
sat in class between a classic and a mathematician, both in after
years distinguished scholars. Each did his appropriate share of
young Shaw's work. In return Shaw would narrate for their
delectation, according to the account of one of the twain, numerous
stories from the Iliad and Odyssey, in his own peculiar and inimit-
able vein. Shaw was only in his tenth year when he entered the
Wesleyan Connexional School ; and in that year Dr. H. R. Parker,
of Trinity College, Dublin, was head master and Rev. T. A. McKee
was governor. Apparently, no picture of the old school now
exists ; the new building stands near, but not on, the site of the
old school.*
It might be imagined, from the evidence of Shaw's own con-
fessions just detailed, that it was impossible for a boy who " took
refuge in idleness " at school to acquire any sort of an education ;
but such a supposition is very wide of the mark. The discipline
he received at home, the discipline of laissez faire ei laissez alter*
which might have spoiled the average boy, had just the opposite
effect upon this strangely inquisitive, alarmingly self-assertive
child. If he lost somewhat in youthful gentleness and tender-
* Compare Jubilee of Wesley College, Dublin, December, 1895 — being a
special number of the Wesley College Quarterly. ^
16
Dublin Days
ness, he gained greatly in manly determination and independence.
If he was never treated as a child, at least he was let do what
he liked. Thus the habit oi freedom, which, as he once assured
me, most Englishmen and Englishwomen of his class never
acquire, came to him naturally.
One might say of Shaw's mother that she was the antithesis
of Candida on the domestic plane. In many respects she was
a forerunner of the " new woman " of our own day — independent,
self-reliant, indifferent to public opinion. She was, in her son's
phrase, " constitutionally unfitted for the sentiment of wifehood
and motherhood " ; her genuine energy and talents were bestowed
almost undividedly upon music. Not long after her marriage
to Mr. Shaw, she became the right hand of an energetic genius,
who had formed a musical society and an orchestra in Dublin.
These organizations were composed wholly of amateurs — and
unavoidably so — in view of the state of musical activity in Dublin
at the time. By all the local professors of music this energetic
genius and man of successful ambitions, George John Vandaleur
Lee, was held in the greatest contempt, even hatred, because he
had repudiated their traditions, and thereby actually trained
himself to become an effective teacher of singing. Through actual
dissection, as well as by practical singing, he studied the anatomy
of the throat until he was able, by watching and hearing a singer,
to state with certainty the exact nature of the physical processes
going on. From Badeali, an Italian opera singer, who preserved
a splendid voice to a great age, he learned the secret of voice
preservation. This method he taught to Mrs. Shaw so success-
fully that when she gave up singing, late in life, it was not because
her voice failed her, but because her age made singing ridiculous.*
* Lee continued steadily to advance in his profession, becoming suc-
cessively music-teacher, opera-conductor, festival conductor, and finally
fashionable teacher of singing in Park Lane, London. He accomplished
everything that he undertook, -even conducting a Handel Festival in
Dublin, participated in by Tietjens, Agnesi, and other leading singers of
the day. For several years he enjoyed great popularity in London as a
teacher of music. When he died, quite suddenly, at his home in Park Lane,
it was discovered, Shaw afterwards remarked, that he had exhausted his
stock of health in his Dublin period, and that the days of his vanity in
London were days of progressive decay j
17 %
George Bernard Shaw
Lee's twofold influence upon the young Shaw — indirectly
through Mrs. Shaw's musical activities, and directly through the
inspiration of his personal character, one of phenomenal com-
petence and unswerving determination— is very markedly visible
in the Shaw of after years, the brilliant musical critic and the
doggedly persistent seeker after worthy success and merited fame.
Mrs. Shaw studied singing under Lee, and thorough bass under
Logier. She assisted Lee in all his various and varied enterprises,
copying orchestral parts and scoring songs for him. She led
the chorus for him at the musical society ; and at different times /
she appeared in operas produced and directed by Lee, playing
Azucena in // Trovatore, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Mar-
garet in Gounod's Faust, and Lucrezia Borgia in Donizetti's opera
of that name. Finally, in order to facilitate matters, Mrs. Shaw
kept house for Lee by setting up a joint household, a sort of
" blameless tn&nage & trots " — the phrase her son used in speaking
of it to me — which lasted until 1872, the year of Lee's departure
for London.
As all these operas were rehearsed at his home, it was only
natural that Bernard Shaw should pick up, quite unconsciously,
indeed, a knowledge of that extraordinary literature of modern
music, from Bach to Wagner, with which his mother and Lee
were so familiar. While he was yet a small boy, he whistled and
sang, from the first bar to the last, not only the operas he
frequently heard, but also the many oratorios rendered from
time to time by the musical society. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once
remarked that, besides their respectability, the chief merit of his
family was a remarkable aptitude for playing all sorts of wind
instruments by ear, even his father playing " Home, Sweet
Home " upon the flute. Before he was fifteen, Bernard Shaw
knew at least one important work by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven,
Mendelssohn, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Gounod from
cover to cover. Not only did he whistle the themes to himself
as a street boy whistles music-hall songs, but he also sang inces-
santly, to himself and for himself, opera and oratorio, in an
" aosurd gibberish which was Italian picked up by ear — and
Irish Italian at that." No one ever taught him music in his
18
»♦
Piioti. loiitt ol iht P.rndl letter*. Taken in I 86 3.
Dublin Days
youth, but when he grew up, although he had a very indifferent
voice, he took some singing lessons under his mother. At first,
he found that he could not make a rightly produced sound that
was audible two yards off. But he learned readily, under the
competent instruction of his mother, and now his voice, " a
commonplace baritone of the most ordinary range, B flat to F,
and French pitch preferred for the F," is distinguished rather by
audibility than in any other respect. It is noteworthy that the
lessons he learned from his mother-— the secrets of breathing
and enunciation — proved of incalculable value to him afterwards
on the platform, in the strenuous days of his dialectical warfare.
Although Bernard Shaw idled away his time at school, the
very real education he received through other broader and
deeper channels has since saved him, he stoutly maintains, from
being " at the smallest disadvantage with men who only know
the grammar and mispronunciation of the Greek and Latin poets
and philosophers." The other great motor of educational
influence in his youth was the National Gallery of Ireland ; to
that cherished asylum, which he haunted in the days of his
youth, he has often expressed his unmeasured gratitude. When-
ever he had any money, he bought volumes of the Bohn trans-
lation of Vasari ; and at fifteen he knew enough of a considerable
number of Italian and Flemish painters to recognize their work
at sight. His communion with the masterpieces preserved in
the Dublin Gallery was so solitary that he was once driven to say,
with comically extravagant egoism, that he believed he was the
only Irishman, except the officials, who had ever been there.
This acquaintance with art and the history of art " did more
for him," he once asserted, than the two cathedrals in Dublin
so magnificently " restored " out of the profits of the drink trade.
I think we must conclude, with the ever modest autobiographer,
that, thanks to communism in pictures, he was really a very
highly educated boy.
Through lack of means, the Shaws were unable to give their
son a university education; perhaps no regret need be felt on
this score, since it is not unlikely, in view of his attitude towards
a university education, that he would have taken refuge in
19 2*
George Bernard Shaw
idleness at Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin, just as he had done
at the schools he had already attended. Unlike his future col-
leagues in dramatic criticism, William Archer and Arthur
Bingham Walkley, graduates of Edinburgh and Oxford re-
spectively, Shaw despised, half ignorantly, half penetratinglyi
the thought of a university education, for it seemed to him to
turn out men who all thought alike and were snobs. So in 187I1
at the age of fifteen, he entered the office of an Irish land agent)
Mr. Charles Uniacke Townshend, and remained there until
March, 1876. Perhaps the Ibsenite, the Nietzschean of after
years was thus beginning a course of preliminary training :
Henri Beyle used to say that to have been a banker was to have
gone through the best preparatory school for philosophy. During
this period Bernard Shaw lived in lodgings in Dublin with his
father, who had by this time given up that furtive drinking, of
which his son in after life spoke with such frank levity. The
lad's salary at first was eighteen pounds a year, his position that
of junior clerk. He had no fondness for his work, and took no
interest in land agency ; nevertheless, he made a very satisfactory
clerk. At the end of about a year, a sudden vacancy occurred
in the most active post in the office, that of cashier. As this in-
volved a sort of miniature banking business for the clients, and
the daily receipt and payment of all sorts of rents, interests,
insurances, private allowances and so on, it was a comparatively
busy post, and a position of trust besides. The junior clerk was
temporarily called upon to fill the sudden vacancy pending the
engagement of a new cashier of greater age and experience. He
performed his numerous duties so successfully that the engage-
ment of the new man was first delayed and then dropped. The
child of fifteen, laboriously and successfully struggling to change
his sloped, straggly, weak-minded handwriting into a fair imita-
tion of his predecessor's, is father of the man of forty, carefully
drawing up elaborate contracts with theatre managers, who never
kept them. By this initial exhibition of enterprise, young
Shaw's salary, now twenty-four pounds a year, was doubled,
which meant a considerable step ahead. The clear-cut chiro-
graphy of the Shaw of to-day and the neatness of arrangement so
20
Dublin Days
noticeable in his apartments at Adelphi Terrace are the results
of his early training ; indeed, he was a remarkably correct cashier
and accountant, as one of Mr. Shaw's colleagues in the office once
told me. While he was always ignorant of the state of his own
finances, and to-day troubles little about his personal accounts,
he was never a farthing out in his accounts at the office.
Land agency in Ireland was, and is still, a socially pretentious
business. Although the position Shaw held was regarded as a
very genteel sort of post, yet to him this was no gratification,
but quite the reverse. It was saturated with a class feeling for
which, even at that time, he had an intense loathing. The posi-
tion carried with it, nevertheless, certain obvious advantages.
It secured for him the society of a set of so-called apprentices,
who were, in fact, idle young gentlemen who had paid a big
premium to be taught a genteel profession. Though the premium
was not paid to Shaw, still he took delight in teaching his co-
workers various operatic scenas, which were occasionally in full
swing when the principal or a customer would enter the office
unexpectedly. On one occasion, Mr. Shaw once told me glee-
fully, a certain apprentice sang : " Ah, che la morte " in his tower —
standing on the washstand with his head appearing over a tall screen
— with such feeling and such obliviousness to all external events,
that the whole office force was suddenly struck busy and silent
by the arrival of Mr. Townshend, the senior partner, who stared,
stupended, at the bleating countenance above the screen and
finally fled upstairs, completely beaten by the situation. The
young clerk thus found plenty of fun and diversion in his associa-
tion with young men of culture and education ; this did not make
him hate his work any the less. His natural antipathy to
respectability asserted itself very early in his career: he once
said that land agency was too respectable for him. Moreover,
the enforced repression concerning his religious beliefs bred in
him a spirit of discontent and revolt. Although he realized that
silence on the subject was undoubtedly an indispensable condi-
tion of sociality among people who disagreed strongly on such a
matter, yet he chafed under the restraint. To such a restraint
he felt he could never permanently submit. This incident alone
21
George Bernard Shaw
would have had the ultimate effect of making him a bad employee.
Fortunately for the world, it put land agency and business as a
serious career out of the question for him. The author of
Widowers' Homes collecting rents as a lifelong profession is a
ludicrous, an incredible incongruity. Shaw retained his place
simply for the sake of financial independence. When he gave
up his position, his employer was sorry to lose him, and, at the
request of Shaw's father, readily gave him a handsome testimonial.
In speaking of the circumstance one day, Mr. Shaw told me that
he was furious that such a demand should have been made.
Nothing could have shown more clearly his distaste for the posi-
tion he held. " Once or twice/' commented Mr. Shaw, " my
employer showed himself puzzled and annoyed when some
accident lifted the veil for a moment and gave him a glimpse of
the fact that his excellent and pecuniarily incorruptible clerk's
mind and interest and even intelligence were ten thousand
leagues away, in a region foreign, if not hostile." Surely this was
another age of " inspired office boys."*
In 1872, Mr. Lee left Dublin for London, the joint household
broke up, and all musical activity ceased. The return to a single
household on Mr. Shaw's income was all but impossible, for his
affairs were as unprosperous as ever. At this time there was
even some question of Bernard Shaw's two sisters becoming
professional singers. With characteristic energy and decisive-
ness, Mrs. Shaw boldly cut the Gordian knot by going to London
and becoming a professional teacher of singing. This domestic
dib&ele robbed young Shaw of his mother's influence, which was
always stimulating and inspiring, if somewhat indirectly and
impersonally so. It deprived him also of music, which, up to
that time, had been his daily food. This sudden deprivation of
* In speaking of his apprenticeship as a clerk in the land office, Shaw
declares : " I should have been there still if I had not broken loose in
defiance of all prudence, and become a professional man of genius — a
resource not open to every clerk. I mention this to show that the fact
that I am not still a clerk may be regarded for the purposes of this article
as a mere accident. I am not one of those successful men who can say, ' Why
don't you do as I do ? ' " — From Bernard Shaw as a Clerk. By Himself,
in The Clerk, January, 1908.
22
Dublin Days
the solace of music came to him as a distinct surprise. He had
never dreamed of such a contingency. Fortunately the piano
remained. Although he had never until then touched it except
to pick out a tune with one finger, he now set to work in earnest
to learn the art of piano playing. It was in a spirit of despera-
tion that he went out and bought a technical handbook of music,
containing a diagram of the keyboard. No finger exercises, no
etudes de velociti for Shaw : he at once got out Don Giovanni
and tried to play the overture ! It took him ten minutes to
arrange his fingers on the notes of the first chord. " What I
suffered, what everybody in the house suffered, whilst I struggled
on, labouring through arrangements of Beethoven's symphonies,
of Tannhduser, and of all the operas and oratorios I knew, will
never be told." It was in vain now, he said, merely to sing :
" my native wood-notes wild — just then breaking frightfully —
could not satisfy my intense craving for the harmony which is the
emotional substance of music, and for the rhythmic figures of
accompaniment which are its action and movement. I had only
a single splintering voice, and I wanted an orchestra." This
musical starvation it was that drove him to the piano in
disregard of the rights of his fellow-lodgers.
" At the end of some months I had acquired a technique
of my own, as a sample of which I may offer my fingering of
the scale of C major. Instead of shifting my hand by turning
CDEFGABC
the thumb under and fingering 12312345, I passed my
fourth finger over my fifth,
CDEFGABC
and played 12345454.
This method has the advantage of being applicable to all
scales, diatonic or chromatic, and to this day I often fall
back on it. Liszt and Chopin hit on it too, but they never
used it to the extent I did. I soon acquired a terrible power
of stumbling through pianoforte arrangements and vocal
scores ; and my reward was that I gained penetrating
23
George Bernard Shaw
experiences of Victor Hugo and Schiller from Donizetti, Verdi,
and Beethoven ; of the Bible from Handel ; of Goethe from
Schumann; of Beaumarchais and Molidre from Mozart;
and of Merimle from Bizet, besides finding in Berlioz an
unconscious interpreter of Edgar Allan Poe. When I was
in the schoolboy adventure vein, I could range from Vincent
Wallace to Meyerbeer; and if I felt piously and genteelly
sentimental, I, who could not stand the pictures of Ary
Scheffer or the genteel suburban sentiment of Tennyson and
Longfellow, could become quite maudlin over Mendelssohn
and Gounod. And, as I searched all the music I came across
for the sake of its poetic or dramatic content, and played
the pages in which I found poetry or drama over and over
again, whilst I never returned to those in which the music
was trying to exist ornamentally for its own sake and had
no real content at all, it soon followed that when I came
across the consciously perfect art work in the music dramas
of Wagner, I ran no risk of hopelessly misunderstanding it
as the academic musicians did. Indeed, I soon found that
they equally misunderstood Mozart and Beethoven, though,
having come to like their tunes and harmonies, and to under-
stand their mere carpentry, they pointed out what they
supposed to be their merits with an erroneousness far more
fatal to their unfortunate pupils than the volley of half-
bricks with which they greeted Wagner (who, it must be
confessed, retaliated with a volley of whole ones fearfully
well aimed)."*
Although he did a good deal of accompanying, especially in
the days of his intimacy with the Salt family, he never really
mastered the instrument. Once, in a desperate emergency, fie
supplied the place of the absent half of the orchestra at a per-
formance of // Trovaicre at a People's Entertainment evening at
the Victoria Theatre — and* luckily, came off without disaster.
To-day he goes to his little Bechstein piano, a relic of the first
* The Religion of the Pianoforte, in the Fortnightly Review. February,
1894.
24
Dublin Days
Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and fearlessly attacks any opera or
symphony. He is his own Melba, his own Plan^on, too, thanks,
as his wife pathetically explains, to " a remarkable power of
making the most extraordinary noises with his throat." He even
revels in the pianola ! And I have shared his enjoyment in his
own rendition of a Chopin nocturne upon that remarkable
mechanical toy.
Bernard Shaw would have been a model young man at the
desk but for the fact that, like Nathaniel Hawthorne at the
Boston Custom House, like Ibsen at the apothecary's shop in
Grimstad, his heart was not in the thing. " I never made a pay-
ment," he once frankly confessed to me, " without a hope or
even a half resolve that I should never have to make it again.
In spite of which, I was so wanting in enterprise and so shy and
helpless in worldly matters (though I believe I had the air of
being quite the reverse) that six months later I found myself
making the payment again."
There gradually came to him a consciousness of the futility of
his life, the consciousness of one who has been freed of illusion.
In this young boy was none of the soft-blarney, the winning and
dulcet melancholy, of the proverbial Irishman. He escaped that
mystic influence of Roman Catholicism, which produces the
phantast, the dreamer and the saint. Calvinism had taught him
that " once a man is born it is too late to save him or damn him ;
you may ' educate ' him and ' form his character ' until you are
black in the face; he is predestinate, and his soul cannot be
changed any more than a silk purse can be changed into a sow's
ear." In the atmosphere of the Island of the Saints — " that
most mystical of all mystical things " — he learned to realize the
barrenness of all else in comparison with the supreme importance
of realizing the purpose of his existence on this earth.
Hence it was that his work and position finally became unbear-
ably irksome, unendurable. London imperatively beckoned to
him. That way, perhaps, lay freedom from the obsession of
hated respectability, freedom from repression of his convictions,
freedom for self-development and spiritual expansion. At the
age of twenty, this raw Irish lad, wholly ignorant of the great
*5
George Bernard Shaw
world, walked out of his office, and threw himself recklessly into
London. There, immediately after the death of his sister Agnes
in the Isle of Wight, in 1876, he joined his mother in la lutte pout
la vie* There he was to set the crystalline intellectual clarity,
the philosophic consciousness of the brilliant Celt, into sharp juxta-
position with the plodding practicality, the dogged energy of the
complacent Briton. There he was to find the arena for his
championship of those advanced movements in art, music, litera-
ture and politics, which give significance and character to the
closing quarter of the nineteenth century.
In these early years we may discern in Shaw the gradual birth
of the social consciousness, the slow unfolding of deep-rooted
impulses toward individualism and self-expression. Like other
boys of his day and time, Shaw melted lead on Holieve, hid rings
in pancakes, and indulged in the conventional mummeries of
Christmas. But to him these were dreary, silly diversions, against
which his nature rebelled. He once refused to celebrate Shake-
speare's birthday — for the very good reason that he had never
celebrated his own. In the conventional sense, he was never
" reared " at all : he simply " grew up wild." No effort was
made to form his character : he developed from within, strangely
aloof in spirit from the healthy gaieties of the normal lad. Thus
was bred in him, even at an early age, a sort of premature asceti-
cism which left its indelible mark upon his character. The puri-
tanic convictions which have animated his entire life find their
origin in the half-instinctive, half-enforced aloofness of his
childhood days.
Shaw was not brought up, as we might expect, a Nonconformist ;
he was a member of the Irish Protestant Church. He rebelled
against the inhuman repression, the meaningless ritualism of his
church ; but the Puritan influences of his home, nevertheless, left
their impress upon his nature. His whole long life is an outcry
of soaring individualism against repressive authority; and yet
* Mr. Shaw's other sister. Miss Lucy Carr Shaw, was the immediate
cause o! her mother's settling in London. She became a professional singer,
and, later, a writer. Her best known book is entitled Fiv* LiUors of IA«
Hous$ of Kildonnsl*
26
Dublin Days
the puritan intensity in condemnation of self-indulgence, the
ascetic revolt from alcoholism, speaks forth unmistakably in the
humanitarian, the vegetarian, the teetotaller of a later epoch.
The ingrained and constitutional protestantism of his forbears
found expression in his boyish, yet rigorously atheistic protest
against the religion of Moody and Sankey. In this audacious
protest we can scarcely expect to find any sort of matured convic-
tion ; it is the first bold denial of his life. Thus early we observe
the workings of polemic, of criticism and analysis — before he had
ever left Irish soil. Even then, I fancy, he felt faint stirrings of
a deeper religious protestant faith. In that protest, we may
discern a forecast of the Plays for Puritans and The Showing-up
of Blanco Posnct.
Thrown upon his own resources, sharing with his fellows none
of the wholesome and joyous foolhardiness of youth, he developed
a maturity of judgment, a detachment in observation, out of all
proportion to his years. His puritanism expressed itself in silent
condemnation of the social self-righteousness he saw around him,
the distinctions so sharply drawn on lines, not of individual worth,
but of social station and respectability. That arresting passage
in Man and Superman in which he describes the birth of the social
passion is a piece of spiritual autobiography : it changed the child
into the man. There was already at work within him the leaven
of the later social revolution of our own day. Intensity of political
conviction was a family tradition and heritage. In the eighteenth
century a Shaw had been leader of the " Orangemen " ; and in
the nineteenth century one of Shaw's uncles was the first Pro-
testant priest in Ireland who, contrary to the convictions of his
companions in creed, declared himself in favour of Home Rule.
By heritage, by environment, by temperament, Bernard Shaw
was destined to display throughout his life that intensity of poli-
tical conviction, that depth of humanitarian concern, that passion
for social service which will for ever remain associated with his
name.
*7
LONDON
•' My destiny was to educate London, bnt I had neither studied my
pupil nor related my ideas properly to the common stock of human know-
ledge." — George Bernard Shaw : an Interview, in The Chap-Booh, November,
1896.
CHAPTER II
" \V7 HEN & d y° u first £eel inclined to write ? " Shaw wa »
W once asked. " I never felt inclined to write, any
more than I ever felt inclined to breathe," was his perverse
reply. "I felt inclined to draw : Michael Angelo was my
boyish ideal. I felt inclined to be a wicked baritone in
an opera when I grew out of my earlier impulse towards piracy
and highway robbery. You see, as I couldn't draw, I was per-
fectly well aware that drawing was an exceptional gift. But it
never occurred to me that my literary sense was exceptional.
I gave the whole world credit for it. The fact is, there is nothing
miraculous, nothing particularly interesting, even, in a natural
faculty to the man who has it. The amateur, the collector, the
enthusiast in an art, is the man who lacks the faculty for pro-
ducing it. The Venetian wants to be a soldier; the Gaucho
wants to be a sailor ; the fish wants to fly, and the bird to swim.
No, I never wanted to write. I know now, of course, the value
and the scarcity of the literary faculty (though I think it over-
rated) ; but I still don't want it. 1 ' And he added : " You cannot
want a thing and have it, too."
That Shaw did want to write, however, is clearly shown by the
early outpourings of the artistic mood in the imaginative boy.
When he was quite small, he concocted a short story and sent it
to some boys' journal — something about a man with a gun
attacking another man in the Glen of the Doons. In after years,
spiritual adventures fired his soul; at this time, the gun was the
centre of interest. The mimetic instinct of childhood in his case,
however, found incentives to the development of almost every
artistic faculty other than writing. His hours spent in the
National Gallery of Ireland, his study of the literature of Italian
31
George Bernard Shaw
art, filled him with the desire to be another Michael Angelo ; but
he couldn't draw. Like Browning, Shaw wished to be an artist,
and, like Browning also, he wished to be a musician. He heard
music from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same ;
he knew whole operas and oratorios. He wanted to be a musi-
cian, but couldn't play ; to be a dramatic singer, but had no voice.
The facile conqueror of every literary domain, mocked in later
life with the accusation of being a sort of literary Jack-of-all-
trades, was only puzzled as a youth to discover in himself a single
promising potentiality.
A casual remark of an acquaintance first startled Shaw, then
in his teens, into recognition of the fact that he lacked any sort
of final consciousness in regard to his own position and destiny.
The apprentice in the land agency office, eight or ten years Shaw's
senior, who sang, " Ah, che la morte " with such deadly effect,
one day happened to observe that every young fellow thinks
that he is going to be a great man until he is twenty. " The shock
that this gave me," Mr. Shaw once confessed to me with perfect
naivete, " made me suddenly aware that this was my own precise
intention. But a very brief consideration reassured me — why,
I don't know ; for I could do nothing that gave me the smallest
hope of making good my calm classification of myself as one of
the world to which Shelley and Mozart and Praxiteles and Michael
Angelo belonged, and as totally foreign to the plane on which
land agents laboured."
In Cashel Byron's Profession, the hero, a prize-fighter, remarks
that it is not what a man would like to do, but what he can do,
that he must work at in this world. Naturally enough, Bernard
Shaw, the young lad in his teens, had not yet come to any sort
of artistic self-consciousness. Shaw may be said to have spent
half of his life in the search for the Ultima Thule of what he could
do. And it is by no means certain, judging from the lesson of
his career, that he has yet discovered all of his capabilities.
Certain it is that, at this formative stage in his career, he had
found only one : the ability to keep — not to write — books. Mr.
Shaw once pictured for me his state of dejection at this time over
his inefficiency and incompetence. " What was wrong with me
32
I
London
then was the want of self-respect, the diffidence, the cowardice
of the ignoramus and the duffer. What saved me was my
consciousness that I must learn to do something — that nothing
but the possession of skill, of efficiency, of mastery, in short, was
of any use. The sort of aplomb which my cousins seemed to
derive from the consciousness that their great-great-grandfather
had also been the great-great-grandfather of Sir Robert Shaw, of
Bushy Park, was denied to me. You cannot be imposed on by
remote baronets if you belong to the republic of art. I was
chronically ashamed and even miserable simply because I couldn't
do anything. It is true that I could keep Mr. Townshend's cash,
and that I never dreamt of stealing it ; and riper years have made
me aware that many of my artistic feats may be less highly
estimated in the books of the Recording Angel than this prosaic
achievement ; but at this time it counted for less than nothing.
It was a qualification for what I hated ; and the notion of my
principal actually giving me a testimonial to my efficiency as a
cashier drove me to an exhibition of rage that must have seemed
merely perverse to my unfortunate father. 11
In these days of inarticulate revolt against current religious
and social ideals, Shaw somehow found an outlet for that seething
lava of his spirit, which was one day to burst forth with such
alarming effect. This, Shaw's first published work, was the forth-
right letter in Public Opinion, in which he sought to stem the
force of the first great Moody and Sankey revival by the announce-
ment that he, personally, had renounced religion as a delusion !
Besides this single public vent for his insurgency, he had found,
in the friendship of a kindred spirit of imaginative temperament,
the opportunity for the expression of all the doubts, hopes and
aspirations of his eager and revolutionary intelligence. With one of
his schoolfellows, Shaw struck up a curious friendship : this young
fellow, Edward McNulty, was afterwards known as the author
of Misther O'Ryan, The Son of a Peasant, and Maureen* three
very original and very remarkable novels of Irish life. Both
boys possessed imaginative temperaments, and their association
gave promise of ripening into close and lasting friendship. But
• These books were published by Edward Arnold.
33 3
George Bernard Shaw
circumstances separated them so effectually that, after their
schooldays, they saw very little of each other. McNulty was
an official in the Bank of Ireland, and had been drafted to the
Newry branch of the institution, while Shaw, as we know, was
in Mr. Townshend's land office in Dublin. During the period
of their separation, between Shaw's fifteenth and twentieth
years, they kept up a tremendous correspondence. In this
way they probably worked off the literary energy which usually
produces early works. The immense letters, sometimes illus-
trated with crude drawings and enlivened by brief dramas, which
came and went with each post, served as " exhausts " for the
superfluous steam of their literary force. It was understood
between them that the letters were to be destroyed as soon as
answered, as their spithors did not relish the possibility of such
unreserved soul histories falling into strange hands.
I believe that Shaw perpetrated one more long correspondence,
this time with an unnamed English lady, whose fervently imagina-
tive novels would have made her known, Shaw once asserted,
had he been able to persuade her to make her name public, or at
least to stick to the same pen name, instead of changing it for
every book. Shaw also made one valuable acquaintance at this
time through the accident of coming to lodge in the same house
with him. This was Chichester Bell, of the family of that name
distinguished for its inventive genius, a cousin of Graham Bell,
the inventor of the telephone, and a nephew of Melville Bell,
the inventor of the phonetic script known as Visible Speech.
The author of the Standard Elocutionist, Chichester Bell's
father, whom Shaw has described as by far the most majestic
and imposing looking man that ever lived on this or any other
planet, was the elocution professor in one of the schools attended
by Shaw in his youth, the Wesleyan Connexional, now Wesley
College, attendance at which, we may be sure from Shaw's case,
by no means implied Methodism.* Although a qualified physician,
Chichester Bell did not care for medical practice, and had gone
to Germany, where he devoted himself to the study of chemistry
and physics in the school of Helmholtz. Shaw's intercourse
• Cf. John Bull's Other Island ; Preface for Politicians, p. rvii.
34
London
with Bell proved to be of great value to him. They studied
Italian together, and while Shaw did not learn Italian with any
final thoroughness, he learned a great deal else, chiefly about
physics and pathology. It was through his association with Bell
that he had come to read Tyndall and Trousseau's " Clinical
Lectures." But Bell is to be remembered chiefly in relation to
Shaw, as first calling his serious attention to Wagner. When
Shaw discovered that Bell, whose judgment he held in high
regard, considered Wagner a great composer, he at once bought
a vocal score of Lohengrin, which chanced to be the only sample
to be had at the Dublin music shops. From this moment dates
the career of the remarkable music critic, who, in after life, swept
Max Nordau off the field with his brilliant and unanswerable
defence of the master-builder of modern music. For the first
few bars of Lohengrin completely converted him. He immediately
became, and ever afterwards remained, the " Perfect Wagnerite."
The days of Shaw's youth before he went to London, as we have
seen, were poisoned because he was taught to bow down to pro-
prietary respectability. But even in his " unfortunate childhood,"
as he calls it, his heart was so unregenerate that he secretly hated,
and rebelled against, mere respectability. In after life, he found
it impossible to express the relief with which he discovered that
his heart was all along right, and that the current respectability
of to-day is " nothing but a huge inversion of righteous and
scientific social order weltering in dishonesty, uselessness, selfish-
ness, wanton misery, and idiotic waste of magnificent opportunity
for noble and happy living." Not the evangelist's but the true
reformer's zeal was always Shaw's. He had too much insight
not to recognize the futility of the effort to reform individuals ;
his humanitarian spirit was impersonal and found its freest
manifestation in fulmination and revolt against social institutional
Concerning the unsocial system of setting class against class, and
creed against creed, he has mordantly expressed himself :
" If I had not suffered from these things in my childhood,
perhaps I could keep my temper about them. To an outsider
there is nothing but comedy in the spectacle of a forlorn set
35 3*
George Bernard Shaw
of Protestant merchants in a Catholic country, led by a
miniature plutocracy of stockbrokers, doctors and land
agents, and flavoured by that section of the landed gentry
who are too heavily mortgaged to escape to London, playing
at being a court and an aristocracy with the assistance of
the unfortunate exile who has been persuaded to accept
the post of lord-lieutenant. To this pretence, involving
a prodigious and continual lying, as to incomes and the
social standing of relations, are sacrificed citizenship, self-
respect, freedom of thought, sincerity of character, and all
the realities of life, its votaries gaining in return the hostile
estrangement of the great mass of their fellow countrymen,
and in their own class the supercilious snubs of those who have
outdone them in pretension and the jealous envy of those
whom they have outdone."
The power which he found in Ireland religious enough to redeem
him from this abomination of desolation was, fitly enough, the
power of art. " My mother, as it happened, had a considerable
musical talent. In order to exercise it seriously she had to
associate with other people who had musical talent. My first
childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant
was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact that the
best voices available for combination with my mother's in the
works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed
to Roman Catholics. Even the divine gentility was presently
called in question, for some of these vocalists were undeniably
connected with retail trade."
The situation in which Mrs. Shaw found herself offered no
alternative. " There was no help for it ; if my mother was to
do anything but sing silly ballads in drawing-rooms she had to
associate herself on an entirely republican footing with people
of like artistic gifts, without the smallest reference to creed or
class. Nay, if she wished to take part in the masses of Haydn
and Mozart, which had not then been forgotten, she must actually
permit herself to be approached by Roman Catholic priests and
even, at their invitation, to enter that house of Belial, the Roman
36
London
Catholic chapel (in Ireland the word church, as applied to a place
of worship, denotes the Protestant denomination), and take
part in their services. All of which led directly to the discovery,
hard to credit at first, that a Roman Catholic priest could be as
agreeable and cultivated a person as a Protestant clergyman
was supposed, in defiance of bitter experience, always to be;
and, in short, that the notion that the courtly distinctions of
Dublin society corresponded to any real human distinctions was
as ignorant as it was pernicious. If religion is that which binds
men to one another, and irreligion that which sunders, then must
I|testify that I found the religion of my country in its musical
genius and its irreligion in its churches and drawing-rooms."
It was unerring common sense on the domestic plane
acquiescence in the sole solution of a flinty problem of life, which
reveals Shaw's mother to us as the parent from whom he derived
his determination, and his firm grip on practical affairs. In
marked contradistinction to Lee, Mrs. Shaw made no conces-
sions to fashion, firmly adhering to her master's old method
in all its rigour. She behaved with complete independence
of manner and speech in the mode of an Irish lady confronted
with English people openly describing themselves as " middle-
class." On account of this characteristic independence, her first
experiences in London were unfortunate and disheartening. Not
until she began to teach choirs in schools did she enter upon the
road of complete success. The results she produced in these
undertakings so pleased the inspectors — and more particularly
the parents at the prize distributions — that the head mistresses
were sensible enough to let her go her own way. Quite a con-
clusive proof of her ability is found in the fact that this remarkable
woman, vigorous and young-minded to-day although now in the
seventies, worked at that famous modern institution, the North
Collegiate School for Girls until quite recently. For some years
she sought to retire for the same reason that she stopped singing :
to her Irish sense of humour there was an element almost of the
ridiculous in a first-rate school having an old woman of between
seventy and eighty wave a stick and conduct a choir. But
D. Sophia Bryant, the principal and an old friend of hers, could
37
George Bernard Shaw
not see her way to change for the better, and it was only within
the last year or two that Mrs. Shaw retired from her post. No
doubt Mrs. Bryant was right; for Mr. Shaw once remarked to
me that it was not an easy matter to find a woman in England
who perfectly combines the ability to take command in music
with the knowledge of music as an artist, and not as a school-
mistress who has superficially studied the subject for the sake of
the certificates and the position.
Mr. Shaw's mother is the most remarkably youthful person
for her years I have ever known, with the possible exception of
Mark Twain. I remember with vivid pleasure taking tea with
her and her son one afternoon at her attractive little " retreat "
in West London. Her eyes danced with suppressed mirth as she
talked, and it was quite easy to see from whom her son derived
his strong sense of humour. Mrs. Shaw told several delightful
stories, one of which deserves repetition here. It seems that
Mrs. Shaw is quite a medium and spiritualist, and takes a great
deal of interest in communicating with " spirits " from the other
world. One day she " called up " Mr. Shaw's sister and asked
her what she thought of George being such a distinguished man.
The spirit expressed surprise to hear the news. " But aren't
you very proud of George ? " queried his mother disappointedly.
" Oh, yes," replied the spirit ; " it's all very well in its way. But,"
she added, " that sort of thing doesn't count for anything up
here " !
Many of Mr. Shaw's very distinctive traits are a direct inherit-
ance from his mother, modified, to be sure, by the differences in
education, temperament and views of life. In her teaching of
music, Mrs. Shaw deliberately displayed total insensibility to the
petty dignities so cherished in English school-life. Upon visiting
rectors, head mistresses, local "personages," and, in fact, upon
all those who wished things done their own way, she made what
her son called " perfectly indiscriminate onslaughts." This
aggressive assertion of her authority would often have made her
position untenable, had it not been for her patent ability and
unquestioned power of leadership. Her outspoken frankness of
manner and conduct, reproduced with such comically extravagant
38
London
excess in her son, always won her the support of the discriminating :
it was always the real " bigwigs " who understood her manners.
Mr. Shaw once said : " From my mother I derive my brains and
character, which do her credit." I remember asking Mr. Shaw's
mother one day to what she attributed her son's remarkable
success in the world of letters. " Oh/' she said, without a
moment's hesitation, her eyes twinkling merrily the while, ** the
answer is quite simple. Of course, he owes it all to me."
To his parents, his mother in particular, Mr. Shaw is also in-
debted for actual financial support during several years of an able-
bodied young manhood. But he has warned us against sup*
posing, because he is a man of letters, that he never tried to commit
that " sin against his nature " called earning an honest living.
We have followed his struggles from his fifteenth to his twentieth
year — a period marking a social and spiritual growth on his part,
he maintains, of several centuries. " I was born on the outskirts
of an Irish city, where we lived exactly as people lived in the
seventeenth century, except that there were gas-lamps and
policemen in tall hats. In the course of my boyhood literature
and music introduced me to the eighteenth century ; and I was
helped a step further through the appearance in our house of
candles that did not need snuffing, an iron-framed pianoforte
and typhoid sanitation. Finally, I crossed St. George's Channel
into the decadence of the mid-nineteenth-century England of
Anthony Trollope, and slowly made my way to the forefront of
the age — the period of Ibsen, Nietzsche, the Fabian Society, the
motor-car, and my own writings." Very slowly indeed did he
make his way to the forefront of the age of Shavianism. He felt
that he was a man of genius, and coolly classified himself as such.
With no effort of the imagination, and, likewise, with no pre-
vision of his subsequent oft-repeated failures and the position of
pecuniary dependence he was temporarily to occupy, he found
himself looking upon London as his destiny. There is something
at once amusing, inspiring, and pathetic in the spectacle of this
bashful, raw, inexperienced boy, fortified only by the confident
consciousness of his yet unproved superiority to the " common
run " pf humanity, throwing himself thus headlong into London,
39
George Bernard Shaw
Little of romantic glamour, fittingly enough, attaches to Shaw's
early struggles in London. No rapt listening to the songs of rival
nightingales, Keats and Shelley, as with Browning; no im-
petuous and clandestine marriage, as with Sheridan ; no roses
and raptures of la vie Bohime, as with Zola. It is, instead, for
the most part a tale of consistent literary drudgery, rewarded
by continual and repeated failures. The rare and individual
style of the satirist, the deft fingering of the dramatist were wholly
undeveloped, and even unsuspected, during this tentative period
in his career. He turned his hand to various undertakings —
to musical criticism, to versifying, to blank-versifying, to novel-
writing ; but all equally to no purpose. Asked once what was
his first real success, he replied : " Never had any. Success in
that sense is a thing that comes to you and takes your breath
away. What came to me was invariably failure. By the time
I wore it down I knew too much to care about either failure or
success. Life is like a battle ; you have to fire a thousand bullets
to hit one man. I was too busy firing to bother about the scoring.
As to whether I ever despaired, you will find somewhere in my
works this line : ' He who has never hoped can never despair.'
I am not a fluctuation." His self-sufficiency, even at this time,
was proof against all discouragement. Perhaps he found con-
solation also in the saying : " He who is down need fear no
fall."
Shaw never experienced any poverty of spirit, of determination,
or of will ; his poverty was pecuniary only. Until the time of
his marriage he remained secure from the accusation of being the
mould of fashion or the glass of form. While the Shaw of matri-
monial respectability bears all the marks of his wife's civilizing
influence in the matter of a costume de rigueur — fashionable clothes,
patent-leather boots, and even, on rare occasions, a " stiff " collar
— his dress in the late seventies and for twenty years thereafter
was usually, like that of Marchbanks, strikingly anarchic. His
outward appearance, as someone unkindly remarked, suggested
that he might be a fairly respectable plasterer 1 " Now," said
Shaw in 1896, " when people reproach me with the un fashion -
ableness of my attire, they forget that to me it seems like the
40
SHAW'S FIRST HOME IN LONDON
}b. Oin»bur»h Street. N.W,
London
raiment of Solomon in all his glory by contrast with the in-
describable seediness of those days, when I trimmed my cuffs
to the quick with scissors, and wore a tall hat and soi-disant black
coat, green with decay." But the poverty of which this attire
was the outward, visible sign was " shortness of cash/' as numerous
personal reminiscences show. From the depressing and devitalizing
effects of " real poverty " he was strong enough to free himself,
as the following autobiographical confidence clearly evidences :
" Whilst I am not sure that the want of money lames a
poor man more than the possession of it lames a rich one*
I am quite sure that the class which has the pretensions and
prejudices and habits of the rich without its money, and
the poverty of the poor without the freedom to avow
poverty — in short, the people who don't go to the theatre
because they cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed to
be seen in the gallery — are the worst -off of all To be on the
down grade from the haute bourgeoisie and the landed gentry
to the nadir at which the younger son's great-grandson gives
up the struggle to keep up appearances ; to have the pretence
of a culture without the reality of it ; to make three hundred
pounds a year look like eight hundred pounds in Ireland or
Scotland ; or five hundred pounds look like one thousand
pounds in London ; to be educated neither at the Board
School and the Birkbeck nor at the University, but at some
rotten private adventure academy for the sons of gentlemen ;
to try to maintain a select circle by excluding all the frankly
poor people from it, and then find that all the rest of the
world excludes you — that is poverty at its most damnable ;
and yet from that poverty a great deal of our literature and
journalism has sprung. Think of the frightful humiliation
of the boy Dickens in the blacking warehouse, and his undying
resentment of his mother's wanting him to stay there — all
on a false point of genteel honour. Think of Trollope, at
an upper-class school with holes in his trousers, because his
father could not bring himself to dispense with a man-
servant. Ugh ! Be a tramp or be a millionaire — it matters
41
George Bernard Shaw
little which : what does matter is being a poor relation of the
rich ; and that is the very devil. Fortunately, that sort
of poverty can be cured by simply shaking off its ideas—
cutting your coat according to your cloth, and not according
to the cloth of your father's second cousin, the baronet.
As I was always more or less in rebellion against those ideas,
and finally shook them off pretty completely, I cannot say
that I have much experience of real poverty — quite the
contrary."*
With that comic seriousness which always passes for outrageous
prevarication, Shaw has related that during the nine years from
1876 to 1885 his adventures in literature netted him the princely
sum of exactly six pounds. At first he " devilled " for a musical
critic ; but his notices " led to the stoppage of all the concert
advertisements and ruined the paper " — " which died — partly of
me." He also began a Passion Play in blank verse, with the mother
of the hero represented as a termagant. Ah, if that play had only
been finished ! But Shaw never carried through these customary
follies of young authors, unless we agree with those who classify
his novels as follies of a green boy. " I was always, fortunately
for me," Mr. Shaw once remarked, " a failure as a trifler. All my
attempts at Art for Art's sake broke down ; it was like hammer-
ing tenpenny nails into sheets of notepaper."
One finds it an easy matter to believe him when he tells us, not
only that he was provincial, unpresentable, but, more broadly
speaking, that he was in an impossible position. " I was a
foreigner — an Irishman, the most foreign of all foreigners when
he has not gone through the University mill. I was . . . not
uneducated ; but, unfortunately, what I knew was exactly what
the educated Englishman did not know, and what he knew — I
either didn't know or didn't believe." Six pounds was a very
small allowance for a growing young man, even a struggling
author, to live on for nine years. Even if we match him with
equal scepticism, at least we can discover, as will be seen, no error
* Who I Am, and What I Thinh, by G. Bernard Shaw. Part J.— In (he
Candid Friend t May nth, 1901,
4*
London
in his arithmetical calculations. After Shaw had hounded the
musical critic and his paper to the grave, London absolutely
refused to tolerate him on any terms. As the nine years pro-
gressed, he had one article accepted by Mr. G. R. Sims, who had
just started a short-lived paper called One and All. " It brought
me fifteen shillings. Full of hope and gratitude, I wrote a really
brilliant contribution. That finished me." During this period,
he received his greatest fee — five pounds — for a patent medicine
advertisement, a circumstance which may give some colour to
Dr. Meyerfeld's early denunciation of Shaw as a " quacksalver."
On another occasion, a publisher asked Shaw for some verses to
fit some old blocks which he had bought up for a school prize
book. " I wrote a parody of the thing he wanted and sent it
as a joke. To my stupefaction he thanked me seriously, and
paid me five shillings." Shaw was so much touched by the gift
of five shillings for his parody that he wrote the generous pub-
lisher a serious verse for another picture. With the startling
result that the publisher took it as a joke in questionable
taste ! Is it any wonder that Shaw's career as a versifier
abruptly ended?
The analysis of the artistic temperament which Shaw puts in
the mouth of John Tanner — an analysis which Mr. Robert
Loraine finds to smack more of mania than of insincerity-
is a cynical and distorted picture at best. And yet it gives
us a refracted glimpse of the position which Shaw himself
deliberately assumed. " The true artist," Tanner rattles on
" will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his
mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work
at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half
vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study
them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their
inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his
deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason,
to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he
calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their
own purpose, whilst he really means them to do it for his."
After various attempts " to earn an honest living," Shaw gave
43
George Bernard Shaw
up trying to commit that sin against his nature, as he puts it.
His last attempt was in 1879, we are told, " when a company
was formed in London to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr.
Thomas Alva Edison — a much too ingenious invention, as it
proved, being nothing less than a telephone of such stentorian
efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all
over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of
discretion." His interest in physics, his acquaintance with the
works of Tyndall and Helmholtz, and his friendship with Mr.
Chichester Bell, of which mention has been made, gave him, he
asserts, the customary superiority over those about him which
he is in the habit of claiming in all the relations of life. While he
remained with the company only a few months, he discharged his
duties in a manner, which, according to his own outrageous and
comically prevaricative assertion, " laid the foundation of Mr.
Edison's London reputation.' '
After this experience, he began, as he says, to lay the founda-
tions of his own fortune /'by the most ruthless disregard of all
the quack duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to the
White House, and harness the real peasant boy to the plough until
he is finally swept, as rubbish, into the workhouse.' ' Far from
being a " peasant lad," who climbed manfully upward from the
lowest rung of the social ladder, he was in reality the son of a
gentleman who had an income of at least three figures (four, if
you count in dollars instead of pounds), and was second cousin
to a baronet. " I never climbed any ladder : I have achieved
eminence by sheer gravitation ; and I hereby warn all peasant
lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding
their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity
so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own
bad novels."
Shaw seems intent upon convincing us that, like the artist of his
own description, he was an atrocious egotist in his disregard of
others ; but we must take his confessions with the customary
grain of salt. " I was an able-bodied and able-minded young
man in the strength of my youth ; and my family, then heavily
embarrassed, needed my help urgently. That I should have
44
London
chosen to be a burden to them instead was, according to all the
conventions of peasant fiction, monstrous. Well, without a blush
I embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself into the
struggle for life : I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff
to my father's old age : I hung on to his coat tails. His reward
was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly
novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my
own (now eminent in literature as Mr. John Mackinnon Robertson)
prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. I think,
myself, that this was a handsome reward, far better worth having
than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for
his parents' bread in some sordid trade. Handsome or not, it
was the only return he ever had for the little pension he con-
trived to export from Ireland for his family. My mother rein-
forced it by drudging in her elder years at the art of music which
she had followed in her prime freely for love. I only helped to
spend it. People wondered at my heartlessness : one young and
romantic lady had the courage to remonstrate openly and indig-
nantly with me, ' for the which/ as Pepys said of the ship-
wright's wife who refused his advances, ' I did respect her.'
Callous as Comus to moral babble, I steadily wrote my five
pages a day and made a man of myself (at my mother's expense)
instead of a slave."
In Shaw's opinion, his brain constituted the sum and sub-
stance of his riches. The projection and exposition of his ex-
perience came to be the most urgent need and object of his life.
He recognized a higher duty than merely earning his living :
the fulfilment of his individual destiny. He resolved to become
a writer. In this resolve to dedicate all his powers to the art of
self-expression, lies the explanation of his strange words : " My
mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my
duty to work for hers : therefore, take off your hat to her and
blush."*
Although it was a " frightful squeeze " at times, Shaw was not
wholly destitute. A suit of evening clothes and the knack of
* . Th§ Irrational Knot, Preface to the American edition of 1905, Brentanos,
N.Y.
43
George Bernard Shaw
playing a " simple accompaniment at sight more congenially
to a singer than most amateurs/' gave him "for a fitful year
or so/' the entrie into the better circle of musical society in
London.
In this latter day of his assertion that money controls morality,
Shaw is perfectly consistent in speaking of his poverty and
quotidian shabbiness as the two " disgusting faults " of his youth.
But at the time he did not recognize them as faults, because he
could not help them. " I therefore tolerated the gross error that
poverty, though an inconvenience and a trial, is not a sin and a
disgrace : and I stood for my self-respect on the things I had :
probity, ability, knowledge of art, laboriousness, and whatever
else came cheaply to me. 1 ' A certain pride of birth, a conscious-
ness of worthy ancestry, also sustained him, and helped him to
triumph over circumstance. It was this same feeling which gave
him suavity and poise during the later campaigns of his revolu-
tionary Socialism, and saved him from the excesses, the blind
fury, of the mere proletarian. He had a magnificent library in
Bloomsbury, a priceless picture-gallery in Trafalgar Square,
and another at Hampton Court, without any servants to look
after or rent to pay. During these years Shaw's gain in the
cultivation of his musical and artistic tastes more than com-
pensated for his lack of the advantages of wealth. Nor were his
essays in literature and criticism — I do not refer to his playful
dilettantism — profitless in any real sense. It is true that innu-
merable articles were consistently returned to him ; and yet he
went his way undismayed, slowly saturating himself with Italian
art from Mantegna to Michael Angelo, with the best music from
London to Bayreuth. And while London had not " caught his
tone," musical or otherwise, at this time, the day was to come
in which he should reap the reward for his critical knowledge of
art and music, for the rare and individual style which he was
slowly perfecting.
To the student of Shaw as the litterateur— the highwayman who
" held up " so many different forms of art — the chief interest of
this period is to be found in the five novels which he wrote during
the five years from 1879 t0 x ®^3 — an average of one a year. His
46
SHAW AT THE AGE OF TWENTY -THREE.
London
first novel, written in 1879, aDC * called, " with merciless fitness "
as Shaw says, Immaturity, was never published; and we are
told that even the rats were unable to finish it. George Meredith,
the novelist, who was a reader and literary adviser for the pub-
lishing firm of Chapman and Hall, London, from i860 to 1897,
rejected the manuscript of Immaturity sans phrase — quickly
disposing of it with a laconic " No." The remaining four have
all been published, in magazines and in book-form, either in
England or America. Shaw " turned them out," one each
year, with unvarying regularity and also with unvarying result :
refusal by the publishers. That six pounds which Shaw earned
in nine years must certainly have gone a long way — as postage
stamps.
Mr. Shaw has carefully explained to us why his works were
refused by publisher after publisher. And I find no reason to
question his explanation to the effect that it was the world-old
struggle between literary conscience and public taste. The more
he progressed towards his own individual style, and ventured
upon the freer expression of his own ideas, the more he disap-
pointed the " grave, elderly lovers of literature." As to the
regular novel-publishing houses, whose readers were merely on
the scent of popularity, they gave him, we are told, no quarter
at all. " And so between the old stool of my literary conscientious-
ness and the new stool of a view of life that did not reach pub-
lishing point in England until about ten years later, when Ibsen
drove it in, my novels fell to the ground."
We may omit for the present any discussion of the validity of
Mr. Shaw's claims as a " fictionist." But the story of the circum-
stances under which the novels finally found their way into print
is certainly worthy of narration. It was in 1882 that Henry
George, by a speech during one of the public meetings at the
Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, fired Shaw to enlist,
in Heine's phrase, "as a soldier in the Liberative War of
Humanity."* About this time a body, styling itself the Land
Reform Union, which still survives as the English Land Restora-
tion League, was formed to propagate Georgite Land Nationaliza-
* Cf. Chapter IV., Ths Fabian Society.
47
George Bernard Shaw
Into open revolution against the social evils which the average
sensual man finds extremely suitable to him. So much is
this the case that the practical doctrine of these two arch-
voluptuaries always presents itself to ordinary persons as a saint-
like asceticism."*
At the time of the mutual intimacy of Joynes, Shaw, and
the Salts, and their unhesitating approval and admiration
of Shelley, early in the eighties, vegetarian restaurants began
to be established here and there throughout the country.
These scattered restaurants, Mr. Shaw once remarked in connec-
tion with his own conversion to the faith of Shelley, " made
vegetarianism possible for a man too poor to be catered for."f
It is hardly open to doubt that, while Shelley first called Shaw's
attention to vegetarianism, it was Joynes and Salt who first
confirmed him in the belief, which soon became solidified into a
hard-and-fast principle, that " the enormity of eating the scorched
corpses of animals— cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted —
becomes impossible the moment it becomes consciously instead
of thoughtlessly habitual."
Another member of this coterie, in which there was no question
of Henry George and Karl Marx, but a great deal of Walt Whitman
and Thoreau, was the now well-known Socialist and author,
Edward Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy and other works
are a faithful reflex of the man. It became the habit of these
early apostles of " the simple life " to wear sandals ; Carpenter
even wore his out of doors. He had taught the secret of their
manufacture to a workman friend of his at Millthorpe, a village
near Sheffield , where he resided. Not unfittingly, the habitual
wearer of moccasins, Carpenter, was always called The Noble
Savage by the members of this congenial and delightful circle.
The noisy grand piano grew noisier than ever when Shaw and
* The Religion of the Pianoforte. In the Fortnightly Review, February,
1 894I
t Mr. Shaw's confessions in regard to his change from "
to vegetarianism are perhaps best given in an article in the Pall Mall
Gazette for January 26th, 18*6, entitled. Failures of Inept Vegetarians. By
an Expert.
50
London
Carpenter visited the Salts — Carpenter, like Shaw, revelling in
pianoforte duets with Mrs. Salt.
The death of Joynes was a great grief to these close friends,
especially to Shaw. I am convinced that those mordantly incisive
and penetrating attacks which SJiaw, in after life, made upon
modern surgery and modern medicine find their animus in his
resentment of the manner of Joynes' death. Certain passages
from The Philanderer and The Conflict of Science and Common
Sense thus become more humanly comprehensible. The literary
activities of this circle, so sadly broken up by the death
of Joynes, were by no means confined solely to Carpenter
and Shaw. Joynes himself left a volume of excellent trans-
lations of the revolutionary songs of the German revolutionists
of 1848 — Herwegh, Freiligrath and others.* Salt, whom
Shaw has occasionally quoted, has published several mono-
graphs, his tastes and predilections revealing themselves in
the names of Shelley, James Thomson, Jefferies and De
Quincey.
The Socialist revival of the eighties is responsible for the final
publication of Shaw's novels. As long as he kept sending them
to the publishers, " they were as safe from publicity as they would
have been in the fire." But as soon as he flung them aside as
failures, with a strange perversity, " they almost instantly began
to show signs of life." Among the crop of propagandist magazines
which accompanied the Socialistic revival of the eighties was
one called To-Day — not the present paper of that name, but
one of the many " To-Days which are now Yesterdays." It was
printed by Henry Hyde Champion, but there were several joint
editors, of brief tenure, among whom were Belfort Bax, the well-
known Socialist, and James Leigh Joynes. Although publishing
his novels in this magazine, which it seems paid nothing for
contributions, " seemed a matter of no more consequence than
stuffing so many window-panes with them," Shaw nevertheless
offered up An Unsocial Socialist and Cashel Byron's Profession
* For a brief and illuminative biographical sketch of James Leigh
Joynes, compare Shaw's review of his book, Songs of a Revolutionary Epoch %
in the Pali Matt Gautte, April 16th. 1888.
5i 4*
George Bernard Shaw
on this unstable altar of his political faith.* With one note-
worthy exception, there were no visible results from the serial
publications of these two novels. Shaw's novels, not uncharac-
teristically, appeared in inverse order of composition ; and
number five, An Unsocial Statutist, made Shaw acquainted
with William Morris, an acquaintance which, as we shall see,
ripened later into genuine and sincere friendship. To Shaw's
surprise, as he tells us, William Morris had been reading the
monthly instalments with a certain relish — a proof to Shaw's
mind " how much easier it is to please a great man than a little
one, especially when you share his politics."
Another propagandist magazine, created after the passing of
To-day, and called Our Corner, was published by Mrs. Annie
Besant, with whom Shaw had J)ecome acquainted about the
time he joined the Fabian Society. " She was an incorrigible
benefactress," Shaw says, " and probably revenged herself for
my freely expressed scorn for this weakness by drawing on her
private account to pay me for my jejune novels." Up to
this time, all Shaw's literary productions seemed to have the
deadly effect of driving their media of circulation to an early
grave. After The Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists
had run through its pages in serial form, Our Corner likewise
succumbed to the inevitable, f
To Shaw's expressed regret, Cashel Byron's Profession found
* The first instalment oi An Unsocial Socialist appeared in To-Day, a
" monthly magazine of Scientific Socialism/' New Series, Vol. I. (January-
June, 1884), March number, pp. 205-220. The final instalment appeared
in New Series, Vol. II., of the same magazine (July-December, 1884),
December number, pp. 543-579. The novel appeared under Shaw's name, and
is marked at the close (page 579), " The End," and dated beneath, " London*
1883," the date of composition. Cashel Byron's Profession ran in the same
magazine through the years 1885 and 1886, beginning in New Series, Vol. III.
(January- June, 1885), April number, pp. 145-160, and concluding in Vol. V.
(January- June, 1886), March number, pp. 67-73.
+ The Irrational Knot began in Vol. V. (January- June, 1885), pp. 229-2409
ran through Vols. VI., VII. and VIII., and was concluded in Vol IX.
(January- June, 1887), ending on page 82. Love Among the Artists opened
in Vol. X. (July-December, 1887) of the same magazine, ran through
Vol. XI., and was concluded in Vol. XII. (July-December, 1888), on page
352. It is marked at the close (page 352), " The End, London, 1881 " — the
date of composition,
52
London
one staunch admirer at least. This was Henry Hyde Champion,
who had thrown up a commission in the Army at the call of
Socialism. This admiration for Shaw's realistic exposure of
pugilism — Mr. Shaw once told me that he always considered
admiration of Cashel Byron's Profession the mark of a fool !
— had very momentous consequences. Champion, it seems, had
an " unregenerate taste for pugilism " — a pugnacious survival
of his abdicated adjutancy. " He liked ' Cashel Byron ' so much
that he stereotyped the pages of To-Day which it occupied, and,
in spite of my remonstrances, hurled on the market a misshapen
shilling edition. My friend, Mr. William Archer, reviewed it
prominently; the Saturday Review, always susceptible in those
days to the arts of self-defence, unexpectedly declared it the novel
of the age ; Mr. W. E. Henley wanted to have it dramatized ;
Stevenson wrote a letter about it . . . ; the other papers hastily
searched their waste-paper baskets for it and reviewed it, mostly
rather disappointedly ; the public preserved its composure and
did not seem to care." This letter of Stevenson's to William
Archer,* written at Saranac Lake in the winter of 1887-8, contains
some very interesting criticism, as a quotation will show :
" What am I to say ? I have read your friend's book
with singular relish. If he has written any other, I beg you
will let me see it ; and if he has not, I beg him to lose no
time in supplying the deficiency. It is full of promise, but
I should like to know his age. There are things in it that
are very clever, to which I attach no importance ; it is the
shape of the age. And there are passages, particularly the
rally in the presence of the Zulu King, that show genuine
and remarkable narrative talent — a talent that few will
have the wit to understand, a talent of strength, spirit,
capacity, sufficient vision, and sufficient self-sacrifice, which
last is the chief point in a narrative."
And at the end of his next letter to Mr. Archer (February!
1888), he says : " Tell Shaw to hurry up. I want another."
* Published, in part, in Ths Litters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vol. II.,
edited by Sidney Colvin.
S3
George Bernard Shaw
Neither Shaw nor Champion earned anything from that first
shilling edition, " which began with a thousand copies, but proved
immortal." Shortly after this first edition was exhausted, the
publishing house of Walter Scott and Company placed a revised
shilling edition on the market ; and the book was also published
in New York at about the same time (Harper and Brothers, New
York, 1887). Brentanos, New York, brought out an edition
in 1897, and this was followed in 1899 by an edition oi An Un-
social Socialist*
The immediate cause of these editions was the temporary
interest in the works of Mr. Shaw, occasioned by Mr. Richard
Mansfield's notable productions of Arms and the Man and
The Devil's Disciple. The publication of Plays, Pleasant and
Unpleasant, in two volumes, by H. S. Stone and Company, of
Chicago, followed shortly afterwards. In 1904, when Mr. Daly's
production of Candida created such a stir in America, Mr. Volney
Streamer, of the firm of Brentanos, a Shaw enthusiast of many
years' standing, used his influence to have these two books
reprinted. None of Shaw's novels are copyright in America, so
that he has never, it appears, reaped the reward of the moderate,
although intermittent, vogue which his novels have enjoyed in
that country. It is a fact of common knowledge that Shaw prefers
to be judged by his later work ; but the demand in America for
these novels has been so large that they are likely to be published
for years yet to come. In 1889 or 1890, it must have been, Shaw
happened to notice that his novels were " raging in America,"
and that the list of book sales in one of the United States was
headed by a novel entitled An Unsocial Socialist. In the preface
of the "Authorized Edition" of Cashel Byron's Profession, which
contains the history of the life and death of the novels, Mr. Shaw
says, " As it was clearly unfair that my own American publishers
(H. S. Stone and Company) should be debarred by delicacy towards
me from exploiting the new field of derelict fiction, I begged them
to make the most of their inheritance ; and with my full approval,
* The New York Herald contained the statement that " Brentanos have
done a service to literature in reprinting two of Shaw's novels that are
strangely unfamiliar to the American public."
54
London
Opus 3, called ' Love Among the Artists ' (a paraphrase of the
forgotten line ' Love Among the Roses ') followed."*
This third act of Shaw's " tragedy/' as he calls it, is by no
means the end of the play; as with Thomas Hardy's endless
dramas, the curtain may never be rung down. One might imagine
that Shaw, the Socialist, required the patience of a Job and the
self-repression of a stoic to enable him to restrain his anger ova:
the diversion of the rewards of his talent from his own to the
pockets of Capitalist publishers, free of all obligation to the
author. But he accepts his fate with breezy philosophy.
" I may say," he wrote to Harper and Brothers (who had pub-
lished his Cashel Byron's Profession) in November, 1899, " that
I entirely disagree with the ideas of twenty years ago as to the
' piratical ' nature of American republications of non-copyright
books. Unlike most authors, I am enough of an economist to
know that unless an American publisher acquires copyright he
can no more make a profit at my expense than he can at Shak-
spere's by republishing Hamlet. The English nation, when
taxed for the support of the author by a price which includes
author's royalties, whilst the American nation escapes that burden (
may have a grievance against the American nation, but that is
a very different thing from a grievance of the author against the
American publisher."!
* This book was published in 1900, followed in 1901 by the " Authorized
Edition " of Cashel Byron's Profession (also published by H. S. Stone and Co. J,
which contains the above-quoted remark. In the autumn of 1901 , Grant
Richards, at the time the English publisher of almost all of Mr. Shaw's
works, also brought out a revised edition of Cashel Byron's Profession. In
the autumn of 1904 The Irrational Knot was for the first time published in
book form by Archibald Constable and Co., Mr. Shaw's English publishers at
present. In 1905 The Irrational Knot was published in America by Brentanos.
t On publishing his Cashel Byron's Profession, Harper and Brothers sent
Mr. Shaw ten pounds in recognition of his moral right as an author to share
any profits the book might yield. There were then no international copy
right laws in force, and the works of foreign authors were not protected in
America. When Mr. Shaw learned that this same book had been repub-
lished by another American house, he sent back to Harper and Brothers
the ten pounds, with thanks for its use, explaining that since the book had
been republished by another firm, even his moral claim to recognition by
the original American publishers had lapsed.
55
George Bernard Shaw
" Suffice it to say here that there can be no doubt now that
the novels so long left for dead in the forlorn-hope magazines of
the eighties have arisen and begun to propagate themselves
vigorously throughout the New World at the rate of a dollar and
a half per copy, free of all royalty to the flattered author." He
begs for absolution from blame " if these exercises of a raw
apprentice break loose again and insist on their right to live.
The world never did know chalk from cheese in the matter of
art ; and, after all, since it is only the young and old who have
time to read — the rest being too busy living — my exercises may
be fitter for the market than my masterpieces."
In 1883, when the last of the novels of his nonage was com-
pleted, Shaw was still striking in the dark. He had not yet found
the opening into the light, the portal giving out from the stuffy
world of imaginative lying into the great world of real life — a life
of pleasurable activity, strenuous endeavour, and high achieve-
ment. He found his way out by following an insistent summons
— the clarion call of Henry George. And when, having doffed
the swaddling clothes of romance, he emerged from the dim
retreat of his imagination, it was to find himself standing in the
dazzling light of a new day— the day of Socialism, of the Fabian
Society, and — of George Bernard Shaw.
56
THE NOVELIST
" London was not ripe for me. Nor was I ripe for London. I was in
an impossible position. I was a foreigner — an Irishman, the most foreign
of all foreigners when he has not gone through the University mill. I was
. . not uneducated ; but, unfortunately, what I knew was exactly what the
educated Englishman didn't know or didn't believe." — George Bernard
Shaw : an Interview. In The Chap-Booh, November, 1896.
CHAPTER III
AS a young man of twenty-four, Bernard Shaw began to
evolve a moral code. He perceived in those phases of
contemporary existence which either intimately touched his life
or daily challenged his critical scrutiny, a shocking discrepancy
between things as they are and things as they should be. He
has never been a " whole hogger," like Pope or Omar Khayyam :
he neither believed that whatever is is right nor wished to
shatter this sorry scheme of things entire. The arch-foe of
idealism, he paradoxically prefaced his attack by hoisting the
banner of an ideal. Shaw has spent more than a quarter of a
century in formulating his ideal, in attempting to concretize his
individual code into a universal ethical system.
Let us not fall into the crass error of supposing that Shaw has
never come under the spell of the fascination of idealism and
romance. Shaw the realist paid his toll to Romance before the
moral passion ever dawned upon his soul. Just as Zola always
bore the brand of Hugo, just as Ibsen worked his way through
romance to real life, so Shaw found his feet in realism only after
tripping several times over the novels of a romantic imagina-
tion. Shaw's novels are the products of a riotous and fanciful
imagination, if not, as he dubs them, the compounds of ignorance
and intuition. In a celebrated discussion with Mr. W. H. Mallock,
we have Shaw's frank confession :
" We are both novelists, privileged as such to make fancy
pictures of Society and individuals, and to circulate them
as narratives of things that have actually been ; and the
critics will gravely find fault with our fictitious law, or our
fictitious history, or our fictitious psychology, if we depart
59
George Bernard Shaw
therein from perfect verisimilitude. Why have we this
extraordinary privilege ? Because, I submit, we are both
natural-born tellers of the thing that is not. Not, observe,
vulgar impostors who lie for motives of gain, to extort alms,
to conceal or excuse discreditable facts in our history, to
glorify ourselves, to facilitate the sale of a horse, or to avoid
unpleasantness. All humanity lies like that, more or less.
But Mr. Mallock and I belong to those who lie for the sheer
love of lying, who forsake everything else for it, who put
into it laborious extra touches of art for which there is no
extra pay, whose whole life, if it were looked into closely
enough, would be found to have been spent more in the
world of fiction than of reality."*
Shaw has somewhere placed on record his boast that such in-
sight as he had in criticism was due to the fact that he exhausted
romanticism before he was ten years old. " Your popular nove-
lists," he contemptuously declared, " are now gravely writing
the stories I told to myself before I replaced my first set of teeth.
Some day I will try to found a genuine psychology of fiction by
writing down the history of my imagined life, duels, battles, love-
affairs with queens and all. They say that man in embryo is
successively a fish, a bird, a mammal, and so on, before he
develops into a man. Well, popular novel-writing is the fish
stage of your Jonathan Swift. I have never been so dishonest as
to sneer at our popular novelists. I once went on like that myself.
Why does the imaginative man always end by writing comedy
if only he has also a sense of reality ? Clearly because of the
stupendous irony of the contrast between his imaginary adven-
tures and his real circumstances and powers. At night, a con-
quering hero, an Admirable Crichton, a Don Juan ; by day, a
cowardly little brat cuffed by his nurse for stealing lumps of
sugar. ... My real name," he added, " is Alnaschar."t
* On Mr. Mattock's Proposed Trumpet Performance. In the Fortnightly
Review, April, 1894.
t Who I Am. and What I Think. Part I. In the Candid Friend, May
nth, 1 90 1.
60
The Novelist
As a matter of fact, Shaw has anticipated his exhaustion of
romanticism by some seventeen years. It was not until he finished
the novels of his nonage that he could justly boast of having
" worked off " that romanticism which always appears to be latent
in every creative imagination in the stage of incipiency. Remem-
ber what Stevenson wrote to William Archer of Cashd Byron's
Profession :
"As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most
feverish. .. * It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful ;
the author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott's or
Dumas' s, and then he daubs in little bits of Socialism ; he
soars away on the wings of the romantic griffon — even the
griffon, as he cleaves air, shouting with laughter at the nature
of the quest — and I believe in his heart he thinks he is
I labouring in a quarry of solid granite realism.
" It is this that makes me — the most hardened adviser
now extant — stand back and hold my peace. If Mr! Shaw is
below five-and-twenty, let him go his path ; if he is thirty,
he had best be told that he is a romantic, and pursue romance
with his eyes open ; perhaps he knows it ; God knows ! —
my brain is softened."*
It is all very well for Shaw to say that he used Bizet's Carmen
as a safety valve for his romantic impulses. But the testimony
of his own novels flatly contradicts his complacent assertion that
he was romantic enough to have come to the end of romance
before he began to create in art for himself.
These novels, in spite of their youthful romanticism, neverthe-
less constitute the record of the adventures of an earnest and
anarchic young man, with a knack of keen observation and terse
portraiture, striving to give voice to and interpret the spirit of
the century. When someone, in 1892, suggested that Shaw was,
of course, a follower of Ibsen, Shaw replied with a great show of
indignation : " What ! / a follower of Ibsen ! My good sir, as far
1 * The Letters of R. L. Stevenson, Vol. II. Edited by Sidney Colvin,
pp, 107 e$ seq.
6l
George Bernard Shaw
as England is concerned, Ibsen is a follower of mine. In 1880,
when I was only twenty-four, I wrote a book called ' The Irrational
Knot,' which reads nowadays like an Ibsenite novel." And in
the postscript to the preface to the new edition of that novel,
after having declared with familiar Shavian willingness in the
preface that he " couldn't stand " his own book, he makes a
sudden bouleversement as follows : " Since writing the above I
have looked through the proof-sheets of this book, and found,
with some access of respect for my youth, that it is a fiction of
the first order. ... It is one of those fictions in which the morality
is original and not ready-made. ... I seriously suggest that
' The 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.
And though I say it that should not, the choice was not such a
bad shot for a stupid instinctive force that has to work and become
conscious of itself by means of human brains."
With all its immaturity, The Irrational Knot is undoubtedly
in the " tone of our time." It is the ill-chosen title, however,
rather than the contents which recalls Nora and Torvald. The
institution of marriage is not shown to be irrational ; Shaw's
shafts were aimed at the code of social morality which renders
marriages such as the one described inevitable failures. Shaw
not only seeks to expose the fatal inconsistencies of this social
code, but also damns the feeble shams with which Society attempts
to bolster up those inconsistencies.
Endowed with much of the bluntness of Bluntschli, but with
an added sensitiveness, the " hero " of this novel may be described
as the crude and repellent prototype of the later Shavian males.
Believing more in force than in savoir faire, in brutal sincerity
than in conventional graces, Conolly stands out for literal truth
and violent tactlessness as against social propriety and observance
of les convenances. He is acting with perfect validity to himself
when he says, in answer to the question as to what he is going
to do about his wife's elopement with a former lover : " Eat my
supper. I am as hungry as a bear." After Marian's desertion
by her lover, Conolly urges her to return to him, assuring her
62
The Novelist
that now she is just the wife he wants, since she is at last rid
of " fashionable society, of her family, her position, her prin-
ciples, and all the rest of her chains for ever." Marian refuses,
because she cannot " respect herself for breaking loose from what
is called her duty. 1 ' Their definitive words epitomise the failure
of their life together.
" ' You are too wise, Ned/ she said, suffering him to replace her
gently in the chair.
"'It is impossible to be too wise, dearest/ he said, and un-
hesitatingly turned and left her/ 1
The subjects which inspired Shaw's maturer genius are the
same subjects which so actively, if crudely and imperfectly,
struggle for expression in this early work. Much acuteness is
exhibited by the young man of twenty-four in spying out the
weak points in the armour of " that corporate knave, Society/ 9
When the " high-bred " wife of the " self-made " man elopes with
a " gentleman/' Society's dismay is only feigned. Like Roebuck
Ramsden, Marian's relatives are quite willing to forgive, and even
to thank, the cur if he will only marry her : by ousting a rank
outsider like Conolly, Douglas appears to Society almost in the
light of a champion of its cause. Shaw was too close an observer
of life, even at twenty-four, to attempt to make out a case against
matrimony by celebrating the success of an unblessed union.
His point is turned against Society, less for upholding traditional
morality than for making the preservation of its class distinctions
its highest laws. Society is ready enough to forgive Douglas ;
but Marmaduke Lind, in setting up an unblessed union with
Comity's sister, Mademoiselle Lalage Virtue, of the Bijou Theatre,
places himself beyond the pale. For she is socially " impossible " ;
and, consequently, there can be no relenting towards Marmaduke
until he return, and, in the odour of sanctity and respectability,
marry Lady Constance Carberry !
The Irrational Knot cannot be called novel on account of
its rather commonplace thought that " a girl who lives in Bel-
gravia ought not to marry with a man who is familiar with the
Mile End Road." But as Mr. W. L. Courtney suggestively
remarks : "What is novel is the illustration, in clever and
63
George Bernard Shaw
mordant fashion, of the absurd folly and wastefulness of social
conditions which obstinately make intelligence subservient to
aristocratic prestige. Even in our much-abused country there
is, and has been for a long time, a career open for talent ; but
the aspiring male must not encumber himself by taking a partner
out of ranks to which he does not belong. Thus, ' The Irrational
Knot ' is nothing more nor less than an early tract in defence of
Socialism or Communism, or whatever other term should be ap-
plied to theories which seek to equalize the chances and oppor-
tunities of human beings." In The Irrational Knot are found the
marks of that individual mode of observing and reflecting life f
which is popularly denominated " Shavian." Here is the first
clear testimony to that rationalistic mood in Shaw which per-
meates so much of his subsequent work. And yet this book
contains intimations of that deeper philosophy of life which con-
ceives of rationality merely as an instrumentality for carrying out
its designs. This knot is irrational only because it is too rational,
Marian shrinks from reconcilement with Conolly : she cannot
breathe in the icy atmosphere of his rationalistic cocksureness.
Conolly expresses Shaw's fundamental protestantism in his asser-
tion that Marian's ill-considered flight with Douglas was the first
sensible action of her whole life. It was admirable in his eyes
because it was her first vigorous assertion of will, of vital purpose.
The human being can and will find freedom only in overriding
convention, repudiating " duty," and solving every problem in
terms of its own factors. The book, indeed, is marked less by
immaturity of thought than by crudeness of execution. The
characters are deficient in the flexibility and pliancy of human
beings, and the book lacks suggestion of "the slow, inegulat
rhythm of life," of which Henry James somewhere speaks. To
Shaw, the depiction of Conolly was evidently a labour of love ;
and, consequently, we have an execution of force, if not always of
convincing veracity. Elinor McQuinch, shrewd, sharp-tongued, acid
— the familiar advocatus diaboli, and Shaw in petticoats of the
later Shavian drama — is delightfully refreshing in her piquancy,
and truly Ibsenic in her determination to " be herself." The
nascent dramatist often speaks out in this book — note the melo-
64
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The Novelist
dramatic Lalage Virtue — but nowhere more characteristically
than in the trenchant deliverance of the justly- vexed Elinor :
" Henceforth Uncle Reginald is welcome to my heartiest
detestation. I have been waiting ever since I knew him
for an excuse to hate him ; and now he has given me one.
He has taken part — like a true parent — against you with a
self-intoxicated young fool whom he ought to have put out
of the house. He has told me to mind my own business.
I shall be even with him for that some day. I am as vindic-
tive as an elephant : I hate people who are not vindictive ;
they are never grateful either, only incapable of any enduring
sentiment. ... I am thoroughly well satisfied with myself
altogether ; at last I have come out of a scene without having
forgotten the right thing to say ! "
Imagination lingers fondly, as Mr. Hubert Bland once re-
marked, over the spectacle of Elinor standing in the middle of
the stage, three-quarters face to the audience, and firing off those
acute generalizations about people who are not vindictive. Shaw's
cleverness has begun thus early to betray him ; a number of the
characters are smart, but quite unnatural. The " Literary Great-
grandfather" of the present Shaw unerringly pointed out many
of the weak spots of Society ; but his fundamental Socialism, im-
patient of class distinctions and social barriers, leads him occasion-
ally into crude caricature. The book's greatest fault lies, perhaps,
in the fact that his characters employ, not the natural, ductile
speech of to-day, but the stilted diction of Dumas and Scott.
Commonplace as is the characterization, Shaw's next novel,
Love Among the Artists, is a tract — less a novel than a critical
essay with a purpose, in narrative form. Shaw confesses that
he wrote this book for the purpose of illustrating " the difference
between that enthusiasm for the fine arts which people gather
from reading about them, and the genuine artistic faculty which
cannot help creating, interpreting, or, at least, unaffectedly enjoy-
ing music and pictures."
I have often wondered if it might not be possible for one who
did not know Shaw personally to construct a quite credible
67 5*
George Bernard Shaw
biography by making a composite of the peculiarly Shavian type*
presented in his novels and plays. Without carrying the analogy
to extremes, I think it mediately true that Shaw has one by
one exhibited, in semi-autobiographic form, the distinguishing
hall-marks of his individual and many-sided character. To
what extent Owen Jack is a projection of the Shaw of this period,
how graphically, if unconsciously, Shaw has revealed in this droll
original his own ideals of music and his defence of a certain im-
pudently exasperating assertiveness of manner in himself, is
difficult to decide. Shaw insists that Jack is partly founded
on Beethoven. And yet there is an undoubted resemblance
between the real Irishman and the imagined Welshman who plays
the Hyde of Jack to the Jekyll of Shaw. Like " C. di B." and
G. B. S., Jack is the first of the " privileged lunatics." He scorns
the pedantry of the schools, sneers at mechanical music of academic
origin, jibes at " analytic criticism," and fiercely denounces the
antiquated views of the musical organizations of England, with
their old fogeyism, their cowardice in the face of novelty, their
dread of innovation, and their cringing subservience to obsolescent
and outworn models. Like Shaw, Jack is always tolerant of
sincerity, always sympathetic with true effort, unrestrainedly
enthusiastic over any vital outpouring of the creative spirit ;
rebuking tyranny wherever he sees it, exposing falsehood when-
ever he hears it, eternally vigilant in exposing frauds and un-
masking shams. And yet, with all his offensive brusqueness,
fierce intolerance, and colossal self-sufficiency, gentle-hearted,
compassionate, and, in the presence of beauty, deeply humble.
Shaw once called Love Among the Artists a novel with a
purpose. Viewed from another standpoint, it is a collection of
types, a study in temperaments. The author preaches the arro-
gance of genius as opposed to a false humility in the presence of
great art works. The shallow artist, Adrian Herbert, " spends
whole days in explaining to you what a man of genius is and feels,
knowing neither the one nor the other " ; Mary Sutherland never
surpasses mediocrity as an artist because her knowledge is based
upon hearsay instead of upon experience. She stands in sharp
contrast to Madge Brailsford, who tersely puts her case to Mary
68
The Novelist
— the case, one might say, of the whole book — " If you don't
like your own pictures, depend upon it no one else will. I am
going to be an actress because I think I can act. You are going
to be a painter because you think you can't paint." Mr. Huneker
declares that Mary Sutherland, " lymphatically selfish and
utterly unsympathetic," is his prime favourite in the story. " Her
taste in flaring colours, her feet, her habit of breathing heavily
when aroused emotionally, her cowardices, her artistic failures,
her eye-glasses, her treacly sentiment — what a study of the tribe
artistic ! And truly British withal." The only other note-
worthy figure in the book is the evasive, elusive Mademoiselle
Szczympli$a — a study searching in the closeness and delicacy of
its observation. This charming and piquant Polish pianist,
although emanating poetry and romance, has, as she puts it, the
" soul commercial " within her. She cannot see why, even if
she does love her husband, she should therefore dispense with
her piano practice!
Unlike the classic model for a play, this novel has neither begin-
ning, middle, nor ending ; and yet it has many brilliantly executed
scenes. Who could ever forget the street fight in Paris, the
humorous " love-scene " between Madge Brailsford and Owen
Jack, and the rehearsal, so acute in its satire — fitting companion-
piece to the Wagner lecture in Cashel Byron* s Profession ?
It is noteworthy that Love Among the Artists heralds a
favourite thesis of Shaw's — the natural antipathy between blood
relations — a thesis expounded many years later by John Tanner
in the rather leaden epigram : " I suspect that the tables of con-
sanguinity have a natural basis in a natural repugnance." Cashel
Byron is always catching himself in the act of " shying " when
his mother is around — she used to throw things at him when he
was a boy ! Blanche Sartorius is quite ready to hate her father
at a moment's notice ; no love is lost between Julia and Colonel
Craven ; Vivie Warren stands out determinedly against her
mother's authority ; and Frank, with nauseating levity, takes
great delight in " jollying " his reprobate father upon the indis-
cretions of his youth. Phil and Dolly are breezily disrespectful
of parental rule ; and Anne uses her maudlin mother as an excuse
69
George Bernard Shaw
to do just whatever she wants. The thesis is part of Shaw's
stock-in-trade, and might be regarded as a mere comic motif,
were it not for the " Hamn*U» iteration " of the thing. Adrian
Herbert avows his positive dislike for his mother, because, as he
affirms, their natures are antagonistic, their views of life and duty
incompatible — because they have nothing in common. We must
take Shaw's insistence upon incompatibility of temperament
between blood-relations with a good many grains of salt. It is
not even half true that every mother tries to defeat every cherished
project of her sons " by sarcasms, by threats, and, failing these,
by cajolery " ; that everyone's childhood has been " embittered
by the dislike of his mother and the ill-temper of his father " ;
that every man's wife soon ceases to care for him and that he soon
tires of her ; that every man's brother goes to law with him over
the division of the family property ; and that every man's son acts
in studied defiance of his plans and wishes. These things are
only true enough to be funny ; just enough of them happen in real
life to give Shaw's thesis a sort of comic plausibility. It is the
phrases, " love is eternal," and " blood is thicker than water,"
rather than the facts themselves, which make the iconoclastic
Shaw see red. I find some explanation of his view in pardonable
revolt, as a dramatist, against that persistent superstition of
French melodrama — the voix du sang. Some explanation of
Shaw's views in the matter may possibly be found in the facts of
his own personal experience ; at any rate, he once said that the
word education brought to his mind four successive schools where
his parents got him out of the way for half a day. Indeed, his
campaign against the modern system of education springs from
his recently expressed disgust with educators for concealing the
fact that " the real object of that system is to relieve parents
from the insufferable company and anxious care of their children."
Continuing in the same strain, he says :
" Until it is frankly recognized that children are nuisances
to adults except at playful moments, and that the first social
need that arises from the necessary existence of children in
a community is that there should be some adequate defence
70
The Novelist
of the comparative quiet and order of adult life against the
comparative noise, racket, untidiness, inquisitiveness, restless-
ness, fitfulness, shiftlessness, dirt, destruction and mischief,
which are healthy and natural for children, and which are
no reason for denying them the personal respect without
which their characters cannot grow and set properly, we
shall have the present pretence of inexhaustible parental
tenderness, moulding of character, inculcation of principles,
and so forth, to cloak the imprisoning, drilling, punishing,
tormenting, brigading, boy and girl farming, which saves
those who can afford it from having to scream ten times
every hour, ' Stop that noise, Tommy, or I'll clout your head
for you/ "*
With gradual, yet nnhalting steps, Shaw works his way to
those startling and topsy-turvy theories which are so delightfully
credible to the intellectuals and so bewilderingly exasperating to
the Philistines. In Love Among the Artists, Madge Brailsford's
open avowal to Owen Jack of her love for him gives a hint that
the theory of woman as the huntress and man as the quarry
is upon us. But quite the contrary course is taken in Cashel
Byron's Profession, Shaw's next novel. Cashel Byron, the per-
fect pugilist, fights his way into the good graces of the " high-
born" heiress, Lydia Carew, by the straight exhibition of his
physical prowess. The whole book is conceived in such broadly
satirical vein that it is impossible for me to accept it as anything
except a boyishly irrepressible pasquinade. Fortunately, the
" little bits of Socialism that were daubed in " here and there at
first, were afterwards deleted; the current version is a novel,
pure and simple, with no discoverable Socialistic thesis behind it,
Shaw's explanation that the book was written as an ofiset to
the " abominable vein of retaliatory violence " that runs all
through the literature of the nineteenth century need not detain
us here; Shaw has made out his own case with sufficiently
paradoxical cleverness in the inevitable preface. He spends
one half of his time in explaining his actions during the other
* Does Modern Education Ennoble ? In Great Thoughts, October ;th, 1905.
71
/
(
George Bernard Shaw
half ; and it has even been unkindly hinted that each new book
of his serves merely as an excuse for writing another preface.
And it should be remembered that the preface to Cashel Byron's
Profession was written some eighteen years later than was the
book itself — ample time for Shaw to devise any excuse for
representing his book as a deliberate challenge to British ideals.
Suffice it to say that a comparison of Cashel Byron's Profession
with Rodney Stone, for example, will make plain the distinction
between the realism and the romance of pugilism. And while
Byron's exhibitions of physical prowess are the most " howlingly
funny" incidents in the book, it is nevertheless true that Shaw
has done nothing to surround the " noble art of sluggerei " with
any halo of fictitious romance.* " Its novelty," as Shaw himself
maintains, " consists in the fact that an attempt is made to treat
the art of punching seriously, and to detach it from the general
elevation of moral character with which the ordinary novelist
persists in associating it."
The real novelty, and, indeed, the chief charm, of the book
consists rather in the fact that no attempt is made to treat any-
thing seriously. So far as the prize-ring is concerned, the book's
realism is veracious; the rest is the frankest of popular melo-
drama. What appeals more strongly to the popular heart than
a low-born but invincible slugger fighting his way, round after
round, to the side of a noble and fabulously wealthy heroine !
What more oracularly Adelphic in its melodrama than the " finger
of fate " upon the " long arm of coincidence " directing CasheTs
mother to the mansion of Miss Lydia Carew ! And what an
exquisite fulfilment of poetic justice — the ultimate discovery
that Cashel is a scion of one of the oldest county families in
England, and heir to a great estate ! The thing that makes the
book go, of course, is its peculiarly Shavian cast — the combination
of what Stevenson called " struggling, overlaid original talent "
* A dramatization of the novel, by Mr. Stanislaus Stange, was pro-
duced with moderate success in New York several years ago. Unique
interest attached to the production because the part of Cashel Byron was
taken by Mr. James J. Corbett, some time pugilistic champion of the world
— and incidentally quite a clever actor. There is much of Cashel in Mr.
Corbett, whose popular sobriquet is " Gentleman Jim."
72
The Novelist
and " blooming gaseous foily." Shaw's sense of dramatic situation
continually foreshadows the future playwright. The abounding
humour of the exquisitely ludicrous scene at the reception — the
devastating comicality of the brute, with his native " mother-
wit," turned rough-and-ready philosopher ! When Cashel is set
down in the midst of this ethical-artistic circle, he breezily excels
all the professors — for he discusses art positively, in the termino-
logy of his own profession, in which he is a past master. The
sublime hardihood of elucidating Beethoven and Wagner in terms
of the pugilistic art of Jack Randall ! And Bashville, over
whom Stevenson howled with derision and delight, what a brief
for democratic Socialism is Bashville — prototype for the Admirable
Crichton and 'Enry Straker — keenly conscious of his own absur-
dity, yet zealously standing out in defence of his mistress and
in insistence upon the truly democratic doctrine of " equal rights
for all, special privileges for none." Who cannot sympathize with
Stevenson : " I dote on Bashville — I could read of him for ever ;
de Bashville [e suis le fervent — there is only one Bashville, and I am
his devoted slave ; Bashville est magnifique, mats il n'est guire
Possible." Or when he says : " Bashville — O Bashville ! fen
chortle (which is finely polyglot)." Service is as sacred to Bash-
ville as pugilism is to Cashel. Each is the " ideal " professional
man, who magnifies his office and measures up to the height of
his own profession. Each demands recognition for fulfilling to
the best of bis ability his own special function in life. Shaw
insists that the real worth of a man is not to be measured by the
social standing of his profession, but in terms of his professional
efficiency.
Shaw's mastery of the portrayal of striking contrasts is exhibited
in the case of Cashel Byron and Lydia Carew. There is a strong
hint of the " female Yahoo " in Lydia' s avowal to her aristocratic
suitor : "I practically believe in the doctrine of heredity ; and as
my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my im-
pulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind
is a trustworthy one. You can understand that ; it is a plain
proposition in eugenics." This was fun to Stevenson — but " horrid
fun." His postscript is laconically eloquent : " (I say, Archer,
73
George Bernard Shaw
my God ! what women ! ) " William Morris seems to have had
the rights in the matter in describing Lydia, to Shaw privately,
as a "prig-ess." Shaw grandiloquently speaks of her as "super-
human all through," a "working model" of an "improved type"
of womanhood. " Let me not deny, however . . . ," he remarks,
"that a post-mortem examination by a capable critical anatomist
— probably my biographer — will reveal the fact that her inside is
full of wheels and springs." The book closes on a mildly Shavian
note — the romance has dwindled to banality. " Cashel's
admiration for his wife survived the ardour of his first love for
her ; and her habitual forethought saved her from disappointing
his reliance on her judgment."
All that was needed to expose the threadbare plot of
Cashel Byron's Profession was The Admirable BashviUe : or
Constancy Unrewarded — Shaw's blank-verse stage version of the
novel. This delightful jest was perpetrated in defence of the
stage-right of the novel, which threatened to pass into unworthy
hands through the malign workings of that " foolish anomaly," the
English Copyright Law. In Shaw's celebrated lecture on Shake-
speare, at Kensington Town Hall, section 10, as given in his
abstract, reads as follows :
" That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of
words, blank verse, written under the amazingly loose con-
ditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all
sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical, and obscurely
technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to
impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of fan-
tasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes of
literary expression, and that this is why whole oceans of dull
bombast and drivel have been emptied on the heads of
England since Shakespeare's time in this form by people who
could not have written Box and Cox to save their lives. Also
(this on being challenged) that I can write blank verse myself
more swiftly than prose, and that, too, of full Elizabethan
quality plus the Shakespearian sense of the absurdity of it
as expressed in the lines of Antient Pistol. What is more,
74
The Novelist
that I have done it, published it, and had it performed on
the stage with huge applause."*
Liking the " melodious sing-song, the clear, simple, one-line
and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the
half-closes in an eighteenth-century symphony, in Peele, Kid,
Greene, and the histories of Shakespeare," Shaw quite naturally
" poetasted The Admirable Bashville in the rigmarole style."
After illustrating how unspeakably bad Shakespearean blank
verse is, Shaw ludicrously claims that his own is " just as good."
Nor is it possible to deny that his own blank verse positively
scintillates with the Shakespearean— or is it Shavian ? — sense of
its absurdity. The preface to The Admirable Bashville has
the genuine Shavian timbre, with its solemn fooling, its portentous
levity, its false premisses and ludicrous conclusions. In that
preface, as Mr. Archer puts it, Shaw " defends the woodenness
of his blank verse by arguing that wooden blank verse is the best.
That, at any rate, is the gist of his contention, though he does
not put it in just that way."
The play — for despite Shaw's prefaces, the play's the thing —
is a truly admirable burlesque of rhetorical drama. Not Bash-
ville, but Cashel only, is admirable ; it is Cashel's constancy that
is rewarded. The piece is couched in a tone of the most delicious
extravagance — a hit, a palpable hit, in every line. I cannot
resist the temptation to quote from the scene in which Lydia,
Lucian, and Bashville, fast locked against intrusion, debate the
question of admitting Cashel, the presumably infuriated ruffian*
who has just been successfully tripped up by Bashville as he is
trying to enter the Carew mansion.
Lydia : We must not fail in courage with a fighter.
Unlock the door.
Lucian : Like all women, Lydia,
You have the courage of immunity.
To strike you were against his code of honour ;
But me, above the belt, he may perform on
T' th' height of his profession. Also Bashville.
* Bernard Shaw Abashed. In the Daily News, April 17th, 1905.
75
George Bernard Shaw
Bashville : Think not of me, sir. Let him do his worst.
Oh, if the valour of my heart could weigh
The fatal difference 'twixt his weight and mine,
A second battle should he do this day :
Nay, though outmatched I be, let but my mistress
Give me the word : instant I'll take him on
Here — now — at catchweight. Better bite the
carpet
A man, than fly, a coward.
Lucian : Bravely said :
I will assist you with the poker.
And well worth remembering is the naive autobiography,
delivered at the request of the Zulu king, of that celestially
denominated " bruiser " concerning whom Cashel once said :
" Slave to the ring I rest until the face of Paradise be changed/ 1
Cetewayo : Ye sons of the white queen :
Tell me your names and deeds ere ye fall to.
Paradise : Your royal highness, you beholds a bloke
What gets his living honest by his fists.
I may not have the polish of some toffs
As I could mention on ; but up to now
No man has took my number down. I scale
Close on twelve stun ; my age is twenty-three ;
And at Bill Richardson's " Blue Anchor " pub
Am to be heard of any day by such
As likes the job. I don't know, governor,
As ennythink remains for me to say.
Those who witnessed the original production of the play by
the London Stage Society in 1903, and also the later production
in 1909 at the " Afternoon Theatre " (His Majesty's), unhesitatingly
gave it that " huge applause " of which Shaw speaks so frankly.
" The best burlesque of rhetorical drama in the language," is Mr.
Archer's sweeping dictum. Even the most hardened of Philistines
might find it easy to agree with his statement : " Fielding's ' Tom
Thumb ' and Carey's ' Chrononhotonthologos ' are, it seems to
me, not in the running."
76
The Novelist
Not until the appearance of An Unsocial Socialist, fifth of
the novels of his nonage, is the Pandora's box of Shavian theories
opened. There now begin to troop forth those startling and
anarchic views with which the name of Shaw is popularly
associated. This modern "Izcoledes Maris" heralds the reign of
the " literature of effrontery " ; Shaw is beginning to take his
stride. With all its extravagance and waywardness, An Un-
social Socialist has been declared by at least one critic of authority
to be as brilliant as anything George Meredith ever wrote.
Let us recall Stevenson's warning to Shaw : " Let him beware
of his damned century ; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated
narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out
like an untimely birth by the Daemon of the Epoch." Gone are
the chivalry and romance — the winds of Socialism have blown
them all away. But the book fairly reeks of the " damned
century," with its mad irresponsibility, its exasperating levity,
its religious and social revolt. Written in 1883, it seethes and
bubbles with the scum of the Socialist brew just then beginning
to ferment. Shaw's original design, he tells us, was to " produce
a novel which should be a gigantic grapple with the whole social
problem. . . . When I had finished two chapters of this enter-
prise — chapters of colossal length, but containing the merest
preliminary matter — I broke down in sheer ignorance and in-
capacity." Eventually the two prodigious chapters of Shaw's
magnum opus were published as a complete novel, in two
"books," under the title An Unsocial Socialist. Shaw begins
fiercely to sermonize humanity, to deride all customs and in-
stitutions which have not their roots sunk in individualism and
in social justice. The Seven Deadly Sins are: respectability,
conventional virtue, filial affection, modesty, sentiment, devotion
to woman, romance. Sidney Tiefusis is the philosopher
of the New Order, revolted by the rottenness of present
civilization and resolved, by any means, to set in motion some
schemes for its reformation. Discovering too late that marriage
to him, as to Tanner, means " apostasy, profanation of the
sanctuary of his soul, violation of his manhood, sale of his birth-
right, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance
77
George Bernard Shaw
of defeat/' Trefusis deliberately deserts his wife, not because, as
with Falk and Svanhild in Ibsen's Love's Comedy, love seems
too exquisite, too ethereal to be put to the illusion-shattering test
of marriage, but because marriage involves the triumph of senses
over sense, of passion over reason. Even after he has ceased
to love Henrietta, her love for him continues to set in motion
the mechanism of passion, and he is revolted by the fact that she
is satisfied so long as " the wheels go round."
The millionaire son of a captain of industry, Trefusis has, by
a strange freak of fate, drunk deep of the Socialist draught of the
epoch. Respecting his dead father for his energy and bravery
among unscrupulous competitors in the struggle for existence,
Trefusis curses his memory for the inhuman means employed in
his business dealings and the social crimes concealed by the
shimmer of his " ill-gotten gold."
His most significant utterance — an outburst before the wealthy
landowner, Sir Charles Brandon — gives us a clear picture of
Shaw's Socialist views at this time :
" A man cannot be a Christian : I have tried it, and found
it impossible both in law and in fact. I am a capitalist and
a landholder. I have railway shares, mining shares, building
shares, bank shares, and stock of most kinds ; and a great
trouble they are to me. But these shares do not represent
wealth actually in existence : they are a mortgage on the
labour of unborn generations of labourers, who must work
to keep me and mine in idleness and luxury. If I sold them^
would the mortgage be cancelled and the unborn generations
released from its thrall ? No. It would only pass into the
hands of some other capitalist ; and the working classes
would be no better off for my self-sacrifice. Sir Charles cannot
obey the command of Christ : I defy him to do it. Let him
give his land for a public park: only the richer classes will
have leisure to enjoy it. Plant it at the very doors of the
poor, so that they may at least breathe its air ; and it will
raise the value of the neighbouring houses and drive the poor
away. Let him endow a school for the poor, like Eton or
7 8
The Novelist
Christ's Hospital ; and the rich will take it for their own
children as they do in the two instances I have named. Sir
Charles does not want to minister to poverty, but to abolish
it No matter how much yon give to the poor, everything but
a bare subsistence wage will be taken away from them again
by force. All talk of practising Christianity, or even bare
justice, is at present mere waste of words. How can you
justly reward the labourer when you cannot ascertain the
value of what he makes, owing to the prevalent custom of
stealing it ? . . . The principle on which we farm out our
national industry to private marauders, who recompense
themselves by blackmail, so corrupts and paralyses us that
we cannot be honest even when we want to. And the reason
we bear it so calmly is that very few of us really want to."
A Marx in Shaw's clothing, Trefusis devotes all his energies,
all his wealth, to the task of forming an international
association — "The International," history gives it — of men
pledged " to share the world's work justly ; to share the
produce of the work justly; to yield not a farthing — charity
apart — to any full-grown and able-bodied idler or malingerer, and
to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons attempting to
get more than their share of wealth or give less than their share
of work." Whole-souledly committed to Socialism in its
iconoclastic aspects, Trefusis defies convention, prudery, delicacy,
good-taste, and tact in all his actions, convinced beyond reclaim
that " vile or not, whatever is true is to the purpose." His
philosophy holds it a short-sighted policy to run away from a
mistake or a misunderstanding, instead of " facing the music "
and clearing the matter up. A licensed eccentric like his proto-
typic creator in real life, Trefusis is permitted to take liberties
granted to no one else ; and by the " exercise of a certain con-
siderate tact (which, on the outside, perhaps, seems the opposite
of tact)," but which in reality consists in the most ingenious
double-dealing, he somehow or other contrives to have his way and
go scot-free.
In the early part of the story, disSuised as that " terrific
79
George Bernard Shaw
combination of nerves, gall, and brains/' Smilash, he dexterously
philanders to his heart's content with several young girls at the
boarding-school where his wife was educated. The verisimilitude
of the portraits, the acute psychology exhibited in the portrayal
of the feelings, sentiments, and sentimentalities of young girls
in the boarding-school stage of evolution, testify to Shaw's
remarkable gifts as a genuine realist. That forerunner of Julia
Craven, the romantic little Henrietta Jansenius, is portrayed
with insight, and not without delicacy and restraint. The most
unreal, most unhuman scene in the book is that in which
Trefusis apostrophizes the body of his dead wife. His reflections
impress me as both flippant and callous in their solemn setting.
It is with a sense of profound shock that we hear him rudely flout
the " funereal sanctimoniousness " of the family physician, mock
at the " harrowing mummeries " of religious and social observance,
and " damn the feelings " of a father and mother who regarded
their daughter as their chattel and showed no true feeling for
her when she was alive. Trefusis is devoured with the conviction
that the first, if the hardest, of all duties is one's duty to one's
self. His fine Italian hand is betrayed in his later philanderings
with the whilom loves of Smilash, now grown up into disagreeable,
hard, calculating women. Trefusis's trickery of Sir Charles
Brandon, his unfeeling deception of Gertrude Lindsay, his base
flattery of Lady Brandon, his misleading promise to Erskine,
are all exhibitions of his Jesuitical policy. The exponent of
Socialism and the New Morality, Trefusis has no scruples in
employing unfair means to secure whatsoever he wants— for the
cause of labour and for himself.*
Mr. W. L. Courtney has somewhere called attention to the
curious triumph achieved by " our only modern dramatist," as
he calls Bernard Shaw, in view of the fact that Shaw has never
* " The hero is remarkable because, without losing his pre-eminence as
hero, he not only violates every canon of propriety, like Tom Jones or Des
Grieux, but every canon of sentiment as well. In an age when the average
man's character is rotted at the core by the lust to be a true gentleman, the
moral value of such an example as Trefusis is incalculable." — Mr. Bernard
Shaw's Works of Fiction. Renewed by Himself. In the Novel Review,
February, 1892.
80
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t-- c •■ uniiJr mean 4 - to se« .:••» .vltatsoever
I '-'.ui and for hi:»i*- '* *
L. Courtney Lis s..'»i l »where ~ • .
. • - ."■ uinph achiov- ! )*v "our o:i'v *"
- • . Bern .rd Sh.iw. .;i w.w of the ! .
. . lit u:.*'* v»."»!t. « \\.*y cutioti of * • •
• . • ., but iV":y «' i -i- »-? ^ntimcnt *•»
on
The Novelist
hesitated at interpreting women as beasts of prey. In the novels
we find premonitions of Shaw's later attitude toward women.
Some suspicion of Shaw's theory that woman " takes the initiative
in sex business " dawns upon us when Madge Brailsford openly
courts Owen Jack ; but Lydia Carew, that bloodless Ibsen type,
is anything but the huntress. An Unsocial Socialist opens
our eyes ; for Henrietta shamelessly pursues the mocking Trefusis
and exhausts every feminine wile in the effort to induce him to
return to the chains of wedlock. The idea is also uppermost in
the final scene, in which Trefusis, by means of a little diabolically-
concocted sentiment, persuades the pursuing Gertrude to give
him up, and, " for his sake," to marry Erskine. When Shaw
came to erect his theory into a system in Man and Superman,
he threw a flood of light upon all his former work. There is a
keynote to the philosophy of every great or pioneer thinker :
Shakespeare had his Hamlet, Wagner his Free-willing of Necessity,
Schopenhauer his Will to Live, and Nietzsche his Will to Power.
So Shaw is the apostle of the Life Force, as he calls it ; and
woman is incarnate life force — potent instrument of that irre-
sistible, secret, blind impulse which Nature wields for her own
transcendent purposes, heedless of the feelings, welfare, or happi-
ness of individuals. Recognizing woman as the primal vital
agency in the fulfilment of Nature's laws, he has not unnaturally
come to regard her as " much more formidable than man, because
she is, as it were, archetypal, belonging to the original structure
of things, and has behind her activity, sometimes benevolent
and more often malevolent, the great authority of Nature herself." 41
Under the spell of this plausible conviction, Shaw endows woman
with all the attributes of a blind, unreasoning, unscrupulous force
of nature. And for his faith he can find ample support in the
literature of an age which produced Schopenhauer's Essay on
Woman, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, The Triumph of Death,
Grdfin Julie, Erdgeist, The Confounding of Camellia. With great
adroitness, but with a curious inconsistency in one who has spent
years of his life in " blaming the Bard," Shaw finds the chief
support for his claim in the plays of Shakespeare himself. By
* The words are those of Mr. W. L. Courtney.
81 6
George Bernard Shaw
blandishment, Rosalind accomplishes her purpose ; Miranda
ensnares Ferdinand with the words, " I would not wish any com-
panion in the world but you. I am your wife if you will marry
me." Juliet scales Romeo's defences one by one, and there is
Desdemona with her fond " hint " ; Mariana, the strategist ;
Helena, pursuing the recreant Orlando ; Olivia, powerless to hide
her passion ; and poor, mad, melancholy Ophelia.
One has only to pass in review Shaw's work, from An Unsocial
Socialist to Man and Superman, to discover that persistent
exemplification of his theory that " woman is the pursuer and
contriver, man the pursued and disposed of." Indeed, in his
very first play, we find Shaw's concrete illustration of Don Juan's
statement that " a woman seeking a husband is the most
unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey." All the men in Shaw's
plays seem to suffer, not from Prossy's, but from Charteris's com-
plaint : " At no time have I taken the initiative and pursued
women with my advances as women have persecuted me." All
seem to labour under the conviction that the woman's need of a
man " does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers
her energy to a climax, at which she dares to throw away her
customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and
dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that
far transcends their mortal personal purposes." The quintessence
of the Shavian woman is Ann Whitefield, that " most gorgeous
of all my female creatures," as Shaw calls her — incarnation of
fecundity in Nature, wilful, unscrupulous, immodest, aggressive,
dominant — compelling Tanner to obey her biological imperative.
The appearance of Shaw's theory in An Unsocial Socialist is
responsible for this divagation of mine from the theme of the
novels, this anticipation of the feminine psychology of the plays.
It is highly unreasonable to suppose that the exploitation of such
a theory on Shaw's part is a perverse and impish trick, designed
solely Spater It bourgeois : Shaw has driven home his theory in
countless deliberate statements. As a philosophic concept, as
an interpretation of woman by an a-priorist, little fault can be
found with Shaw in the matter. No one can question Shaw's
right to his opinion. Even as an effort to make the natural
82
The Novelist
attraction of the sexes the mainspring of the action in modern
English drama, Shaw's delineation of woman is far from being
unworthy of consideration, though it has swung wide of the mark
in exaggerative reaction against the romantic sentimentalities of
the English stage. Shaw's women are full of purpose and vitality
— the most " advanced " of women in assertion of their rights,
in resolute determination to override all the barriers of current
respectability and " prurient prudery," in perfect readiness to
forego all considerations of good taste, tact, delicacy, modesty
conventional virtue. They ruthlessly repudiate all those qualities
which have led man to dub her his " better half." Shaw's mistake
consists in painting woman, not as she really, normally is, but as
his preconceived philosophic system requires her to be. He
planks down for our inspection less a life-like portrait of the
eternal feminine than a philosophic interpretation of the
" superior sex." Shaw is a remarkable critic of life. Certain
phases of human nature, unnoticed or unaccented by others, he
has depicted with a veracity, a cleverness, a sparkling brilliancy
beyond all praise. But it is one thing to portray an individual,
a totally different thing to announce a universal type. A soldier
like Bluntschli, a dare-devil like Dudgeon, a minister like Gardner,
a hero like Caesar or Napoleon, a wooer like Valentine, a Socialist
like Trefusis, a pugilist like Byron — all these may have lived.
Shaw doubtless can — indeed, sometimes does — point to their
counterparts, if not in literature, certainly in real life. But to say
that all soldiers are like Bluntschli, for example, is little more
foolish than to say that all women are like Blanche, like Julia,
like Ann. The vital defect in Shaw's women is that they are too
blatant, too obvious, too crude. They are lacking in mystery,
in finer subtlety, in the subconscious and obscurer instincts of
sex, in the arts of exquisite seduction, of keenly-felt yet only half-
divined allurement.* The Life Force goes about its business, one
would fain remind Mr. Shaw, not openly and with a blare of
trumpets, but by a thousand devious and hidden paths.
Of course, there is always the danger of taking Shaw too
* There are exceptions to this generalization, of course — Lady Cicely,
Candida, Nora, Jennifer, Barbara,
83 6*
George Bernard Shaw
seriously. Mr. Archer wittily, but, above all, entirely truth
fully, dubbed Ann a " mythological monster." As a pendant
to Everyman of the Dutch morality, Ann may be the Every-
woman of the Shavian morality. But even Shaw himself admits,
with wily fairness, that while, philosophically, Ann may be Every-
woman according to the Shavian dispensation, yet in practical,
every-day existence there are countless women who are not Ann.
If faith is to be placed in M. tmile Faguet's dictum that no
exceptional work of art is ever written by anyone before reaching
the age of thirty, then Shaw's novels are debarred by the Statute
of Limitations. The "ineptitude" of his novels, of which Mr.
Shaw once spoke to me, is attributable to the fact that during
this early period he fed upon his imagination. He had not yet
come into any deep or really vital communion with humanity.
Produced in that impressionable period when dreaming seems
preferable to living, the novels bristle with faults — immaturities
of form, crudenesses of expression, blatant didactics. They are
often loose and disjointed, generally lacking in closely articulated
structure. With all his pretended effort at realism, Shaw has
failed to impart to his novels that one quality without which no
modern work of Active art can take the very highest rank — inevit-
ableness. To Shaw, as to Zola, art is life seen through a tem-
perament. And I often receive the impression that Shaw's novels
are less faithful records of contemporary existence than documents
revelative of Bernard Shaw. Shaw is lacking in artistic self-
restraint ; like the true propagandist, he seems almost unwilling
to accept facts as they are, so eager is he to impose upon them the
stamp of his individual predilections. It is the strangest of
paradoxes that one who claims for himself that rare and price-
less gift — the abnormally normal eyesight of the realist — should
have spent his life in the endeavour to fix the mask of Shaw upon
the face of life.
" The gods know that Bernard Shaw has many sins of omission
to answer for when he reaches the remotest peak of Parnassus,"
writes Mr. Huneker ; " but for no one of his many gifts will he be
so sternly taken to task as the wasted one of novelist. . . . There
is more native talent for sturdy, clear- visioned, character-creating
84
The Novelist
fiction in the one prize-fighting novel of Bernard Shaw than in the
entire cobweb work of the stylistic Stevenson ! . . . Shaw could
rank higher as a novelist than as a dramatist — always selecting
for judgment the supreme pages of his tales, pages wherein
character, wit, humour, pathos, fantasy, and observation are
mingled with an overwhelming effect."* While there is much of
truth in what Mr. Huneker says, I should hold quite the opposite
opinion concerning Shaw's relative merits as novelist and
dramatist. Not the least significant feature of the novels, to my
mind, is their foreshadowing of the future dramatist.f Turning
over the pages of the novels, from first to last one cannot but
observe this recurrent trait : Shaw always sees his characters in
a " situation." It is difficult to read one of Shaw's novels without
unconsciously looking for the stage directions. Proud as he is of
his gifts as a " fictionist," no one is more conscious than is Shaw
himself of his deficiencies in this r6le. With his customary suc-
cinctness, he once put the case to me as it really is : " My novels
are very green things, very carefully written."
* Bernard Shaw and Woman, In Harper's Bazaar, June, 1905.
t It is worthy of remark that the conclusion of Love Among ike Artists,
as Julias Bab has pointed out, accurately prefigures the conclusion of
Candida. The situation, the very words, are almost identical.
85
THE FABIAN SOCIETY
i<
II ever there was a society which lived by its wits, and by its wits alone,
that society was the Fabian." — The Fabian Society. Tract No. 41. By
G. B. Shaw. *
CHAPTER IV
FOR the student of Shaw's work and career, there is no escape
from the resemblance, superficial or vital, between Shaw
himself and the numerous comic figures he has projected upon
the stage. Like that Byronic impostor, Saranoff, Shaw has
gone through life afflicted with a multiplicity of personalities.
In The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, .Oliver Wendell Holmes
said that when two people meet, there] are always six persons
present. But Shaw needs no party of xhe-second part to sum
up the total of personalities : he is eternally dogged with his own
ubiquitous aliases. Bernard Shaw, the " fictionist " ; Corno di
Bassetto, the music critic of admirable fooling and pungent
criticism ; G. B. S., the apostle of comic intransigiance in criticism
of art, music, and drama — and life ; " P-Shaw," the Gilbertian
topsy-turvyist of essay and drama ; George Bernard Shaw,
Fabian, economist, public speaker, borough councillor, reformer —
all these distinct characters is Shaw, in Maeterlinckian phrase,
constantly meeting upon the highway of fate. It is the province
of the biographer to detect, among this confusing cloud of
aliases, the real man.
In 1883, the career of Bernard Shaw the " fictionist " came
to an abrupt and final conclusion. While this first and intro-
ductory chapter in the book of Shaw's multiplex life was being
written, the material for another and infinitely more important
chapter was slowly being collected and arranged. With this
second chapter begins the life of the real Shaw.
As he himself has told us, his parents pulled him through the
years in which he earned nothing. But he was perpetually
"grinding away" at something, perpetually feeling his way
towards confidence and efficiency. The diversity of his interests
89
George Bernard SfiaW
Was remarkable : nothing he touched proved banal or unfruitful
This universality of interests — the determination to grasp, the
effort to master, every subject that came to his hand — is little
less than conclusive as an explanation of his many-sidedness.
" I did not start life with a programme. I simply accepted every
job offered to me, and I did it the best way I could." In this
simple and straightforward statement is found the key to that
diversity of talent, that range of ability, which is perhaps the
most striking and noteworthy characteristic of this rare and
eccentric genius.
The decisive and revolutionary changes in Shaw's truly
" chequered" career were due, in almost all cases, to the adven-
titious or deliberate influence of some dominant personality in
literature or in life. The crucial conjunctures in his career are
closely associated with the names of Shelley, Ibsen, Nietzsche,
Marx, Wagner, Mozart and Michael Angelo, in art, mjisic, literature
and philosophy ; with the names and personalities, among others,
in life of James Leigh Joynes, the Salt family, Henry George,
Sidney Webb, William Morris and William Archer.
In Shaw's acquaintance with the late James Lecky* is found
the germ of that strenuous propagandist activity which may be
called the most definitive expression of Shaw's life. It was in
1879 that Shaw first became intimate with Lecky and with those
various subjects, connected with music and languages on the
scientific side, to which Lecky devoted so much of his energy and
attention. Once interested in some pursuit, Lecky would become
so enthused that he would demand of his friends an interest
therein commensurate with his own. This pestiferously altruistic
spirit of Lecky's proved of great value to Shaw, who set his
critical brain to work upon many of the problems which Lecky
brought to his attention. Through Lecky, Shaw acquired a
working knowledge of Temperament, concerning which he once
boasted that he was probably the only living musical critic who
knew what it meant ; and a due appreciation of Pitman's Short-
hand — which he could write at the rate of twenty words per
* Author of the article on Temperament (systems of tuning keyed
instruments) in the first edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music,
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The Fabian Society
minute and could not read afterwards on any terms ! — as
probably the worst system of shorthand ever invented, yet the
best pushed on its business side. Together Lecky and Shaw
studied and discussed Phonetics, and while Shaw's knowledge of
the subject was by no means exhaustive, his interest in it has
since served as a permanent protection against such superficial
catch-penny stuff as the reformed spellings that are invented every
six months by faddists. Shaw's individual mode of punctuation,
his use of spaced letters in place of italics, his almost total rejec-
tion, on Biblical authority, which he accepted for once, of quotation
marks, and those numerous original rules of punctuation and
phonetics which he has from time to time formulated in magazine
and daily press,* find their raison d'etre in Shaw's early association
with Lecky and subsequent acquaintance, through Lecky's
instrumentality, with the late Alexander Ellis and Henry Sweet,
of Oxford. As readers of the notes to Captain Brassbound's
Conversion may gather, Shaw accepts Sweet as his authority;
indeed, he highly values his acquaintance with that " revolutionary
don," as he calls him, and once said that, in any other place or
country in the world, Sweet would be better known than even
Shaw himself. The knowledge of phonetics, the interest in lan-
guage-reform acquired through his acquaintance with men like
Lecky, Ellis and Sweet is the explanation, Mr. Shaw once told
me, of the fact that the Cockney dialect, which so befuddles and
astounds the readers of Captain Brassbound's Conversion, is
far more scientific in its analysis of London coster lingo than any-
thing that had previously occurred in fiction.
In the winter of 1879, Lecky joined a debating club, called
The Zeletical Society, numbering among its members Mr. Sidney
Webb, Mr. Emil Garcke, and Mr. J. G. Godard. It was a sort of
* Among Shaw's many articles on these topics, may be cited the follow-
ing : A Plea for Speech Nationalization, in the Morning Leader, August 16th,
1901 ; Phonetic Spelling : a Reply to Some Criticisms, ibid., August 22nd,
1901 ; Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers, in
The Author, April, 1902, pp. 17 1-2. See also Mr. William Archer's two
articles : Spelling Reform v. Phonetic Spelling, in the Daily News, August
10th, 1 90 1 ; and Shaw's Phonetic World-English, in the Morning Leader,
August 24th, 1 90 1.
91
George Bernard Shaw
" junior copy " of the once well-known Dialectical Society, which
had been founded to discuss Stuart Mill's essay on Liberty not
long after its appearance in print. Both societies were strongly
Millite ; in both there was complete freedom of discussion, political,
religious and sexual. Women took a prominent part in the
debates, which often dealt with subjects concerning their rights,
interests and welfare. A noteworthy feature of these debates,
particularly in relation to Shaw's future development as a public
speaker, and a critic as well, was that each speaker, at the con-
clusion of his speech, might be cross-examined on it by any one
of the others in a series of questions. In this society Malthus,
Ingersoll, Darwin and Herbert Spencer were held in especial
reverence. The works of Huxley, Tyndall and George Eliot were
on the shelves of all the members. The tone of the society
was very " advanced " — individualistic, atheistic, evolutionary.
Championship of the Married Woman's Property Act was scarcely
silenced by the Act itself. The fact that Mrs. Besant's children
were torn from her like Shelley's, aroused hot indignation, as
did the prosecutions for " blasphemy " then going on. It is not
without significance that, even at this time, Shaw was Socialist
enough to defend the action of the State in both cases. Indeed,
he has always been, as he once told me, somewhat of Morris's
opinion that " There may be some doubt as to who are the best
people to have charge of children ; but there can be no doubt that
the parents are the worst." Strange jest of fate, Shaw began his
career by joining a society whose members regarded Socialism as
an exploded fallacy ! How little did anyone dream that, even
then, underground rumblings of the approaching revolution might
be faintly heard ! That recurrent quindecennial cycle of Socialistic
upheaval of which Karl Kautsky has somewhere spoken, was well-
nigh completed. Within five years Socialism was to burst forth
with fresh impetus, sweep the younger, generation along with it,
and plunge the Dialectic and Zeletical Societies into the " blind
cave of eternal night."
One night in the winter of 1879, Lecky dragged Shaw to a meeting
of the Zeletical Society, which then met weekly in the rooms of
the Woman's Protective and Provident League in Great Queen
92
'^Wju/UtfX^
The Fabian Society
i Street, Long Acre. It will be related elsewhere why Shaw
\ decided to join the society at once ; suffice it to say here that he
j became a frequent attendant upon the meetings of the society,
entering actively, if haltingly, into discussion and debate. The
importance, in its bearing upon Shaw's subsequent career as a
man of affairs and a man of letters, of an acquaintance he formed
, at this time through the accident of joining the Zeletical Society,
can scarcely be overestimated. A few weeks after joining the
society Shaw's keenest interest was aroused in a speaker who took
part in one of the debates. This speaker was a young man of
about twenty-one, rather below middle height, with small, pretty
hands and feet, and a profile that suggested, on account of the
' nose and imperial, an improvement on Napoleon the Third. I
well remember the animated way in which Mr. Shaw described to
me the man and the occurrence. " He had a fine forehead, a long
head, eyes that were built on top of two highly developed organs
of speech (according to the phrenologists), and remarkably thick,
strong, dark hair. He kftew all about the subject of debate ;
, knew more than the lecturer ; knew more than anybody present ;
had read everything that had ever been written on the subject ;
and remembered all the facts that bore on it. He used notes,
read them, ticked them off one by one, threw them away, and
finished with a coolness and clearness that, to me in my then
trembling state, seemed miraculous. This young man was the
ablest man in England — Sidney Webb." Then a trembling
novice, yet subsequently to be known as the cleverest man in
England, Shaw to-day does not hesitate to pay full honour to the
part Sidney Webb has played in his career. The extent and
value of this association will reveal itself in due course. Shaw
has said and done a thousand clever things ; but, as he once freely
confessed to me, " Quite the cleverest thing I ever did in my life
was to force my friendship on Webb, to extort his, and keep it."
After Shaw had been a member of the Zeletical Society for about
a year, he joined the Dialectical Society, and was faithful to it
for years after it had dwindled into a little group of five or six
friends of Dr. Drysdale, the apostle of Malthus. Shaw subse-
quently joined another debating society, the Bedford, presided
93
George Bernard Shaw
over by Stopford Brooke, who had not then given up his pastorate
at Bedford Chapel to devote himself exclusively to literature.
During these years, as we shall see more particularly in the next
chapter, Shaw was slowly perfecting himself in the art of public
speaking. The fascination of the platform grew upon him daily.
He not only spoke frequently himself, but also attended public
meetings of every sort, learning by precept, experience, and
example the secrets of the art of platform speaking. With
dogged persistence, he was surely, if slowly, acquiring what he
himself has called the coolness, the self-confidence and the imper-
turbability of the statesman.
During these years he had gradually widened and deepened his
knowledge of the subjects which periodically came up for dis-
cussion in the various debating societies he had joined. In his
boyhood he had read Mill on Liberty, on Representative
Government, and on the Irish Land Question. And he was fully
the equal of his co-debaters in knowledge and comprehension of
the evolutionary ideas and theories of Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley,
Spencer, George Eliot, and their school. But of political economy
he knew absolutely nothing. It was in 1882 that his attention
was first definitely directed into the economic channel.
England and Ireland were greatly stirred up at this time by the
arrest of Henry George and James Leigh Joynes as " suspicious
strangers " in Ireland (August, 1882). Joynes, a master of Eton,
wishing to see something of the popular side of the Irish move-
ment, accompanied George as a correspondent of the London
Times. George was making an investigation of the situation in
Ireland preliminary to his campaign of propaganda in behalf
of his Single Tax theories, enunciated in Progress and Poverty.
The arrest of George and Joynes, on the charge of being agents
of the Fenians, was widely commented on in the newspapers of
Great Britain and Ireland, and resulted in a Parliamentary
questioning. Progress and Poverty, pronounced by Alfred Russel
Wallace " undoubtedly the most remarkable and important work
of the nineteenth century," began to sell by the thousands ; it
was prominently reviewed in the London Times and dozens of
other papers ; and George felt at last that he was " beginning to
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The Fabian Society
move the world." Further encouragement came from the Land
Nationalization Society, which had been founded in London early
in 1882, with Alfred Russel Wallace at its head.* " It contained
in its membership," says Mr. Henry George, Jr., in his biography
of his father, " those who, like Wallace, desired to take possession
of the land by purchase and then have the State exact an annual
quit-rent from whoever held it ; those who had the Socialistic
idea of having the State take possession of the land with or with-
out compensation and then manage it ; and those who, with
Henry George, repudiated all idea of either compensation or of
management, and would recognize common rights to land simply
by having the State appropriate its annual value by taxation.
Such conflicting elements could not long continue together, and
soon those holding the George idea withdrew and organized on
their own distinctive lines, giving the name of the Land Reform
Union to their organization." While interest was at fever heat,
George was invited by the Land Nationalization Society to lecture
under the auspices of a working men's audience in Memorial Hall.
The bill, a true copy of which lies before me, reads as follows *
LAND NATIONALIZATION.
Memorial Hall,
Farringdon Street.
On Tuesday, September $th t 1882.
Under auspices of
THE LAND NATIONALIZATION SOCIETY.
Professor
F. W. Newman
will preside.
George's speech that night was the torch that " kindled the
fire in England " — a fire which he afterwards said no human
power could put out. It was the masses that George was trying
to educate and arouse. It was the masses whose ear he caught
that night.
4
'" * Compare Land Nationalisation : Its Necessity and its Aims, by Alfred
Russel Wallace. Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 189a.
95
George Bernard Shaw
At that time, Bernard Shaw eagerly haunted public meetings
of all kinds. By a strange chance, he wandered that night into
the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street. The speaker of the
evening was Henry George : his speech wrought a miracle in
Shaw's whole life. It " kindled the fire " in his soul. " It flashed
on me then for the first time," Shaw once wrote, " that ' the
conflict between Religion and Science ' . . . the overthrow of
the Bible, the higher education of women, Mill on Liberty, and all
the rest of the storm that raged round Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley,
Spencer, and the rest, on which I had brought myself up intel*
lectually, was a mere middle-class business. Suppose it could
have produced a nation of Matthew Arnolds and George Eliots 1
— you may well shudder. The importance of the economic basis
dawned on me."* Shaw now read Progress and Poverty; and
many of the observations which the fifteen-year-old Shaw had
unconsciously made now took on a significance little suspected
in the early Dublin days of his indifference to land agency, t
Shaw was so profoundly impressed by the logic of Henry
George's conclusions and suggested remedial measures that,
shortly after reading Progress and Poverty, he went to a meeting
of the Social Democratic Federation, and there arose to protest
against their drawing a red herring across the track opened by
George. The only satisfaction he had was to be told that he was
a novice : " Read Marx's Capital, young man," was the con-
descending retort of the Social Democrats. Shaw promptly went
* Compare Chapter VI. for Shaw's own account of his conversion by
Henry George.
f No more significant contradiction between practice and conviction
can be found in Shaw's career than lies inherent in the fact that he began
life by collecting Irish rents ! " These hands have grasped the hard-earned
shillings of the sweated husbandman, and handed them over, not to the
landlord — he, poor devil I had nothing to do with it — but to the
mortgagee, with a suitable deduction for my principal who taught me
these arts." Not without its spice of humour, also, is the fact that Shaw
is to-day an absentee landlord, having derived from his mother an estate
on which her family lived for generations by mortgaging. No wonder
that Mr. Shaw contemplates with mingled feelings that process, which he
has condemned from a thousand platforms, being carried on in his name
between his agents and his mortgagees f
96
The Fabian Society
and did so, and then found, as he once said, that his advisers
were awestruck, as they had not read it themselves 1 It was
then accessible only in the French version at the British Museum.
William Archer has testified to the diligence with which Shaw
studied Marx's great work ; he caught his first glimpse of Shaw
in the British Museum Library, where he noticed a " young man
of tawny complexion and attire" studying alternately— if not
simultaneously — Das Kapital, and an orchestral score of Tristan
and Isolde I
While Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and their school left a distinct
impress upon Shaw's mind, it is nevertheless true that he never
became a Darwinian. To-day he is violently opposed to
Darwinian materialism ; and yet the Shavian philosophy, histori-
cally considered, is a natural consequence of that bitter fight
against convention, custom, authority, and orthodoxy, inaugurated
by Darwin and his followers. But Shaw's sociologic doctrine is
a distillation, not of the Descent of Man or of the Data of Ethics,
but of Das Kapital. At this crucial period in Shaw's career he
was exactly in the mood for Marx's reduction of all the conflicts
to the conflict of classes for economic mastery, of all social forms
to the economic forms of production and exchange. The real
secret of Marx's fascination for him, as he once said, was " his
appeal to an unnamed, unrecognized passion — a new passion — the
passion of hatred in the more generous souls among the respectable
and educated sections for the accursed middle-class institutions
that had starved, thwarted, misled, and corrupted them from their
cradles." In Marx, Shaw found a kindred spirit ; for, like Marx,
his whole life had bred in him a defiance of middle-class respecta-
bility, of revolt against its benumbing and paralysing influence.
As Shaw once said :
" Marx's ' Capital ' is not a treatise on Socialism ; it is a
jeremiad against the bourgeoisie, supported by such a mass of
evidence and such a relentless genius for denunciation as
had never been brought to bear before. It was supposed to
be written for the working classes; but the working man
respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeois ; Marx
97 7
George Bernard Shaw
never got hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting
sons of the bourgeoisie itself— Lassalle, Marx, Liebknecht,
Morris, Hyndman, Bax, all, like myself, bourgeois crossed
with squirearchy— -that painted the flag red. Bakunin
and Kropotkin, of the military and noble caste (like Napoleon),
were our extreme left. The middle and upper classes are the
revolutionary element in society; the proletariat is the
conservative element, as Disraeli well knew. 1 '*
Some such Marxist passion, one surmises, subsequently carried
weight with Shaw in influencing his choice of the Fabian Society
as the fit milieu for the development and exploitation of his energy
and talent. For at heart Shaw is what his plays so abundantly
prove him — the revolted bourgeois.
Not only did Marx's jeremiad against the bourgeoisie awaken
instant response in Shaw : it changed the whole tenor of his life.
No single book — not the Bible of orthodoxy and respectability,
certainly — has influenced Shaw so much as the " bible of the
working classes." It made him a Socialist. Although he has
since repudiated some of the fundamental economic theories of
Marx, at this time he found in Das Kapital the concrete expres-
sion of all those social convictions, grievances and wrongs which
seethed in the crater of his being. He became that most deter-
mined, most resistless, and often most dangerous of men to deal
with, a man with a mission. " From that hour," I once heard
Mr. Shaw say, " I became a man with some business in the
world."
During the years 1883 and 1884 Shaw threw himself heart and
soul into the exciting task of Socialist agitation and propagandism.
His dogged practice in public speaking now began to demonstrate
its value with telling effect. While he spent his days in criticizing
books in the Pall Mall Gazette and pictures in the World, he
devoted his evenings to consistent and strenuous Socialist pro-
pagandism. He accepted invitations to address all sorts of
bodies on every day in the week, Sunday not excepted. Remem-
• Who I Am, and What I Think.— Port I. In the Candid Friend, May
nth, 1 90 1.
98;
The Fabian Society
ber his confession that he first caught the ear of the British public
on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands. During
these years, also, he was coming into close touch with the younger
generation destined soon to unite in a solid phalanx as the
Fabian Society. Probably no living man has touched modern life
at so many points as has Bernard Shaw. In his lifetime he has
traversed a very lengthy arc on the circle of modern culture, modern
thought and modern philosophy. Sovereign contempt for the
laggard is one of his prominent characteristics ; he himself has
ever been an " outpost thinker " on the firing-line of modern
intellectual conflict. Essentially significant because essentially
modern, Shaw owes no small share of his ability, his versatility,
and his breadth of interests to his voraciously acquisitive, acutely
inquisitive intellect. Clever acquaintances, brimming with ideas,
and overflowing with combative zeal, furnished grist for the cease-
lessly active mill of Shaw's intelligence. No biography which failed
to trace the shaping influence exerted upon Shaw's frantically
complex career by such men as Hubert Bland, Graham Wallas,
Sidney Olivier, Sidney Webb and William Morris, could lay just
claim to the title of genuine natural history.
At the Land Reform Union Shaw first met Sidney Olivier,
then upper division clerk in the Colonial Office. Sidney Webb
and Sidney Olivier, very close friends, were the two resident
clerks there. When Webb, at Shaw's persuasion, joined the
Fabians, Olivier went with him. There existed a very close
relation, not only between the various members of the Fabian
Society, but also between many of the advanced societies which
came to life at this time. For example, Sidney Olivier, who was
secretary of the Fabian Society for several years, and Edward
Carpenter's brother, Captain Alfred Carpenter, of the Royal Navy,
married sisters ; in this way there was a sort of family connection
between the Socialist and Humanitarian movements. Olivier
had made friends at Oxford with Graham Wallas, who was probably
influenced through this connection to become a Fabian. The very
intimate relation existing between Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas,
and the consequent marked influence upon Shaw's literary career
and performance, will be spoken of elsewhere at greater length.
99 7*
George Bernard Shaw
It is noteworthy that all of these men possessed literary talents
of no mean order. Webb's books have a world-wide reputation.
Olivier's play, Mrs. Maxwell's Marriage, has been performed by
the London Stage Society ; and his literary talent has displayed
itself, not only in plays, but also in verse, essay and story.* In
addition to his ability as a facile public speaker, Graham Wallas
also possessed literary talent of no mean order, displayed to best
advantage in his book on Francis Place, with its lucid exposition
of the way in which politics are " wire-pulled " in England by
real reformers, f
Another man of talent, whose very opposition of belief and
view-point exerted a sort of stimulating influence upon Shaw,
was William Clarke, an Oxford M.A., who contributed the chapter
on The Industrial Basis of Socialism to Fabian Essays. A Whit-
manite, with strong feelings of rationalist type, allied in spirit
to Martineau, the Unitarians, and their logical outgrowth, the
American Ethical Society, Clarke made upon Shaw an inefface-
able impression. Shaw first met this remarkable man at the
Bedford Society — a meeting which bore fruit in Clarke's joining
the Fabian Society. Clarke had lectured in America, known
Whitman, and is remembered as the author of several books. Al-
though a successful lecturer, he had by this time exhausted the
interest of lecturing, being much older than the other Fabians.
A very unlucky man, he was, in consequence, very poor. It
has been often said that in the matter of philanthropy Shaw never
let his right hand know what his left was doing ; he found a way
to relieve Clarke's poverty without even letting Clarke, who
quarrelled with everything and everybody, suspect that he was
the recipient of benefaction. When the Daily Chronicle changed
its policy and decided to give a column in its pages to Labour, its
concerns and interests, the editor, in his search for young blood,
* Entering the Colonial Office twenty-five years ago, he served as Colonial
Secretary of the Island of Jamaica from 1809 to 1904, and on three occa-
sions served as Acting Governor. From 1905 to 1907 he was principal
clerk in the West African Department ; in April, 1907, he was appointed
Governor of Jamaica, to succeed Sir Alexander Swettenham, and he was
made a K.C.M.G. on King Edward's birthday in 1907.
t Life of Francis Place. Longmans, 1898,
100
The Fabian Society
hit upon Shaw, who quietly substituted Clarke in his place. Had
Clarke ever discovered the truth it might have mitigated the
profound moral horror of Shaw he always entertained. How
Shaw must have chuckled over the latent comedy ! The secret
philanthropist regarded as a moral anarchist, a monstrum horrcn-
dutn, by his highly moral beneficiary! To Clarke, an altruist
and moralist to the backbone, the dawning of Ibsenism, of
Nietzscheism, of Shavianism, seemed to be the coming of chaos.
" Yet the fact that I knew his value and insisted on it, and that
I could sympathize even with his horror of me," Mr. Shaw once
told me, " kept our personal relations remorsefully cordial. The
last time I called on him was in the influenza period. He was
working madly, as usual. He would have certainly refused to see
anyone ; but he was alone in the flat, and opened the door for
me. With a savage, set face that would have made even Ibsen's
mouth look soft by contrast, he said, through his shut teeth : ' I
can give you five minutes and that is all* ' My dear Clarke/
I replied, ambling idly into his study, ' I must leave in half an hour
to keep an appointment ; and I have just been thinking how I am
to get away from you so soon ; for I know you won't let me go.'
And it turned out exactly as I said. We began to discuss the
Parnell divorce case and the Irish crisis, and I could not get away
from him until the hour was nearly doubled."*
The part which the Fabian Society has played in English life,
and the share of Bernard Shaw in the task of advancing the
principles of Collectivism in the last twenty odd years, alone
offer ample material for a book. So diverse in its ramifications
is the subject, that it will be possible here to trace the evolutionary
advance of Socialism in England only in so far as it directly bears
* Peculiarly sad are the subsequent details of Clarke's life. After saving
about a thousand pounds by frenziedly working away for several years as
a journalist, he lost it all again in an unfortunate investment in the Liberator
Building Society — the enterprise of the notorious Jabez Balfour. With an
assured reputation as a journalist and author, Clarke might have repaired
his fortunes. But the first great influenza epidemic almost killed him ;
and each year thereafter the epidemic laid upon him its increasingly tena-
cious grip. At last he sought to regain his health by foreign travel, only
to die in Herzegovina. Clarke was the first leading Fabian to fall,
101
George Bernard Shaw
upon Shaw's career.* As we know, Shaw began his real education
as a pupil of Mill, Comte, Darwin and Spencer. Converted to
Socialism by Henry George and his Progress and Poverty, Shaw
took to insurrectionary economics after reading Das Kapital.
Marx's book won his support because it so fiercely " convicted
private property of wholesale spoliation, murder and compulsory
prostitution ; of plague, pestilence and famine ; battle, murder
and sudden death." For some time before joining any Socialist
society, Shaw preached Socialism with the utmost zeal and
enthusiasm. The choice of a society lay between the Social
Democratic Federation, the Socialist League — both quite prole-
tarian in their rank and file, both aiming at being large working-
class organizations — and the Fabian Society, which was middle-
class through and through. " When I myself, on the point of
joining the Social Democratic Federation, changed my mind and
joined the Fabian instead," Shaw once wrote, " I was guided by
no discoverable difference in programme or principle, but solely
by an instinctive feeling that the Fabian, and not the Federation,
would attract the men of my own bias and intellectual habits,
who were then ripening for the work that lay before us."
The meetings held at Thomas Davidson's rooms at Chelsea in
1881-1883 furnished the initial impulse to the ethical Socialism
in England of the last thirty years. As an immediate outcome
of these meetings the Fabian Society sprang into being. In
September, 1882, Thomas Davidson, recently returned from
Italy, where he had been engaged in writing an interpretation
of the ethical philosophy of Rosmini, gathered about him a group
of people " interested in religious thought, ethical propaganda,
and social reform." Among their number were Messrs. Frank
Podmore, Edward R. Pease, Havelock Ellis, Percival Chubb,
Dr. Burns. Gibson, H. H. Champion, the late William Clarke,
Hubert Bland, the Rev. G. W. Allen and W. I. Jupp, Miss
Caroline Hadden, Miss Dale Owen and Mrs. Hinton. According
to Mr. Havelock Ellis, Davidson was convinced of " the absolute
necessity of founding practical life on philosophical conceptions ;
* In this connection, compare Socialism in England, by Sidney Webb.
Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1890.
102
THE FABIAN SOCIETY
17, Ohnabuboh Street, Regent's Park.
Fabian ©i^achs, Ho." 2.
>.
" For always in thine eyes, O Liberty !
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved .
And, though thou slay us, we will trust in thee/*
LONDON:
GEO. STANDMNG, 8 4 9, FINSBURY STREET, E.C.
1884
Facsimile of Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2.
George Bernard Shaw
of living a simple, strenuous, intellectual life, so far as possible
communistically, and on a basis of natural religion. It was
Rosminianism, one may say, carried a step further." The many
meetings at Mr. Pease's rooms in Osnaburgh Street and elsewhere
finally bore fruit in a series of resolutions proposed by Dr. Burns
Gibson.* Certain members of the circle, led by Mr. Podmore,
who desired to have a society on more general lines, purposed
organizing a second society, not necessarily exclusive of the
" Fellowship," on broader and more indeterminate lines, leaving
it open to anyone to belong to both societies. At a meeting on
January 4th, 1884, these proposals were substantially agreed to.
The original name, "The Fellowship of the New Life," was
retained by those who originally devised it, and a new organiza-
tion constituted under the title of " The Fabian Society."!
The Fabian Society, as Shaw has told us in characteristic style,
was "warlike in its origin; it came into existence through a
schism in an earlier society for the peaceful regeneration of the
race by the cultivation of perfection of individual character.
Certain members of that circle, modestly feeling that the revolu-
tion would have to wait an unreasonably long time if postponed
until they personally had attained perfection, set up the banner
of Socialism militant, seceded from the regenerators, and estab-
lished themselves independently as the Fabian Society." Shaw
was not one of the original Fabians; in fact, he knew nothing
of the society until its first tract, Why are the Many Poor ? fell
into his hands. For some reason the name of the society struck
him as an inspiration. His choice fell upon that society in which
* The society was entitled " The Fellowship of the New Life/ 1 and its
first manifesto was entitled Vita Nuova. The following was its original
basis, as drawn up by Mr. Maurice Adams, and adopted on November 16th,
1883 :
" We, recognizing the evils and wrongs that must beset men so long
as our social life is based upon selfishness, rivalry and ignorance, and
desiring above all things to supplant it by a life based upon unselfishness,
love and wisdom, unite, for the purpose of realizing the higher life
among ourselves, and of inducing and enabling others to do the same.
" And we now form ourselves into a Society, to be called the Guild
of the New Life, to carry out this purpose."
t Compare Memorials of Thomas Davidson, the Wandering Scholar,
collected and edited by William Knight. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1907.
ZO4
The Fabian Society
he could gratify his desire to work with a few educated and clever
men of the type of Sidney Webb.
In the earliest stage of the society the Fabians were content
with nothing less than the prompt " reconstruction of society
in accordance with the highest moral possibilities/' Shaw joined
the society on September 5th, 1884, when it was about eight
months old, and in the labour-notes versus pass-books stage
of evolution. Shaw actually debated with a Fabian who had
elaborated a pass-book system, the question whether money
should be permitted under Socialism, or whether labour-notes
would not be a more suitable currency ! The next two tracts,
numbered 2 and 3, were from Shaw's pen ; and although
they were, as he now rightly regards them, mere literary boutades,
they serve as an important link in the history of the evolution of
the society.* Tract No. 4, What Socialism Is, answering the
* Tract No. 2, dated 1884, which is now very rare, has for motto the
words of the late John Hay :
" For always in thine eyes, O Liberty !
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved ;
And, though thou slay us, we will trust in thee."
Certain sections of this manifesto deserve quotation as illustrative of Shaw's
original and characteristic mode of expression :
" That, under existing circumstances, wealth cannot be enjoyed
without dishonour, or forgone without misery.
" That the most striking result of our present system of farming out
the national land and capital to private individuals has been the divi-
sion of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners
at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other.
" That the State should compete with private individuals — especi-
ally with parents — in providing happy homes for children, so that
every child may have a refuge from the tyranny or neglect of natural
custodians.
" That men no longer need special political privileges to protect them
against women ; and that the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal
political rights.
"That the established Government has no more right to call itself
the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the weather.
" That we. had rather face a civil war than such another century of
suffering as the present one has been."
Tract No. 3, addressed " To Provident Landlords and Capitalists," urged
the proprietary classes to support " all undertakings having for their object
the parcelling out of waste or inferior lands among the labouring class, and
105
George Bernard Shaw
question both from the Collectivist and Anarchist point of view,
reveals the early Anarchistic leanings of the society ; the tract
really contained nothing that had not already been better stated
in the famous Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. Shaw
was especially impressed by the fact that, in Das Kapital, Marx
had made the most extensive use of the documents containing
the true history of the leaps and bounds of England's prosperity,
e.g., the Blue Books. This convinced him that a tract stuffed
with facts and figures, with careful references to official sources,
was what was wanted. Incapable of making such tracts un-
aided, Shaw at once bethought him of Sidney Webb. That
" walking encyclopaedia," the student who knew everything
and forgot nothing, could do it, Shaw was aware, as well as it
could be done. So he brought all his powers of persuasion to
bear on Sidney Webb. Picture to yourself the scene — two
earnest, enthusiastic, revolutionary young men walking up and
down Whitehall, outside the Colonial Office door, holding long
and weighty discussions, often prolonged into the wee small hours,
concerning the future of Socialism — the keen wit and agile logic
of Shaw pitted against the sound judgment and sane conservatism
of Webb. In this crucial juncture Shaw's proved the heavier
artillery, and Webb became a Fabian. It would be difficult to
lay one's finger upon any circumstance of deeper, more permanent,
or more salutary effect upon Shaw's whole life. When Sidney
Webb joined the Fabian Society there began a new and pro-
foundly significant chapter in the history of Bernard Shaw. The
debt Shaw owes to Webb is incalculable, and no one is readier
to affirm it than Shaw himself. On various occasions I have
heard Mr. Shaw unstintingly ascribe to Mr. Webb the greatest
measure of credit for formulating and directing the policy of the
Fabian Society for many years. " The truth of the matter,"
Mr. Shaw once said to me, " is that Webb and I are very useful
to each other. We are in perfect contrast, each supplying the
the attachment to the soil of a numerous body o! peasant proprietors."
Among the probable results of such a reform was mentioned (section 5) :
" The peasant proprietor, having a stock in the country, will, unlike the
landless labourer of to-day, have a common interest with the landlord in
resisting revolutionary proposals. 1 '
106
The Fabian Society
deficiency in the other." On the other hand, Mr. Webb assigns
the chief credit to Mr. Shaw ; and in a personal letter, as well
as in conversation, he has assured me that Mr. Shaw has been
not simply a leading member, but the leading member of the Fabian
Society practically from its foundation, and that it has always
expressed his political views and work. I think we may safely
say that Mr. Shaw and Mr. Webb have been mutually com-
plementary — and complimentary.
The immediate result of the acquisition of Webb, the new recruit
of the Fabians, was Tract No. 5, Facts for Socialists, a tangible
proof of Webb's richly-stored mind and well-nourished scholarship.
A comparison of this tract with those numbered 2 and 3
is sufficient evidence of the vast practical improvement Webb
effected in the publications of the society. From this time forth
the tracts and manifestos of the Fabian Society took on character
and importance through the fortunate conjunction of Webb's
encyclopaedic mind and Shaw's literary sense. The next publica-
tion of importance was Tract No. 7, Capital and Land, a survey
of the distribution of property among the classes in England.
Drafted by Sidney Olivier, this tract was aimed in reality at the
Georgites, who regarded capital as sacred. It exhibits growth of
independent thought on the part of the society, and courage in
breaking away from the fetters of " mere Henry Georgism."
Eight years later, that official organ of the Gladstonians, the
Speaker, defined Fabianism as a" mixture of dreary, gassy doo
trinairism and crack-brained farcicality, set off by a portentous
omniscience and a flighty egotism not to be matched outside the
walls of a lunatic asylum." Such denunciatory invective reveals
the activity and influence the Fabian Society must have exerted,
during those years, in the direction most dreaded by the older
Whigs. But many were the lessons learned, the hard knocks
received, the follies rejected, before Fabianism was sufficiently
dangerous and important to be honoured with the scathing denun-
ciation of the Speaker. The Fabian wisdom grew out of the
Fabian experience ; scientific economics out of insurrectionary
anarchism. Decidedly catastrophic in their views at first, the
Fabians were not unlike the young Socialist Shaw somewhere
107
George Bernard Shaw
describes, who plans the revolutionary programme as an affair of
twenty-four lively hours, with Individualism in full swing on
Monday morning, a tidal wave of the insurgent proletariat on
Monday afternoon, and Socialism in complete working order on
Tuesday. After Mrs. Wilson, subsequently one of the Freedom
Group of Kropotlrinist Anarchists, joined the Fabians, a sort of
influenza of Anarchism spread through the society.* In regard
to political insurrectionism, the Fabians exhibited no definite and
explicit disagreement with the Social Democratic Federation,
avowedly founded on recognition of the existence of a class war.
All, Fabians and Social Democrats alike, said freely that (^ as
gunpowder destroyed the feudal system, so the capitalist system
could not long survive the invention of dynamite " ! Not that,
they were dynamitards ; but, as Shaw explains : " We thought
that the statement about gunpowder and feudalism was historically
true, and that it would do the capitalists good to remind them
of it." The saner spirits did not believe the revolution could be
accomplished merely by singing the Marseillaise ; but some of
the youthful and insurgent enthusiasts " were so convinced that
Socialism had only to be put clearly before the working classes
to concentrate the power of their immense numbers into one
irresistible organization, that the revolution was fixed for 1889 —
the anniversary of the French Revolution— at latest." Shaw
was certainly not one of the conservative forces ; he was out-
spokenly catastrophic and alarmingly ignorant of the multifarious
delicate adjustments consequent upon a widespread social cata-
clysm. " I remember being asked satirically and publicly at that
time," Shaw afterwards wrote, " how long it would take to get
Socialism into working order if I had my way. I replied, with a
spirited modesty, that a fortnight would be ample for the purpose.
When I add that I was frequently complimented on being one of the *
more reasonable Socialists, you will be able to appreciate the fervour
of our conviction and the extravagant levity of our practical ideas." f
* Compare Fabian Tract No. 41.
f The Transition to Social Democracy, an address delivered on September
7th, 1888, to the Economic Section of the British Association at Bath.
Printed in Fabian Essays, but first published in Our Corner, November, 1888,
edited by Annie Besant.
108
The Fabian Society
Broadly stated, the Fabians, in 1885, proceeded upon the
assumption that their projects were immediately possible and
realizable, an assumption theoretically as well as practically
unsound. At the Industrial Remunerative Conference they
denounced the capitalists as thieves; while among themselves
they were vehemently debating the questions of revolution,
anarchism, labour-notes versus pass-books, and other like futile
and daring projects. The tacit assumption under which they
worked, the purpose of their campaign with its watchwords:
" Educate, Agitate, Organize, 11 was " to bring about a tre-
mendous smash-up of existing society, to be succeeded by com-
plete Socialism. 11 This romantic, almost childlike faith in the
early consummation of that far-off divine event, towards which
the whole of Socialist creation ipoves, meant nothing more nor less,
as Shaw freely admits, than that they had no true practical under-
standing either of existing society or Socialism. But the tone
of the society was changing, gradually and almost imperceptibly,
from that of insurrectionary futility to economic practicality.
Their tracts and manifestos voiced, less and less frequently,
forcible-feeble expressions of altruistic concern and humanitarian
indignation. The practical bases of Socialism, the Fabians began
to realize, were in sore need of being laid. And there can be no
doubt that the frank levity and irreverent outspokenness, which
are the distinguishing traits of Shaw, the artist, were given the
fullest field for development in the early days of Fabian contro-
versy, when no rein was put on tongue or imagination. It was
at this period, Shaw has told us, that the Fabians contracted the
invaluable habit of freely laughing at themselves — a habit which
has always distinguished them, always saved them from being
dampened by the gushing enthusiasts who mistake their own
emotions for public movements. As Shaw once expressed it :
" From the first such people fled after one glance at us,
declaring that we were not serious. Our preferences for
practical suggestions and criticisms, and our impatience of
all general expressions of sympathy with working-class aspira-
tions, not to mention our way of chaffing our opponents in
109
George Bernard Shaw
preference to denouncing them as enemies of the human
race, repelled from us some warm-hearted and eloquent So-
cialists, to whom it seemed callous and cynical to be even
commonly self-possessed in the presence of the sufferings
upon which Socialists make war. But there was far too much
equality and personal intimacy among the Fabians to allow
of any member presuming to get up and preach at the rest
in the fashion which the working-class still tolerate submis-
sively from their leaders. We knew that a certain sort of
oratory was useful for ' stoking up ' public meetings ; but
we needed no stoking up, and when any orator tried the pro-
cess on us, soon made him understand that he was wasting
his time and ours. I, for one, should be very sorry to lower
the intellectual standard of the Fabian by making the atmo-
sphere of its public discussions the least bit more congenial
to stale declamation than it is at present. If our debates
are to be kept wholesome, they cannot be too irreverent or
too critical And the irreverence, which has become traditional
with us, comes down from those early days when we often talked
such nonsense that we could not help laughing at ourselves."*
No perceptible difference in the various Socialist societies in
England was apparent until the election of 1885. When the Social
Democratic Federation and that high priest of Marxism, the
eloquent H. M. Hyndman, first appeared in the field, they
" loomed hideously in the guilty eye of property." Whilst the
Fabians numbered only forty, the Federation in numbers and
influence was magnified out of all proportion by the imagination
of the public and the political parties. The Tories actually
believed that the Socialists could take enough votes from the
Liberals to make it worth their while to pay the expenses of
two Socialist candidates in London.f The Social Democrats
• Tract No. 41, The Fabian Society : its Early History, by G. Bernard
Shaw.
t The main facts of the history of the Fabian Society as here recorded are
derived chiefly from Fabian Tract, No. 41, The Fabian Society : its Early
History, by Mr. Shaw, and from conversations with Mr. Shaw. Compare,
also, The Fabian Society, by William Clarke ; Preface to Fabian Essays. Ball
Publishing Co., Boston, .1908.
ZIO
The Fabian Society
committed a huge tactical blunder in accepting Tory gold to
pay the expenses of these elections, to say nothing of making
the damaging exposure that, as far as voting power was con-
cerned, the Socialists might be regarded as an absolutely
negligible quantity. A more serious result of the " Tory money
job " to the Federation was the defection of many of its adherents.
The Socialist League, in the language of American National Con-
ventions, viewed with indignation and repudiated with scorn the
tactics of " that disreputable gang," the S. D. F. f as it was currently
designated; while the Fabians, more parliamentary in tone,
passed the following resolution : " That the conduct of the Council
of the Social Democratic Federation in accepting money from
the Tory party in payment of the election expenses of Socialist
candidates is calculated to disgrace the Socialist movement in
England." Certain members of the Federation, under the leader-
ship of C. L. Fitzgerald and J. Macdonald, seceded from it, and
in February, 1886, formed a new body called "The Socialist
Union," which eked out a precarious existence for barely two
years. Far from being reinforced by the secessionists, the Fabians
were, on the contrary, only the more inevitably forced to
formulate their own principles, to mature their own individual
policy. From this time forward, they were classed by the
Federation as a hostile body. And, as Shaw says, " We ourselves
knew that we should have to find a way for ourselves without
looking to the other bodies for a trustworthy lead."
During the years 1886 and 1887, which mark the high tide
and recession of Insurrectionism in recent English Socialist history,
the sane tacticians, the Fabians, took little or no hand in the
revolutionary projects for the relief of the unemployed. The
budding economists were not wedded to street -corner agitations ;
nor was their help wanted by the men who were organizing church
parades and the like. These were years of great distress among
the labouring classes, not only in England, but in Holland, in
Belgium, and especially in the United States. " These were the
days when Mr. Champion told a meeting in London Fields that if
the whole propertied class had but one throat he would cut it
without a second thought if by doing so he could redress the
III
George Bernard Shaw
injustices of our social system; and when Mr. Hyndman was
expelled from his club for declaring on the Thames Embank-
ment that there would be some attention paid to cases of
starvation if a rich man were immolated on every pauper's tomb."
After the 8th of February, 1886, that mad Monday of window-
breaking, shop-looting, and carriage-storming memory, Hyndman,
Champion, Burns, and Williams were arrested and tried for
inspiring the agitation, but were acquitted. " The agitation went
on more violently than ever afterwards ; and the restless activity
of Champion, seconded by Burns' formidable oratory, seized on
every public opportunity, from the Lord Mayor's Show to services
for the poor in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's, to parade the
unemployed and force their claims upon the attention of the
public." Champion gave up in disgust when, impatient of doing
nothing but marching hungry men about the streets and making
speeches to them, he encountered only refusal of his two proposals
to the Federation : either to empower him to negotiate some
scheme of relief with his aristocratic sympathizers, or else go to
Trafalgar Square and stay there until something should happen.
Matters reached a crisis when the police, alarmed by the occasional
proposals of incendiary agitation to set London on fire simul-
taneously at the Bank, St. Paul's, the House of Commons, the
Stock Exchange, and the Tower, cleared the unemployed out
of the Square. But the agitation for right of meeting grew
universal among the working-classes ; and finally Mr. Stead, with
the whole working-class organization at his back, gave the word
" To the Square ! "* To the Square they all went, therefore, Shaw
tells us, with drums beating and banners waving, in their tens of
thousands, nominally to protest against the Irish policy of the
Government, but really to maintain the right of meeting in the
Square. With the new Chief Commissioner of Police, however,
it was, as one of Bunyan's Pilgrims put it, but a word and a blow.
" That eventful 13th of November, 1887, has since been known
* For an interesting account of the early movements of Socialistic con-
sciousness in England, compare An Artists Reminiscences, by the artist,
Walter Crane ; Chapter " Art and Socialism/' pp. 249-338. Methuen and
Co., 19074
112
The Fabian Sodety
as ' Bloody Sunday.' The heroes of it were Burns and Cun-
ninghame Graham, who charged, two strong, at the rampart
of policemen round the Square and were overpowered and arrested.
The heroine was Mrs. Besant, who may be said without the
slightest exaggeration to have all but killed herself with over-
work in looking after the prisoners, and organizing in their behalf
a ' Law and Liberty League ' with Mr. Stead. Meanwhile, the
police received the blessing of Mr. Gladstone ; and Insurrectionism,
after a two years' innings, vanished from the field and has not
since been heard of. For, in the middle of the revengeful growling
over the defeat at the Square, trade revived ; the unemployed
were absorbed ; the Star newspaper appeared to let in light and
let off steam ; in short, the way was clear at last for Fabianism.
Do not forget, though, that Insurrectionism will reappear at the
next depression in trade as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow
morning."*
Being " disgracefully backward " in open-air speaking, the
Fabians had been somewhat overlooked in the excitements of
the unemployed agitations. They had only Shaw, Wallas and
Mrs. Besant as against Burns, Hyndman, Andrew Hall, Tom
Mann, Champion and Burrows, of the Federation, and numerous
representative open-air speakers of the Socialist League. The sole
contribution of the Fabians to the agitation was a report, printed
in 1886, recommending experiments in tobacco culture, and even
hinting at compulsory military service as a means of absorbing
some of the unskilled unemployed. Drawn up by Bland, Hughes,
Podmore, Stapleton and Webb, this was the first Fabian
publication that contained any solid information. In June, 1886,
the temper of the society over the social question having cooled
to some extent, the Fabians " signalized their repudiation of
Sectarianism " by inviting the Radicals, the Secularists, and any
* Shaw's mother was never able to persuade herself, so strong were her
aristocratic instincts, that in becoming a Socialist, George had not allied
himself with a band of ragamuffins. One day, while walking down Regent
Street with her son, she inquired who was the handsome gentleman on the
opposite side. On being told that it was Cunninghame Graham, the
distinguished Socialist, she protested : " No, no, George, that's impossible.
Why, that man's a gentleman I "
113 8
George Bernard Shaw
one else who would come, to a great conference, modelled upon
the Industrial Remunerative Conference, and dealing with the
Nationalization of Land and Capital. Fifty-three societies sent
delegates, and eighteen papers were read during the three after-
noons and evenings the conference lasted. Among those who read
papers were two Members of Parliament, William Morris and
Dr. Aveling, of the Socialist League, Mr. Foote and Mr. Robertson,
of the National Secular Society. Wordsworth Donisthorpe,
Stuart Headlam, Dr. Pankhurst, Mrs. Besant, Edward Carpenter
and Stuart -Glennie represented various other shades of Socialist
doctrine and belief. The main result of the conference was to
make the Fabians known to the Radical clubs and to prove that
they were able to manage a conference in a business-like way.
By this time the Fabians had definitely rejected Anarchism,
and were agreed as to the advisability of setting to work by the
ordinary political methods. The revolutionary hue of the society,
however, was not obliterated without many wordy duels with that
section of the Socialist League which called itself Anti-Communist,
chiefly represented by Mr. Joseph Lane and William Morris.* It
finally became necessary to put the matter to a vote in order to
determine how many adherents Mrs. Wilson, the one avowed
Anarchist among the Fabians, could muster. There ensued a
spirited debate over the advisability of the Socialists organizing
themselves as a political party " for the purpose of transferring
into the hands of the whole working community full control over
the soil and the means of production, as well as over the produc-
tion and distribution of wealth" — a debate in which Morris,
Mrs. Wilson, Davis and Tochatti were pitted against Burns,
Mrs. Besant, Bland, Shaw, Donald and Rossiter. The resolution
of Mrs. Besant and Bland, in favour of the organization of such
a party, was finally carried, while Morris's " rider," discounte-
nancing as a false step the attempt of the Socialists to take part
in the Parliamentary contest, was subsequently rejected. The
Fabian Parliamentary League, an organization within the society
itself, to which any Fabian might belong, was now formed in
order to avoid a break with the Fabians who sympathized with
• Compare To-Day, edited by Hubert Bland, for the year 1886.
"4
The Fabian Society
Mrs. Wilson. The preliminary manifesto of this body, dated
February, 1887, gives the first sketch of the Fabian policy of
to-day.* The League, Shaw tells us, first faded into a Political
Committee of the society, and then merged silently and painlessly
into the general body. The few branches of the League which
Mrs. Besant formed in the provinces had but a short life, quite
to be expected at this time, for, outside Socialistic circles in London,
the society remained unknown.
In connection with Shaw's own individual development, we shall
soon see how the Fabians received their training for public life
and became " equipped with all the culture of the age." Suffice
it to state here that the Fabians had now thoroughly grounded
themselves in the historic, economic and moral bearings of
Socialism. Their rejection of Anarchism and Insurrectionism was
not accomplished without the expenditure of many words, was
not unattended by ludicrous results. The minutes of the
tumultuous meeting, signalized by the Besant-Bland-Morris
resolutions and attendant heated debate, closed with the significant
words :
" Subsequently to the meeting, the secretary received
notice from the manager of Anderton's Hotel that the
Society could not be accommodated there for any further
meetings."
At any rate, even at the cost of being refused a meeting-place,
the Fabians had finally demolished Anarchism in the abstract
" by grinding it between human nature and the theory of
economic rent." They now began to train the artillery of their
culture and economic equipment upon practical politics. The
Fabian Conference of 1886, attesting the repudiation of
sectarianism by the Fabians, had been boycotted by the S. D. F.
In 1888, the Fabians adopted a policy which severed the last
link between the Fabian Society and the Federation. The
Fabians began to join the Liberal and Radical, or even the Con-
servative, Associations, to become members of the nearest Radical
• This manifesto, in lull, is to be found in Fabian Tract No. 41, pp. 13-14.
115 8*
George Bernard Shaw
Club and Co-operative Store, and, whenever possible, to be
delegated to the Metropolitan Radical Federation and the Liberal
and Radical Union. By making speeches and moving resolutions
at the meetings of these bodies, and using the Parliamentary
candidate for the constituency as a catspaw, the Fabians succeeded
in " permeating " the party organizations. So adroitly did the
Fabians manage their machinery of political wire-pulling that
in 1888 they gained the solid advantage of a Progressive majority,
full of ideas " that would never have come into their heads had
not the Fabians put them there," on the first London County
Council. In Shaw's words, in 1892 :
" The generalship of this movement was undertaken chiefly
by Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring
tricks with the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas, that
to this day both the Liberals and the Sectarian Socialists
stand aghast at him. It was exciting whilst it lasted, all this
' permeation of the Liberal party,' as it was called ; and
no person with the smallest political intelligence is likely to
deny that it made a foothold for us in the press and pushed
forward Socialism in municipal politics to an extent which
can only be appreciated by those who remember how things
stood before our campaign. When we published ' Fabian
Essays ' at the end of 1889, having ventured with great mis-
giving on a subscription edition of a thousand, it went of!
like smoke ; and our cheap edition brought up the circulation
to about twenty thousand. In the meantime, we had been
cramming the public with information in tracts, on the model
of our earliest financial success in that department, namely,
Facts for Socialists, the first edition of which actually brought
us a profit — the only instance of the kind then known. In
short, the years 1888, 1889, 1890 saw a Fabian boom. . . ."*
In the Political Outlook, last of the Fabian Essays, Hubert
Bland wisely predicted that the moment the party leaders had
• Tract No. 41 : The Fabian Society : its Early History, by G. Bernard
Shaw.
Il6
THE SOCIALIST.
From a photo,,. P h lata in July. 1891.
The Fabian Society
unmasked the Fabian designs, they would rally round all the
institutions the Fabians were attacking. They might either
put off the Fabians by raising false issues, such as Leaseholds
Enfranchisement and Disestablishment of the Church, or, in order
to defeat the Fabian candidates, coalesce with their rivals for
office — just as, for example, the Republicans and Democrats
united in the defeat of Henry George for mayor of New York
City. In less than two years, Bland's prediction was verified.
When Sidney Webb sought to force to political action a certain
" Liberal and Radical " London Member of Parliament, who
had unwarily expressed views virtually identical with Socialism,
the startled politician discovered that he was not a Socialist and
that Webb was. Although the word to " close up the ranks of
Capitalism against the insidious invaders" was promptly given,
it came too late, for the permeation had gone on too long. But
the result was the " show-down " of the Fabian hand, and the
call for a " new deal." In fact, the Conference of the London and
Provincial Fabian Societies at Essex Hall on February 6th, 1892,
was called together, not to celebrate the continuance of the per-
meation boom, but to face the fact that it was over. The time
had come for a new departure. In his address before that con-
ference, Shaw unhesitatingly said : " No doubt there still remains,
in London, as everywhere else, a vast mass of political raw material,
calling itself Liberal, Radical, Tory, Labour, and what not, or
even not calling itself anything at all, which is ready to take the
Fabian stamp if it is adroitly and politely pressed down on it.
There are thousands of thoroughly Socialized Radicals to-day who
would have resisted Socialism fiercely if it had been forced on them
with taunts, threats, and demands that they should recant all
their old professions and commit what they regard as an act of
political apostasy. And there are thousands more, not yet
Socialized, who must be dealt with in the same manner. But
whilst our propaganda is thus still chiefly a matter of permeation,
that game is played out in our politics. . . . We now feel that we
have brought up all the political laggards and pushed their parties
as far as they can be pushed, and that we have therefore cleared
the way to the beginning of the special political work of the
117
George Bernard Shaw
Socialist—that of forming a Collectivist party of those who have
more to gain than to lose by Collectivism, solidly arrayed against
those who have more to lose than to gain by it." And his final
words project no absurdly Utopian dream of striking the shackles
from the white slaves of Capital. While expressing undiminished
hope for the possibilities of a distant, yet realizable, future, they
reveal the sanity of the practical man of affairs, of the realist
Shaw has so often magnified and celebrated. " You know what
we have gone through, and what you will probably have to go
through. You know why we believe that the middle-classes
will have their share in bringing about Socialism, and why we
do not hold aloof from Radicalism, Trade-Unionism, or any of
the movements which are traditionally individualistic. You
know, too, that none of you can more ardently desire the formation
of a genuine Collectivist political party, distinct from Conservative
and Liberal alike, than we do. But I hope you also know that
there is not the slightest use in merely expressing your aspirations
unless you can give us some voting power to back them and that
your business in the provinces is, in one phrase, to create that
voting power. Whilst our backers at the polls are counted by
tens, we must continue to crawl and drudge and lecture as best
we can. When they are counted by hundreds we can permeate
and trim and compromise. When they rise to tens of thousands
we shall take the field as an independent party. Give us
hundreds of thousands, as you can if you try hard enough, and
we will ride the whirlwind and direct the storm."
1x8
THE CART AND TRUMPET
" I leave the delicacies of retirement to those who are gentlemen first
and literary workmen afterwards. The cart and trumpet for me." — On
Didbolonian Ethics, In Three Plays for Puritans, p. zxii.
CHAPTER V
" ¥ F the art of living were only the art of dialectic ! If this
1 world were a world of pure intellect, Mr. Shaw would be
a dramatist." Mr. Walkley damns the dramatist to deify the
dialectician. Many would deny Shaw the possession of a heart ;
few can deny him the possession of a remarkable brain and a
phenomenal faculty of telling speech. The platform orator of
to-day — easy, nonchalant, resourceful, instantaneous in repartee,
unmatched in hardiesse, sublime in audacity — Shaw was once a
trembling, shrinking novice. The veteran of a thousand verbal
combats was once afraid to raise his voice ; the blagueur, the
" quacksalver " of a thousand mystifications, was once afraid to
open his mouth ! After all, the " brilliant " and " extraordinary "
Shaw is only a self-made man. The sheer force of his will, exerted
with tremendous energy ever since he came to man's estate, is the
great motor which has carried him in his lifetime " from the
seventeenth to the twenty-first century." A scientific natural
history of Bernard Shaw's extraordinary career should make clear
to all young aspirants that the extraordinariness of that career
lies in its ordinariness. " Like a greengrocer and unlike a minor
poet," as Mr. Shaw once put it to me, " I have lived instead of
dreaming and feeding myself with artistic confectionery. With
a little more courage and a little more energy I could have done
much more ; and I lacked these because in my boyhood I lived
on my imagination instead of on my work."
Bernard Shaw has unravelled life's tangles with infinite patience.
No cutting of Gordian knots for him. To ignore his training, his
dogged persistence, his undaunted " push, pluck and perseverance,"
is unduly to magnify his natural capacity. Sacrifice the pheno-
menon and you find the personality ; off with the marvel and
zai
George Bernard Shaw
on with the man. In a letter to me, written in 1904, Mr. Shaw
gave due, almost undue, credit to the influence of training :
11 It has enabled me to produce an impression of being an
extraordinarily clever, original and brilliant writer, deficient
only in feeling, whereas the truth is that, though I am in a way
a man of genius— otherwise I suppose I could not have sought
out and enjoyed my experiences and been simply bored by
holidays, luxury and money — yet I am not in the least
naturally ' brilliant,' and not at all ready or clever. If
literary men generally were put through the mill I went
through and kept out of their stuffy little coteries, where
works of art breed in and in until the intellectual and spiritual
product becomes hopelessly degenerate, I should have a
thousand rivals more brilliant than myself. There is nothing
more mischievous than the notion that my works are the
mere play of a delightfully clever and whimsical hero of the
salons: they are the result of perfectly straightforward
drudgery, beginning in the ineptest novel-writing juvenility,
and persevered in every day for twenty-five years."
The combination of supreme audacity with a sort of expansive
and ludicrous self-consciousness has enabled Shaw to secure many
of his most comic effects. And yet he once said with unreasonable
modesty that anybody could get his skill for the same price, and
that a good many people could probably get it cheaper. He
wrested his self-consciousness to his own ends, transforming it
from a serious defect into a virtue of genuine comic force. The
apocryphal incident of Demosthenes and the pebbles finds its
analogue in the case of Shaw. Only the most persistent and
long-continued efforts enabled him to acquire that sublime hardi-
hood in platform speaking which he deprecatingly denominates
" ordinary self-possession." When Lecky, in 1879, first dragged
him to a meeting of the Zeletical Society, Shaw knew absolutely
nothing about public meetings or public order. I remember a talk
with Mr. Shaw one day at Ayot St. Lawrence over the morning
meal. " I had an air of impudence, of course," said Mr. Shaw,
122
The Cart and Trumpet
" but was really an arrant coward, nervous and self-conscious to
a heartrending degree. Yet I could not hold my tongue. I
started up and said something in the debate, and then felt that I
had made such a fool of myself (mere vanity ; for I had probably
done nothing in the least noteworthy) that I vowed I would join
the society, go every week, speak every week, and become a
speaker or perish in the attempt. And I carried out this resolu-
tion. I suffered agonies that no one suspected. During the
speech of the debater I resolved to follow, my heart used to beat
as painfully as a recruit's going under fire for the first time. I
could not use notes ; when I looked at the paper in my hand I
could not collect myself enough to decipher a word. And of the
four or five wretched points that were my pretext for this ghastly
practice of mine, I invariably forgot three — the best three." Yet
in some remarkable way Shaw managed to keep his nervousness
a secret from everyone except himself, for at his third meeting he
was asked to take the chair. He bore out the impression he had
created of being rather uppish and self-possessed by accepting as
off-handedly as if he were the Speaker of the House of Commons.
He afterwards confessed to me that the secretary probably got
the first inkling of his hidden terror by seeing that his hand shook
so that he could hardly sign the minutes of the previous meeting.
There must have been something provocative, however, even in
Shaw's nervous bravado. His speeches, one imagines, must have
been little less dreaded by the society than they were by Shaw
himself, yet it is significant that they were seldom ignored. The
speaker of the evening, in replying at the end, usually paid Shaw
the questionable compliment of addressing himself with some
vigour to Shaw's remarks, and seldom in an appreciative vein.
Conversant with the political theories of Mill and the evolutionary
theories of Darwin and his school, Shaw was, on the other hand,
" horribly ignorant " of the society's subjects. He knew nothing
of political economy ; moreover, he was a foreigner and a recluse.
Everything struck his mind at an angle that produced reflections
quite as puzzling as at present, but not so dazzling. His one
success, it appears, was achieved when the society paid to Art,
of which it was stupendously ignorant, the tribute of setting
123
George Bernard Shaw
an evening for a paper on it by a lady in the " aesthetic
dress of thejperiod. " I wiped the floor with that meeting,
Shaw once told me, " and several members confessed to me after-
wards that it was this performance that first made them reconsider
their first impression of me as a discordant idiot."
Shaw persevered doggedly, taking the floor at every opportunity.
Like the humiliated, defiant Disraeli, in his virgin speech in the
House of Commons, Shaw resolved that some day his mocking
colleagues should hear, aye, and heed him. He haunted public
meetings, so he says, "like an officer afflicted with cowardice,
who takes every opportunity of going under fire to get over it and
learn his business." After his conversion to Socialism, he grew
increasingly zealous as a public speaker. He was so full of
Socialism that he made the natural mistake of dragging it in by
the ears at every opportunity. On one occasion he so annoyed
an audience at South Place that, for the only time in his life, he
was met with a demonstration of impatience. " I took the hint
so rapidly and apprehensively that no great harm was done,"
Mr. Shaw once said to me ; " but I still remember it as an un-
pleasant and mortifying discovery that there is a limit even to
the patience of that poor, helpless, long-suffering animal, the public,
with political speakers." Such an incident had never occurred
before ; and although Shaw has spent his life in deriding the
public, he has taken care that such a mortifying experience never
occur again. Shaw now began to devote most of his time to
Socialist propagandism. An eventful experience came to him
in 1883, when he accepted an invitation to address a workmen's
club at Woolwich. At first he thought of writing a lecture and
even of committing it to memory ; for it seemed hardly possible
to speak for an hour, without text, when he had hitherto spoken
only for ten minutes in a debate. He now realized that if he
were to speak often on Socialism — as he fully meant to do — writing
and learning by rote would be impossible for mere want of time.
He made a few notes, being by this time cool enough to be able
to use them. He found his feet without losing his head : the sense
of social injustice loosened his tongue. The lecture, called
" Thieves," was a demonstration of the thesis that the proprietor
124
The Cart and Trumpet
of an unearned income inflicted on the community exactly the
same injury as a burglar. Fortified by sava indignatio, Shaw
spoke for an hour easily. From that time forth he considered
the battle won.
In March, 1886, Shaw participated in a series of public debates
held at South Place Institute, South Place, Finsbury, E.C. Here
for the first time he tried his hand, in a fairly large hall, on an
audience counted by hundreds instead of scores. " Socialism and
Individualism" was the general title of this series of Sunday
afternoon lectures.* This was a daring undertaking for Shaw,
who had neither the experience nor the savoir faire of his col-
leagues. It was perhaps for this reason that he did not particularly
distinguish himself, his opponent giving him as good as he sent.
Mrs. Besant, a born orator, was interesting and eloquent, while
Webb quite eclipsed Shaw, positively annihilating his adversary.
One who knew him well at this initial stage, however, said that
if Bernard Shaw knew nothing, he invented as he went along.
The lightness of touch, the nimbleness of intellect, lacked complete
development. At this time the clever young Irishman had
neither memory enough for effective facts, nor presence of mind
enough to be an easy winner in debate.
No one has yet measured the all-important influence Sidney
Webb has exerted upon Shaw's career, dating from that memorable
evening at the Zeletical Society when Shaw gazed in open-
mouthed wonder at that miracle of effectiveness and model of
self-possession. Shaw's admiration has waxed, not waned, with
the passage of time. To-day he regards Webb as one of the most
* On March 6th, Mrs. Annie Besant (Fabian Society) spoke versus Mr.
Corrie Grant, subject : " That the existence of classes who live upon un-
earned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the community, and ought
to be put an end to by legislation." On March 13th, Mr. G. B. Shaw
(Fabian Society) versus Rev. F. W. Ford, subject : " That the welfare of
the community necessitates the transfer of the land and existing capital
of the country from private owners to the State." On March 20th, Mr.
Sidney Webb (Fabian Society) versus Dr. T. B. Napier, subject : " That the
main principles of Socialism are founded on, and in accordance with, modern
economic science." On March 27th, Mr. H. H. Champion versus Mr.
Wordsworth Donisthorpe (Liberty and Property Defence League), subject :
" That State interference with, and control of, industry is inevitable, and
will be advantageous to the community."
125
SOUTH PLACE INSTITUTE,
South Place, Finsbury, E.C
(SEAR MOO RG ATE STHER1 AND BBOAl> STHhET STATIONS )
Sunday Afternoon Lectures,
Sociali sm and Individu alism.
A SERIES OF DEBATES
Will take plaoe during MARCH as follows
March Stk.
MRS. ANNIE BBSANT wmi MR CORRIE GRANT.
(RteMoJi Soeiety.)
Subjed : * That the oxistenoe of classes who live upon unearned inoomes
is detrimental to the welfare of the Community, and ought to he
pot an and to by Legislation."
March 13th.
MR. O. BERNARD SHAW eersat REV P W FORD.
(Fmbum Society.)
$%Uj§et " That the welfare of the Community necessitates the transfer
of the land and existing capital of the Country from private
owners to the state.
March 20*.
MR. SIDNEY WEBB em* DR. T. B. NAPIER.
{Fabian Society.)
Subject : «' That the main principles of Socialism are founded on, and in
accordance with Modern Economic 8eienoe."
March 27*.
MR. H. H. CHAMPION
MR. WORDSWORTH DONISTHORPE.
(Liberty amd P rope rty Defemce Leaawe.)
Subject: "That State interference with, and control of indnatry is
inevitable, and will be advantageous to the Community."
The Chair will be taken each afternoon at 4 o'clock.
The audience are requested to refrain from any interference in the
Debates, whion will be confined exclusively to the speakers
annonnoed above.
MR. WALTER HASTINGS
Will give an
Each Afternoon from 8-80 to 4 o'clock.
ALL 8EATS FREE. NO COLLEOTION.
Doors open at 3.20.
CONRAD THIE8, Hon. Sec. to Institute Committee.
Program or Sunday Afternoon Lectures.
South Place Institute, South Place, Finsbury, *E.C.
March, £8§6\j
(
tf1
The Cart and Trumpet
extraordinary and capable men alive. The critic who, in Disraelian
phrase, regards Shaw as " one vast appropriation clause," will
find some support for this belief in Shaw's statement that the
difference between Shaw with Webb's brains and knowledge at
his disposal, and Shaw by himself, is enormous. " Nobody has
as yet gauged it," Mr. Shaw once said in a letter to me, " because
as I am an incorrigible mountebank, and Webb is one of the
simplest of geniuses, I have always been in the centre of the stage
whilst Webb has been prompting me, invisible, from the side."
Shaw's faculties of acquisitiveness and appropriation are enor-
mously developed, a fact once comically accentuated by him in
the frank avowal he once made to me : " I am an expert picker of
other men's brains, and I have been exceptionally fortunate in
my friends."
It was not without severe training and incessant work that
Shaw and his fellow Fabians acquired the equipment in the his-
toric and economic weapons of Social Democracy, comparable to
that which Ferdinand Lassalle in his day so defiantly flaunted
in the faces of his adversaries. While Stead, Hyndman and Burns
were organizing the unemployed agitation in the streets, the
Fabians were diligently training themselves for public life. Frank
Podmore, a Post Office civil servant, and Edward Reynolds Pease,
present secretary of the Fabian Society, two original Fabians,
were great friends, and the earliest Fabian meetings were held
alternately at Pease's rooms in Osnaburgh Street, and at Pod-
more's, in Dean's Yard, Westminster.* Certain of the Fabians
+ At this time, it is interesting to recall, Pease and Podmore were deeply
interested in the Psychical Research Society, which had its office in the
Dean's Yard rooms. In this way the Fabians, Shaw in particular, were
brought in close touch with the exploits of this society at its most exciting
period, when Madame Blavatsky was exposed by the American, R. Hodgson.
Compare, for example, Shaw's two book-reviews in the Pall Mall Gasette :
A Scotland Yard for Spectres, being a notice of the Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research (January 23rd, 1886), and A Life of Madame Blavatsky
(January 6th, 1887). On one eventful evening Shaw attended a Fabian
meeting, then went on to hear the end of a Psychical Research stance, and
ended by sleeping in a haunted house with a committee of ghost-hunters.
Picture, if you can, Shaw's deep mortification, his intense disgust over
having a nightmare on that night of all nights, and waking up in a corner
of the room struggling desperately with the ghost I
127
George Bernard Shaw
sadly felt the need of solid information and training, in addition
to that afforded by the meetings of the society. Thrown upon
their individual resources, those most scholarly inclined of the
Fabians, a veritable handful, founded the Hampstead Historic
Club. First established as a sort of mutual improvement society
for those ambitious Fabians wishing to read, mark, learn and
inwardly digest Marx and Proudhon, this club was afterwards
turned into a systematic history class, in which each student
took his turn at being professor. Thus they taught each other
what they themselves wished to learn, acquiring the most thorough
and minute knowledge of the subject under discussion. In these
days Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas were the bravoes of advanced
economics — the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan. As Olivier
and Wallas were men of very exceptional character and attain-
ments, Shaw was enabled, as he once expressed it in my presence,
to work with a four-man-power equal to a four-hundred-ordinary-
man-power, which made his feuilletons and other literary per-
formances " quite unlike anything that the ordinary hermit-crab
could produce." Mr. Shaw thus explained very quaintly the
secret of his success at this period. " In fact the brilliant, extra-
ordinary Shaw was brilliant and extraordinary ; but then I had
an incomparable threshing machine for my ideas — a machine
which contributed heaps of ideas to my little store ; and when I
seemed most original and fantastic, I was often simply an
amanuensis with a rather exceptional literary knack, cultivated
by dogged practice." And of his three warm friends he freely
confessed : " They knocked a tremendous lot of nonsense,
ignorance and vulgarity out of me, for we were on quite ruthless
terms with one another."
Another associate, one of the Fabian essayists and now a
journalist, Hubert Bland, was — and is still — of great value to
Shaw and his colleagues, by reason of his strong individuality and
hard common sense, and on account of the fact that his views ran
counter to Webb's on many lines. Bland lived at Blackheath,
on the south side of the river, at this time ; and his wife, the very
clever woman and distinguished author, " E. Nesbit," was a
remarkable figure at the Fabian meetings during the first seven
128
The Cart and Trumpet
or eight years of its existence. During the era of the Hampstead
Historic Club, Bland had a circle of his own at Blackheath ; and
although Hampstead, lying north of London, was quite out of
Bland's district, Shaw and his friends used sometimes to descend
on his evening parties. Bland had an utter contempt for the
Bohemianism of Shaw and his companions, evincing it by wearing
invariably an irreproachable frock-coat, tall hat, and a single
eyeglass which infuriated everybody. Mrs. Bland graciously
humoured the reckless Bohemianism of the insouciant Fabians,
and on one memorable occasion stopped them at her door, went
for needle and thread, and — perhaps with a faint hope of pre-
serving the haul ton of her social evening — then and there sewed
up the sleeve of Sidney Olivier's brown velveteen jacket. A
dernier ressort, for the sleeve was all but torn out ! There was
some compensation in the fact that, even then, Olivier fully looked
the dignified part he was one day to fill. But it is not easy to
doubt that the arrant Bohemianism of the luckless Fabians, their
reckless disregard of evening dress, must have been very trying
to the decorum of Blackheath.
Of fierce Norman exterior and great physical strength, Bland
dominated others by force of sheer size. Pugnacious, powerful,
a skilled pugilist, and with a voice which Mr. Shaw once accu-
rately described as being exactly " like the scream of an eagle,"
he made such a formidable antagonist that no one dared be
uncivil to him. Just as William Clarke always combated and
consequently stimulated Shaw by a diametrically opposite point
of view, so Bland exerted a like influence upon Sidney Webb, and
indirectly upon Shaw. Strongly Conservative and Imperialist by
temperament, Bland stood in sharp contrast to the Millite, Ben-
thamite recruits of the Fabian Society. There were many other
clever fellows, many other good friends in Shaw's circle at this
time ; but through circumstances of time, place and marriage —
the changes and chances of this mortal life — they could not be
in such close touch with Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas as were
these four with one another.
It is not, of course, to be supposed that Shaw was merely the
recipient, like Molidre always taking his material where he found
129 9
George Bernard Shaw
it. In his own peculiar and, at times, vastly irritating way, he
made his personality strongly felt, exerting great influence by
sheer force of a sort of perverse common sense. To employ Poe's
apt descriptive, he was the Imp of the Perverse made flesh. In
the circle of the Fabians there was room for considerable strife
of temperaments, and in the other Socialist societies, quarrels and
splits and schisms were rather frequent. Unquestionably Shaw's
quintessential service to the Fabians lay in his pioneering ideas
and his knack of drafting things in literary form and arranging
his colleagues' ideas for them with Irish lucidity. A somewhat
less conspicuous, yet little less important, service consisted in
clearing the atmosphere, in easing off the personal friction which
not infrequently produced smoke and at times threatened to
kindle a conflagration. This personal friction Shaw managed to
eliminate in a most characteristic way : by a sort of tact which
superficially looked like the most outrageous want of it. When-
ever there was a grievance, instead of trying to patch matters up,
Shaw would deliberately betray everybody's confidence after the
fashion of Sidney Trefusis, by stating it before the whole set in
the most monstrously exaggerated terms. What would have
been the result among acquaintances less closely linked by
ties of personal friendship it is easy to imagine. The usual
result, however, of Shaw's hazardous and tactless outspoken-
ness was that everybody repudiated his monstrous exaggera-
tions, and whatever of grievance there was in the matter
was fully explained. Of course, Shaw was first denounced as
a reckless mischief-maker, and afterwards forgiven as a
privileged lunatic.
Once every fortnight, for a number of years, Shaw attended
the meetings of the Hampstead Historic Club ; and in the alternate
weeks he spent a night at a private circle of economists which
subsequently developed into The Royal Economic Society.
Fabian, and especially Shavian, Socialism is strictly economic
in character, a circumstance due in no small measure to the fact
that in this circle of economists the social question was left out
and the work kept on abstract economic lines. In speaking of
this period, Shaw afterwards confessed :
130
The Cart and Trumpet
" I made all my acquaintances think me madder than
usual by the pertinacity with which I attended debating
societies and haunted all sorts of hole-and-corner debates
and public meetings and made speeches at them. I was
President of the Local Government Board at an amateur
Parliament where a Fabian ministry had to put its proposals
into black-and-white in the shape of Parliamentary Bills.
Every Sunday I lectured on some subject I wanted to teach
to myself ; and it was not until I had come to the point of
being able to deliver separate lectures, without notes, on
Rent, Interest, Profits, Wages, Toryism, Liberalism,
Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Trade-Unionism, Co-
operation, Democracy, the Division of Society into Classes,
and the Suitability of Human Nature to Systems of Trust
Distribution, that I was able to handle Social Democracy as it
must be handled before it can be preached in such a way
as to present it to every sort of man from his own particular
point of view. In old lecture lists of the Society you will
find my name down for twelve different lectures or so.
Nowadays (1892), I have only one, for which the secretary
is good enough to invent four or five different names."*
The only opponents who held their own against the Fabians
in debate, men like Levy and Foote, had learned in the harsh
school of experience ; like the Fabians, they had found pleasure
and profit in speaking, in debating, and in picking up bits of social
information in the most out-of-the-way places. It was this
keen Socialistic acquisitiveness of the Fabians, their readiness to
eschew the conventional amusements for the pleasure to be
derived from speaking several nights each week, which prepared
them for the strenuous platform campaigns of the future. And
such fun it was to the Fabian swashbucklers ! After being
" driven in disgrace " out of Anderton's Hotel, and subsequently
out of a chapel near Wardour Street in which they had sought
sanctuary, the Fabians went to Willis's Rooms, the most aristo-
cratic and also, as it turned out, the cheapest place of meeting
* Tract No. 41, The Fabian Society : its Early History, by G. Bernard
Shaw.
131 9*
•
George Bernard Shaw
in London. " Our favourite sport," says Shaw, " was inviting
politicians and economists to lecture to us, and then falling on
them with all our erudition and debating skill, and making them
wish they had never been born." On one occasion the Fabians
confuted Co-operation in the person of Mr. Benjamin Jones on
a point on which, as Shaw afterwards confessed, they subsequently
found reason to believe that they were entirely in the wrong and
he entirely in the right. The 16th of March, 1888, commemorates
the most signal victory of the Fabians in this species of guerrilla
warfare. On that night of glorious memory a well-known member
of Parliament, now the Secretary of State for War, lured
into the Fabian ambuscade, was butchered to make a Fabian
holiday. The following ludicrous account of the incident was
written by the Individualist, Mr. G. Standring, in The Radical,
March 17th, 1888. Picture to yourself the scene — a spacious and
lofty apartment, brilliantly lighted by scores of wax candles in
handsome candelabra, and about eighty ladies and gentlemen,
seated around on comfortable chairs, lying in wait for the un-
suspecting M.P. The company is composed almost exclusively of
members of the Fabian Society — " A Socialist body whose motto
is : Don't be in a hurry ; but when you do go it, go it thick ! "
" Such were the surroundings when, on March 16th,
Mr. R. B. Haldane, M.P., was brought forth to meet his
fate. The hon. gentleman, who is a lawyer and Member
for Haddingtonshire, was announced to speak on ' Radical
Remedies for Economic Evils,' but one could easily see that
this was a mere ruse of war. The Fabian fighters were drawn
up in battle array before the Chairman's table, ready for
the fatal onslaught.
11 Truth to tell, Mr. Haldane did not appear at all alarmed
at the prospect of his impending butchery. Erect and manly,
he stood at the table, and in calm, well-chosen language
showed cause for his belief that Radical principles and
Radical methods are sufficient to cure the evils of society.
He then critically examined a Fabian pamphlet, ' The True
Radical Programme,' and put in demurrers thereto. The
132
The Cart and Trumpet
hon. and learned gentleman spoke for an hour, and as I sat
on my cushioned chair, encompassed round about by
Socialists, breathing an atmosphere impregnated with
Socialism, I listened, and softly murmured : ' Verily, an
angel hath come down from heaven ! '
" As the last words of Mr. Haldane died away, the short,
sharp tones of the Chairman's voice told that the carnage
was about to commence. After some desultory questioning,
Mr. Sidney Webb sprang to his feet, eager, excited and anxious
to shake the life out of Mr. Haldane before anyone else could
get at him. He spoke so rapidly as to become at times
almost incoherent. Mr. Webb seemed to be charged with
matter enough for a fortnight, and he was naturally desirous
to fire as much of it as possible into the body of the enemy.
At length the warning bell of the Chairman was heard, and
the attack was continued by Mrs. Annie Besant, who, standing
with her back to the foe, occasionally faced round to emphasize
a point. Then up rose George Bernard Shaw, and as he spoke,
his gestures suggested to me the idea that he had got Mr.
Haldane impaled upon a needle, and was picking him to
pieces limb by limb, as wicked boys disintegrate flies. Mr.
Shaw went over the Radical lines as laid down by his
opponent, and this was the burden of his song : That is
no good, this is no good, the other is no good — while you
leave nine hundred thousand millions, in the shape of Rent
and Interest, in the hands of an idle class. Let us nationalize
the nine hundred thousand millions, and all these (Radical)
things shall be added unto you. Mr. Shaw fired a Parthian
shot as he sat down. Mr. Haldane had spoken of education,
elementary and technical, as a means of advancing national
welfare. Shaw met this with open scorn, and declared that
the most useful and necessary kind of education was the
education of the Liberal party ! With that he subsided in a
rose-water bath of Fabian laughter.
" The massacre was completed by two other members
of the Society, and then the Chairman called upon Mr. Haldane
to reply. Hideous mockery ! the Chairman knew that
133
George Bernard Shaw
Haldane was dead! He had seen him torn, tossed and
trampled underfoot. Perhaps he expected the ghost of the
M.P. to rise and conclude the debate with frightful gibber-
ings of fleshless jaws and gestures of bony hands. Indeed,
I heard a rustling of papers, as if one gathered his notes for
a speech ; but I felt unable to face the grisly horror of a
phantom replying to its assassins, so I fled"
The three great influences, formative and determinative, whose
importance in their bearing upon Shaw's career can scarcely be
overestimated, are : first, minute and exhaustive researches into
the economic bases of society; second, his persevering efforts
as a public man toward the practical reformation of patent social
evils ; and, third, his strenuous activity persisted in for many
years, as a public speaker and Socialist propagandist. His plays
are so permeated with the spirit of economic and social research
that they may be called, with little exaggeration, clinical lectures
upon the social anatomy of our time. Shaw, the public man,
the man of affairs, never the literary recluse of the ivory tower,
stands revealed alike in criticism and drama. There is more
truth than jest in Shaw's statement, generally greeted with
derisive scepticism, that his plays differ from those of other
dramatists because he has been a vestryman and borough
councillor. And there is scarcely a play of Shaw's which does
not bear the hall-mark of the facile debater. His weekly feuilletons,
his literary criticisms, provocative, argumentative, controversial,
smack of the arena and the public platform.
This close touch with actual life, this vital association with
public effort and social reform, have imparted to Shaw's literary
productions a rare, an unique flavour. He has gone down
unflinchingly into the pitiless and dusty arena to joust against
all comers. Shaw has never lived the literary life, never belonged
to a literary club. He has never lived " Vauguste vie quotidiennt
d'un Hamlet," who, as Maeterlinck asserts, has time to live because
he does not act. Shaw has found life in action, action in life.
Although he brought all his powers unsparingly to the criticism
of the fine arts, he never frequented their social surroundings.
*34
The Cart and Trumpet
When he was not actually writing or attending performances,
his time was fully taken up by public work, in which he was
fortunate enough to be associated with a few men of exceptional
ability and character. From 1883 to 1888, he was criticizing
books in the Pall Mall Gazette and pictures in the World. This
left him his evenings free ; consequently he did a tremendous
amount of public speaking and debating — speaking in the open
air, in the streets, in the parks, at demonstrations — anywhere
and everywhere. While he never belonged to a literary club, so
called, he was a member of several literary societies in London.
His intimate acquaintance with Shakespeare was improved by
his quiet literary off-nights at the New Shakespeare Society under
F. J. Furaival. Elected a member of the Browning Society by
mistake, Shaw stood by the mistake willingly enough, and spent
many breezy and delightful evenings at its meetings. " The
papers thought that the Browning Society was an assemblage
of long-haired aesthetes," Shaw once remarked to me ; "in truth,
it was a conventicle where pious ladies disputed about religion
with Furnival, and Gonner and I egged them on."* When
Furnival founded the Shelley Society, Shaw, of course, joined
that, and became an extremely enthusiastic and energetic
member. It was at the Shelley Society's first large meeting that
Shaw startled London by announcing himself as, " like Shelley,
a Socialist, an atheist and a vegetarian, "f Shaw was after-
wards active in forwarding the fine performance of The Cenci,
given by the Shelley Society, before it succumbed to its heavy
printer's bills. Such were Shaw's recreations; but his main
business was Socialism. It was first come first served with Shaw.
Whenever he received an invitation for a lecture, like his own
character Morell, he gave the applicant the first date he had
* The Gonner here referred to is E. C. K. Gonner, M.A., now Brunner
Professor of Economic Science at the University College, Liverpool.
t While Shaw has stated publicly numbers of times that he was an
atheist, an explanation here is necessary. Shaw has always had a strong
sense of spiritual things ; his declarations of atheism should always be
taken with the context. " If this be religion/' he has virtually said in
reply to someone's exposition of religion, " then I am an atheist." In the
case of Shelley, it is perfectly plain that Shaw meant that he was all these
things — a Socialist, an atheist and a vegetarian — in the Shelleyan sense.
135
George Bernard Shaw
to the remarkable qualities of Bradlaugh as thinker and dialectician.
The Socialist League challenged Bradlaugh to debate, and chose
Shaw as their champion, although he was not even a member of
that body. Bradlaugh made it a condition that Shaw should
be bound by all the pamphlets and utterances of the Social
Democratic Federation, a strongly anti-Fabian body. Had
Shaw been richer in experience in such matters, he would un-
undoubtedly have let Bradlaugh make what conditions he pleased,
and then said his say without troubling about them. As it was,
Shaw proposed a simple proposition, " Will Socialism benefit
the English people ? " with a simple, general definition of
Socialism. But Bradlaugh refused this; and the debate — as
Bradlaugh probably intended — did not come off. At the time,
Shaw was somewhat relieved over the issue, being very doubtful
of his ability to make any great showing against Bradlaugh ; he
has since privately expressed his regret that the debate did not i
take place. Bradlaugh was a tremendous debater, and in point
of " personal thunder and hypnotism " Shaw would have been, |
in sporting parlance, outclassed. But to Shaw, whose forte is j
always offence, it would have been a great gratification to tackle I
Bradlaugh in his own hall — the Hall of Science, in Old Street,
St. Luke's. At least Shaw could have had his say.
At a later time, Bradlaugh debated the question of the Eight-
Hours' Day with H. M. Hyndman — their second platform
encounter. But both sides were dissatisfied, as neither of them
stuck to his subject, and the result was inconclusive. A debate
on the same question was then arranged between Shaw and G. W.
Foote, Bradlaugh's successor as President of the National Secular
Society. In this, Shaw's only public set debate with the exception
of one in earlier days at South Place chapel, the question was
ably and carefully argued by both parties, without rancour,
bitterness, or personal abuse.* The debate lasting two nights,
* In a long contemporary account of the debate, a French newspaper
commented approvingly on the high tone maintained throughout, placing
the English in sharp contrast with French debates on similar subjects,
which were not regarded as unqualified successes unless they broke up in
personal encounters, with the attendant imprecations : " Assassins I A bos
n's Socialises I A la lanUrne / "
138
The Cart and Trumpet
and presided over by Mr. G. Standring and Mr. E. R. Pease in
turn, was held at the Hall of Science, London, on January 14th
and 15th, 1891. The verbatim report, which is still procurable,
exhibits the best qualities of Shaw as a cool-headed, logical
debater. His two speeches, markedly ironical in tone, are
frequently punctuated by the bracketed (applause). Mr. Foote
closed one of his speeches with the rather effulgent peroration,
" Every question must be threshed out by public debate. Let
truth and falsehood grapple — whichever be truth and whichever
be falsehood ; for, as grand old John Milton said, * Whoever
knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter ? ' "
— a sentiment greeted with loud applause. To which Shaw
delightfully responded : " I do not know, gentlemen, what a free
and open encounter might bring about ; but if John Milton asks
me whoever saw truth put to shame in such an encounter with
falsehood as it has a chance of having in the present condition of
society, then I reply to John Milton that George Bernard Shaw
has seen it put to shame very often." Shaw maintained that a
reduction of hours would raise wages, not prices, and that doing
it by law was the only possible way of doing it. His closing words
clearly mirror his view of the mission of Socialism, the reason
of its existence.
" I can only say, for myself, that the debate has been a
pleasant one to me, because of the friendly terms on which
Mr. Foote and I stand. I even imagine there is a bond
between Mr. Foote and myself that may serve a little to
explain this. Mr. Foote and I, on a certain subject — the
established religion of this country— entertain the same views.
Now, those views have directed our attention very strongly
towards the necessity of maintaining the freedom of the
individual to hold what views he likes, to have freedom of
speech and association for the purpose of following out all
his conclusions, and establishing a genuine culture founded
on facts, and not on the dogmas of any church whatsoever.
I confess that in the days before I had studied economic
questions I was filled with the necessity of individual freedom
139
George Bernard Shaw
on these points, and that I also had that strong distrust of
the State which Mr. Foote has expressed here to-night. But
when my attention was turned to the economic side of the
question, I soon became convinced that the real secret of
the State's hostility to the advance of reasonable views was
that Reason condemned the propertied institutions of this
country. Property is the real force that hypocritically
expresses itself as Religion. I therefore came to the con-
clusion that we shall never get out of the mess we are in
until the workers come to understand that they are already
deprived of individual freedom by the irresistible physical
force of the State, and that they can escape from its oppression
only by seizing on the political power, and using that very
State force to emancipate themselves, and impose their will
on the minority which now enslaves them. That is the
reason that, just as I urge the importance of individual
freedom of speech, so I also urge on the workers that they
cannot possibly help themselves by individual action so long
as this terrible State is outside them, and ready to cut them
down at every point. I believe that they can, by concerted
action, not merely in trade unions, but in a united democracy,
get complete control of the State, and use its might for their
own purposes; and when they once come to understand
this, I believe their emancipation will only be delayed untiJ
«
they have learned from experience the true conditions of
social freedom."*
There is another feature of Shaw's career as a public speaker
which exhibits his attitude towards the work in life he had set
before him. Shaw fights for what seems to many less like liberty
than licence of speech. He never submitted his intelligence, his
will, or his power to alien domination. He has never belonged
to any political party, rightly considered, never cringed under
any lash, never realized in his own experience what he himself
has called the only real tragedy : " the being used by personally-
* The Legal Eight Hours Question. A two-nights' public debate between
Mr. G. W. Foote and Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Verbatim Report. London :
R. Forder, 28, Stonecutter Street, E.C. 1891.
140
The Cart and Trumpet
minded men for purposes which you recognize as base." It was
the determination to remain untrammelled in thought and action
which forbade his ever accepting payment for speaking. Very
often provincial Sunday Societies invited him to come down for
the usual ten guineas fee and give the usual sort of lecture,
avoiding politics and religion. Shaw's invariable answer to such
requests was that he never lectured on anything but politics and
religion, and that his fee was the price of his railway ticket third-
class, if the place was further off than he could afford to go at his
own expense. The Sunday Society would then " come around"
and assure Shaw that he might, on these terms, lecture on any-
thing he liked; and he always did. Occasionally, to avoid
embarrassing other lecturers who lived by lecturing, the thing
was done by a debit and credit entry : that is, Shaw took the usual
fee and expenses, and gave it back as a donation to the society.
Shaw once related to me the circumstances of a most interesting
contretemps, which alone would suffice to justify his desire for
freedom of speech, his wisdom in arming himself against the
accusation of being a professional agitator. " At the election
of 1892, I was making a speech in the Town Hall of Dover, when
a man rose and shouted to the audience not to let itself be talked
to by a hired speaker from London. I immediately offered to
sell him my emoluments for five pounds. He hesitated; and I
came down to four pounds. At last I offered to take five shillings
— half-a-crown — a shilling — sixpence — for my fees, and when he
would not take them at that, claimed that he must know perfectly
well that I was there at my own expense. If I had not been able
to do this, the meeting, which was a difficult and hostile one (Dover
being a hopeless, corrupt Tory constituency) would probably have
been broken up."
As Mr. Clarence Rook has remarked, London first opened her
eyes in wonder over the versatile " G. B. S." when she discovered
that in the daytime he preached revolt to the grimy East from a
tub, and in the evening sent William Archer and the cultured West
into peals of merriment over his Arms and the Man. In those
halcyon transpontine days London began to take pains to be
present at Shaw's delightful dialectical performances at Battersea.
141
George Bernard Shaw
Shaw lectured often in Battersea because it was John Burns 9
stronghold. Never was Shaw's sky-rocketing brilliance more
effectively displayed than in one of his orations at the Washington
Music Hall, with Clement Edwards in the chair. In this oration
he proved that no conclusion could be drawn from a bare profession
of Socialism as to what side a man would take on any concrete
political issue. In speaking of this remarkable effort, Mr. Shaw
recently told me the following incident : "I remember hearing
a workman say to his wife as I came up behind them on my way
to the station : ' When I hear a man of intellect talk like that
for a whole evening, it makes me feel like a worm.' Which made
me feel horribly ashamed of myself. I lelt the shabbiest of im-
postors, somehow, though really I gave him the best lecture I
could." With the exception of his two nights' wrestle with G. W.
Foote, Shaw's most sustained effort — an oration lasting about
four hours — was delivered in the open air on a Sunday morning at
Trafford Bridge, Manchester. Shaw takes pleasure in declaring
that one of his best speeches, about an hour and a half long, was
delivered in Hyde Park in the pouring rain to six policemen sent
to watch him, and the secretary of the little society that had
invited him to speak. " I was determined to interest those
policemen, because as they were sent there to listen to me, their
ordinary course, after being once convinced that I was a reasonable
and well-conducted person, would be to pay no further attention.
But I quite entertained them. I can still see their waterproof capes
shining in the rain when I shut my eyes."
Courage and daring, as well as fertility and inventiveness, often
enabled Shaw to carry his point or to have his say, in the face of
violent and almost invincible opposition. He has more than once
actually voted against Socialism in order to forward the motion
in hand. And once, in St. James's Hall, London, at a meeting
in favour of Woman's Suffrage, he ventured with success upon a
curious trick, the details of which he once related to me :
"Just before I spoke a hostile contingent entered the room,
and I saw that we were outnumbered, and that an amendment
would be carried against us. They were all Socialists of the
142
The Cart and Trumpet
anti-Fabian sort, left by a man whom I knew very well, and
who was at that time worn out with public agitation and
private worry, so that he was excitable almost to frenzy. It
occurred to me that if they, instead of carrying an amend-
ment, could be goaded to break up the meeting and disgrace
themselves, the honours would remain with us. I made a
speech that would have made a bishop swear and a sheep
fight. My friend the enemy, stung beyond endurance, dashed
madly to the platform to answer me then and there. His
followers, thinking he was leading a charge, instantly stormed
the platform, and broke up the meeting. Then the assailants
reconstituted the meeting and appointed one of their number
chairman. I then demanded a hearing, which was duly granted
me as a matter of fair play, and I had another innings with
great satisfaction to myself. No harm was done and no
blow struck, but the papers next morning described a scene
of violence and destruction that left nothing to be desired by
the most sanguinary schoolboy. "
Like Ibsen, Shaw has barely escaped the honour of being im-
prisoned — an honour which, it is needless to say, he never sought.
Fortunately for Shaw, the religious people always joined with
the Socialists to resist the police. Twice, in difficulties raised by
attempts of the police to stop street meetings, Shaw was within
«
an ace of going to prison. The first time, the police capitulated
on the morning of the day when Shaw was the chosen victim. The
second time Shaw was so fortunate as to have in a member of a
rival Socialist society a disputant for the martyr's palm. One
can sympathize with Shaw's secret relief when, on a division, his
rival defeated him by two votes t
One of the most remarkable speakers in England to-day, Bernard
Shaw is not simply a talent, a personality : he is a public institu-
tion. People flock to his lectures and addresses, and his Ions mots
are quoted in London, New York, Berlin, Vienna and St. Peters-
burg. He is the most universally discussed man of letters now
living. Not since Byron has any British author enjoyed an
international audience and vogue comparable to that enjoyed
*43
i
George Bernard Shaw
•
by Bernard Shaw. No one in our time is Shaw's equal in searching
analysis and trenchant exposition of the ills of modern society.
His ability to see stark reality and to know it for his own makes
of him the most powerful pamphleteer, the most acute journalist-
publicist since the days of Swift. His indictments of the funda-
mental structure of contemporary society prove him the greatest
master of comic irony since the days of Voltaire. Inferior to
Anatole France in artistry and urbanity, Shaw excels him in the
strenuousness of his personal sincerity and in the scope of his
purpose. Shaw's manner of speaking is as individual, as dis-
tinctive, as is his style as an essayist or his fingering as a dramatist.
There is something indescribably piquant about this Irish wit.
He combines the coolness and imperturbability of a Sidney Webb
with the wit of a Gilbert and the paradox of a Wilde. Nor is he
lacking in the fleering audacity, the corrosive invective, the
boundless self-confidence of Disraeli. No less picturesque a
figure in his way than was William Morris, that " perpetual chal-
lenge to all that is smug, respectable and genteel," Shaw far ex-
celled him in readiness and extempore wit. Shaw has none of the
ponderous majesty, the prophetic manner of H. M. Hyndman,
perhaps England's greatest orator. That priceless and inalienable
gift which has helped to make Jean Jaures the leader of modern
Socialists — the power of touching the emotions — is a quality
which Shaw, like Disraeli before him, wholly lacks. In Shaw
there is no spark of the mesmeric force, the hypnotic power of the
born orator ; he lacks that romance, that power of dramatic
visualization, which is a quality of all true oratory. While it is
true that people do not " orate " in England as they do in America,
still there is a vast difference between the born orator, like Jaurte
or Mrs. Besant, and the practised public speaker, like Shaw. All
that could be acquired, Shaw acquired. Not Charles Bradlaugh
himself had a more thorough training than had Shaw. He is
facile, fluent and fertile ; he does not leave all his qualities behind
him when he mounts the platform. In fine, Shaw has fulfilled
to the letter his early vow, solemnly taken the night he joined the
Zeletical Society. He has delivered something like a thousand
public addresses, and the best of them were masterpieces of their
144
p I "t\
5 I t
The Cart and Trumpet
kind. And yet Shaw has only a very ordinary voice ; and in
order to make himself comfortably heard by a large audience
he has to be very careful with his articulation and to speak as
though he were addressing the auditor furthest from him.
With his long, loose form, his baggy and rather bizarre clothes,
his nonchalant, quizzical, extemporaneous appearance ; with his
red hair and scraggly beard, his pallid face, his bleak smile, his
searching eyes flashing from under his crooked brows ; with his
general air of assurance, privilege and impudence — Bernard Shaw
is the jester at the court of King Demos. Startling, astounding,
irrepressible, he fights for opposition, clamours for denial, demands
suppression. Shaw was once completely floored by a workman,
who rose after he had completed a magnificent pyrotechnic display,
and said : " I know quite well that Bernard Shaw is very clever at
argument, and that when I sit down he will make mincemeat of
everything I say. But what does that matter to me ? I still have
my principles." Shaw had to admit, as he once told me in speaking
of. the incident, that this was unanswerable and thoroughly sound
at bottom. " Call me disagreeable, only call me something,"
clamours Shaw ; " for then I have roused you from your stupid
torpor and made you think a new thought." The incarnation of
intellect, not of hypnotism, of reason, not of oratory, this strange
image of Tolstoy as he was in his middle years has always made his
audience think new thoughts. He has never given the audience
what it liked ; he has always given it what he liked, and what he
thought it needed: a bitter and tonic draught. The successes
of the orator who is the mere mouthpiece of his audience have
never been his. But he has achieved a more enviable and more
arduous distinction ; I have heard him say with genuine pride that
more than once he has been the most unpopular man in a meet-
ing, and yet carried a resolution against the most popular orator
present by driving home its necessity. For the transports which
the popular orator raises by voicing popular sentiment Shaw has
no use. Of the orator's power of entrancing people and having
his own way at the same time he has never had a soupfon. He is
the arch-foe of personal hypnotism, of romance, of sensuous
glamour. He has sought the accomplishment of the demand of
145 10
George Bernard Shaw
his will ; he never practised speaking as an art or an accomplish-
ment. The desire for that, he once told me, would never have
nerved him to utter a word in public. Just as Zola used his
journalistic work as a hammer to drive his views into the brain
of the public, Shaw used his dialectical skill as a weapon, as a
means to the end of making people think. One might truly say of
all the tilings that he has either spoken or written : " lis donnent
& penser furieusement." As a speaker, he first startled and pro-
voked his audience to thought, and then annihilated their objec-
tions with the sword of logic and the rapier of wit. His ready
answer for every searching query, his instantaneous leap over
every tripping barrier, seemed to the novice a proof of very genius.
To strange audiences, his readiness in answering questions and
meeting hostile arguments seemed astonishing, miraculous. On
several different occasions I have heard Mr. Shaw modestly give
the explanation of this apparently magic performance. " The
reason was that everybody asks the same questions and uses the
same arguments. I knew the most effective replies by heart.
Before the questioner or debater had uttered his first word I knew
exactly what he was going to say, and floored him with an apparent
impromptu that had done duty fifty times before/' Shaw always
carefully thought out the thing for himself in advance, and, which
is far more important, had thought out not only an effective, but
also a witty answer to the objections that were certain to be raised.
This is the secret of Shaw's success in every task which he has
undertaken : to think each thing out for himself, and to couch it
in terms of scathing satire and fiery wit. His is the sceptical
Socratic method pushed to the limit.
Confronted with the point-blank question : " To what do you
owe your marvellous gift for public speaking ? " Shaw charac-
teristically replied : " My marvellous gift for public speaking is
only part of the G. B. S. legend. I am no orator, and I have
neither memory enough nor presence of mind enough to be a really
good debater, though I often seem to be when I am on ground
that is familiar to me and new to my opponents. 'I learned to
«
speak as men learn to skate or to cycle — by doggedly making a
fool of myself until I got used to it. Then I practised it in the
146
The Cart and Trumpet
open air — at the street corner, in the market square, in the park
— the best school. I am comparatively out of practice now, but I
talked a good deal to audiences all through the eighties, and for
some years afterwards. I should be a really remarkable orator
after all that practice if I had the genius of the born orator. As it
is, I am simply the sort of public speaker anybody can become by
going through the same mill. I don't mean that he will have the
same things to say, or that he will put them in the same words, for,
naturally, I don't leave my ideas or my vocabulary behind when
I mount the tub ; but I do mean that he will say what he has to
say as movingly as I say what I have to say — and more, if he is
anything of a real orator. Of course, as an Irishman, I have some
fluency, and can manage a bit of rhetoric and a bit of humour on
occasion, and that goes a long way in England. But ' marvellous
gift ' is all my eye."*
* Who I Am, and What I Thinks Part I. The Candid Friend, May nth,
1 901.
147 10 s
SHAVIAN SOCIALISM
" Of course, people talk vaguely of me as an Anarchist, a visionary, and
a crank. I am none of these things, but their opposites. I only want a
few perfectly practical reforms which shall enable a decent and reasonable
man to live a decent and reasonable life, without having to submit to the
great injustices and the petty annoyances which meet you now at every
turn." — -George Bernard Shaw : an Interview. In The Chap-Book, November,
1896.
" Economy is the art of making the most of life.
The love of economy is the root of all virtue."
— The Revolutionist* s Handbook. In Man and Superman.
CHAPTER VI
10NCE heard a Socialist of world-wide renown accuse Bernard
Shaw of an inconsistency which, to him, was little short of
inexplicable. To every charge of inconsistency, Shaw is always
ready with the effective rejoinder : " Vhomme absurde est celui
qui ne change jamais. 91 To Shaw, the stationary is the stagnant,
evolution is progress. That rare literary phenomenon, a master
of the comic spirit, Shaw is not only willing to admit for the nonce
the inconsistencies in his own make-up : he is positively eager to
make thereof genuine comic capital.
To the public, Shaw is his own greatest paradox. What defence,
they ask, can be devised for a man rooted in Nietzscheism, who
champions the Socialism which Nietzsche mocked ? Reconcile
the ardent apostle of the levelling democracy of a Social-Demo-
cratic Republic with the avowed advocate of the doctrines of Ibsen
and Nietzsche, the intellectual aristocrats of this distinctly social
era ? Identify the agitation for international disarmament, for
universal peace, with one who sings of arms and the superman ?
The Irish Nietzsche, the daring pilgrim in search of a moral
Ultima Thule, with one who has forcibly declared the impossibility
of anarchism ? The evangelist preaching the brotherhood of
man with one who repudiates the pacifying sedative : " Sirs, ye
are brothers," in the statement that he has no brothers, and if
he had, he would in all probability not agree with them ? What
faith is to be put in the economic grounding of one who, in the
course of two or three years, turned from vigorous defence of
Marx's value theory to its " absolute demolition, on Jevonian
lines, with his own hand " ?
It is very difficult to understand Shaw's fundamental philosophy
of Socialism without a thorough knowledge of the evolutionary
I5i
George Bernard Shaw
course of his thought. The particular brand of Socialism deno-
minated Shavian is not a bundle of prejudices of an immature
youth, but the integration of years of day-by-day observations
of life and character, as well as of political and economic science.
The diversities of Socialistic faith have been wittily exhibited by
Shaw in the opening scenes of the third act of Man and Superman.
Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of Socialists : theoretical,
Utopian and practical. Lassalle and Marx, Liebknecht and Bebel,
Gutede and Jaurte, Hyndman and Kropotkin, Shelley and Morris,
George and Bellamy, Shaw and Webb, carry the stamp of the
cobweb-spinner, the dreamer, or of the man of affairs. It is Shaw's
supreme distinction that, beginning as doctrinaire, he has ended as
practical opportunist. He has sought to traverse the chasm
between democracy and social-democracy, by the aid of a solid
economic structure, rather than by the rainbow bridge of senti-
mentality and Utopism. No scheme finds favour in his eyes
which does not irresistibly commend itself to his intelligence. He
has found the " true " doctrine of Socialism in repudiation of the
follies of Impossibilism.
Shaw has unhesitatingly given credit to Henry George for the
great impetus he gave to Socialism in England, and, in particular,
for the important part George played in his own career. In
speaking of the memorable evening in 1882, when, under the
inspiration of George's stirring and eloquent words, he first began
to realize the importance of the economic basis, Shaw recently
wrote :*
11 One evening in the early eighties I found myself — I forget
how and cannot imagine why — in the Memorial Hall, Far-
ringdon Street, London, listening to an American finishing a
speech on the Land Question. I knew he was an American,
because he pronounced ' necessarily ' — a favourite word of
his — with the accent on the third syllable instead of the first ;
because he was deliberately and intentionally oratorical,
* Letter to Hamlin Garland, as Chairman of the Committee, the Progress
and Poverty dinner, New York, January 24th, 1905. The letter, dated
December, 1904, was kindly loaned me by Mr. Henry George, Jr.
152
Shavian Socialism
which is not customary among shy people like the English ;
because he spoke of Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law,
and other strange eighteenth-century superstitions ; and
because he explained with great simplicity and sincerity the
views of the Creator, who had gone completely out of fashion
in London in the previous decade and had not been heard of
there since. I noticed, also, that he was a born orator, and
that he had small, plump, pretty hands.
" Now at that time I was a young man not much past
twenty-five, of a very revolutionary and contradictory tem-
perament, full of Darwin and Tyndall, of Shelley and De
Quincey, of Michael Angelo and Beethoven, and never having
in my life studied social questions from the economic point
of view, except that I had once, in my boyhood, read a
pamphlet by John Stuart Mill on the Irish Land Question.
The result of my hearing the speech, and buying from one
of the stewards of the meeting a copy of ' Progress and
Poverty ' for sixpence (Heaven only knows where I got that
sixpence !), was that I plunged into a course of economic
study, and at a very early stage of it became a Socialist and
spoke from that very platform on the same great subject,
and from hundreds of others as well, sometimes addressing
distinguished assemblies in a formal manner, sometimes
standing on a borrowed chair at a street corner, or simply
on the kerbstone. And I, too, had my oratorical successes ;
for I can still recall with some vanity a wet afternoon (Sun-
day, of course) on Clapham Common, when I collected as
much as sixteen and sixpence in my hat after my lecture,
for the Cause. And that all the work was not mere gas, let
the feats and pamphlets of the Fabian Society attest ! *
" When I was thus swept into the great Socialist revival
of 1883, I found that five-sixths of those who were swept
in with me had been converted by Henry George. This fact
would have been far more widely acknowledged had it not
been that it was not possible for us to stop where Henry
George stopped. ... He saw only the monstrous absurdity
of the private appropriation of rent, and he believed that if
153
George Bernard Shaw I
you took that burden off the poor man's back, he could help
himself out as easily as a pioneer on a pre-empted clearing.
But the moment he took an Englishman to that point, the
Englishman saw at once that the remedy was not so simple
as that, and that the argument carried us much further, even
to the point of total industrial reconstruction. Thus George
actually felt bound to attack the Socialism he had created ;
and the moment the antagonism was declared, and to be a t
Henry Georgeite meant to be an anti-Socialist, some of the
Socialists whom he had converted became ashamed of their
origin and concealed it ; whilst others, including myself, had *
to fight hard against the Single Tax propaganda."
However carefully other English Socialists have endeavoured
to minimize or deny outright the momentous influence of Henry
George, certainly Shaw has neither denied nor belittled their debt.
"If we outgrew 'Progress and Poverty' in many ways, so did
he himself too ; and it is perhaps just as well that he did not
know too much when he made his great campaign here ; for the
complexity of the problem would have overwhelmed him if he had
realized it ; or, if it had not, it would have rendered him unin-
telligible. Nobody has ever got away, or ever will get away, from
the truths that were the centre of his propaganda : his errors
anybody can get away from." And yet Shaw's insularity and
sense of British superiority sticks out in the statement that certain
of the English Socialists, including himself, regretted that George
was an American, and, therefore, necessarily about fifty years
out of date in his economics and sociology from the point of view
of an older country 1 The absurdity of such a contention is
glaringly patent on comparison of Progress and Poverty with
the tracts of the Fabian Society during its early period : George
was at least fifty years ahead of the English Socialists, instead
of the reverse. With that grandiose conceit which is an essential
item of his " stock in trade," Shaw has expressed his eagerness
to play the part of Henry George to America. " What George did
not teach you, you are being taught now by # your great Trusts and
Combines, as to which I need only say that if you would take
154
Shavian Socialism
them over as national property as cheerfully as you took over the
copyrights of all my early books, you would find them excellent
institutions, quite in the path of progressive evolution, and by
no means to be discouraged or left unregulated as if they were
nobody's business but their own. It is a great pity that you all
take America for granted because you were born in it. I, who have
never crossed the Atlantic, and have taken nothing American for
granted, find I know ten times as much about your country as
you do yourselves ; and my ambition is to repay my debt to
Henry George by coming over some day and trying to do for
your young men what Henry George did nearly a quarter of a
century ago for me."
While Henry George and his Progress and Poverty were the
prime motors in directing Shaw to Socialism, it was Karl Marx
and his Capital that first shunted Shaw on to the economic
tack. In 1884, the Unitarian minister, Mr. Philip H. Wicksteed,
contributed to To-Day a criticism of Marx from the point of view
of the school of mathematician-economists founded in England on
the treatise on Political Economy published by the late Stanley
Jevons in 1871.* Mr. Wicksteed, whose writings on Dante and
Scandinavian literature are well known, was a remarkable linguist,
a popular preacher, and an excellent man. To the fact, hpwever,
that he was a mathematician is largely attributable his deep
interest in Jevons* theory of value, which scientifically demolished
the classical theory of Adam Smith, Ricardo and Cairnes, with
its adaptation to Socialism by Hodgskin and Marx. To his
mathematical training, also, may be ascribed the lucidity and
logical clarity of his application of the Jevonian machinery to
Marxian theory. So abject was the deification of Marx by English
Socialists at that time that Hyndman, whom Shaw thought should
answer the article, pooh-poohed Wicksteed as beneath his notice.
But the Omniscience and Infallibility of Marx were rudely shaken :
* In the early eighties the monthly magazine To-Day was purchased by
three Socialists : Henry Hyde Champion, Percy Frost and James Leigh
Joynes. Mr. Wicksteed's article, entitled Das Kapital : a Criticism, appeared
in To-Day, New Series, Vol. II., pages 388-409, 1884; publishers, The
Modern Press, a printing business conducted by Messrs. H. H. Champion and
J. C. Foulger.
155
George Bernard Shaw
of friends interested in economics to his house. The To-Day
discussion had established friendly relations between Shaw and
Wicksteed ; and Shaw secured an entry to this circle and " held
on to it like grim death " until after some years it blossomed out
into The Royal Economic Society, founded the Economic Journal,
and outgrew Beeton's drawing-room. Mr. Shaw once remarked
to me that his great difficulty was to see through Marx's fallacy in
assuming that abstract labour was the unique factor by which
the celebrated equation of Value was divisible. " I couldn't, for
the life of me," said Mr. Shaw, " see any sense in the equation
2a-r3b=Sc. I actually bought an Algebra and tried to recap-
ture any early knowledge I might have had, but it was all gone."
And only the other day I ran across this book, The Scholar's
Algebra, by Lewis Hensley, at a second-hand book-shop in London.
Under date " 22-8-87," appears the following, written in Shaw's
remarkably neat stenography : " What sudden freak induced me
to purchase this book ? I saw it offered at a second-hand book-
shop in Holborn for one and sixpence. For a time I was puzzled
by a notion that the symbols referred to things instead of to
numbers. For instance, 2a+3b appeared to me as absurd as
2 wrens+3 apples."
In a letter to me Mr. Shaw once related the following story of
his economic education — a story which gives the lie to his own
strictures on University education. And in conversation he
recently admitted to me that this economic training corresponded
closely to the highest form of University instruction.* " During
those years Wicksteed expounded ' final utility ' to us with a
blackboard except when we got hold of some man from the
* The leading members of this club were Beeton, Wicksteed, FoxweU,
Graham Wallas, F. Y. Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall, Edward Cunningham,
Charles Wright and Armitage Smith. The club met monthly — from No-
vember to June — during the years 1884 to 1889 inclusive, when it came
to an end through the formation of what was formally entitled The Economic
Club, organized mainly at the instance of Alfred Marshall. It may be worthy
of mention that Wicksteed dedicated his Alphabet of Economics to this
club. Shaw joined the club because he wanted to learn abstract economics,
and he occasionally contributed something to the programme himself.
On November 9th, 1886, for example, he read a paper before the society on
the subject of Interest.
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Shavian Socialism
Baltic' (The London Wheat Exchange), or the like, to explain
the markets to us and afterwards have his information reduced
to Jevonian theory. Among university professors of economics
Edgeworth and Foxwell stuck to us pretty constantly, and W.
Cunningham turned up occasionally. Of course, the atmosphere
was by no means Shavian ; but that was exactly what I wanted.
The Socialist platform and my journalistic pulpits involved a
constant and most provocative forcing of people to face the
practical consequences of theories and beliefs, and to draw mordant
contrasts between what they professed or what their theories
involved and their life and conduct. This made dispassionate
discussion of abstract theory impossible. At Beeton's the con-
ditions were practically university conditions. There was a tacit
understanding that the calculus of utilities and the theory of
exchange must be completely isolated from the fact that we lived,
as Morris's mediaeval captain put it, by ' robbing the poor. ' "
In the heated discussions over Marx's economic theories which
followed during the next few years, Shaw enjoyed an immense
advantage in that nobody else in the Socialist movement had gone
through this discipline, which required considerable perseverance
and deep scientific conviction. It ended, as Shaw maintains, in
his finding out Marx and Hyndman completely as economists.
In Shaw's present view Marx was less an economist than a revolu-
tionary Socialist, employing political economy as a weapon
against his adversaries : to Marx, the economic theory of Ricardo
was simply a " stick to beat the capitalist dog." To Hyndman,
doubt of any part of the " Bible of the working classes " was
Socialist heresy : the whole issue resolved itself into the question
whether Jevons was a Socialist or an anti-Socialist.* No doubt
the influence which moved Shaw to devote himself to economic
studies was his need of a weapon ; but he did not stop to ask
whether the steel came from a Socialist foundry or not. " The
Marxian steel was always snapping in my hand," he once remarked
* As late as 1905 Mr. £. Belfort Bax is found maintaining that Jevons
was the mere tool of capitalism, seeking to undermine the Marxian theory
of value in the interests of social order and political stability. Compare his
article. Socialism and Bourgeois Culture, in Wilshire's Magazine, 1905.
159
George Bernard Shaw
to me. " The Jevonian steel held and kept its edge, and fitted
itself to every emergency. And then, just as one loves a good
sword for its own sake, so one loves a sound theory for its own
sake." As a literary artist also, accustomed to express himself
in terse and pointed phrase, Shaw was fired with determination to
extricate the theory from its " damned shorthand " of mathematical
symbols, and put it into human language.*
On the appearance of the English translation from the third
German edition of Das Kapital, by Samuel Moore and Edward
Aveling, in 1887, Shaw reviewed it in three consecutive articles, f
These articles of Shaw's show that in 1887 his conversion by
Wicksteed was complete. In Shaw's article, Stanley Jevons :
His Letters and Journal, a review of the Letters and Journal of
W. Stanley Jevons, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette,
May 29th, 1886, he says : " He (Jevons) was far too orthodox
in his practical conclusions for those materialists of the science —
the revolutionary Socialists — who saw in him a mere ' bourgeois
economist/ as their phrase goes. He does not seem to have had
any suspicion that Mr. Hyndman and his friends made any
economic pretensions at all ; but it is remarkable that the most
successful attack so far on the value theory of Karl Marx has come
from Mr. Philip Wicksteed, a well-known Unitarian minister, who
is an able follower of Jevons in economics." Shaw was now the
complete Jevonian, had thrown the Marxian theory completely
over, and exactly located the step Marx missed. Shaw himself
readily admits that Marx came within one step of the real solution.
Whilst Marx left Shaw unconvinced as to Marxian economics, he
left him profoundly imbued with Marxian convictions. In Marx,
* This Shaw achieved with great success in his review, in three parts, of
Das Kapital, English translation, which appeared in the National Reformer.
t The National Reformer, now extinct, then the weekly organ of the
National Secular Society, editors, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant ;
policy, Atheism, Malthusianism and Republicanism. These articles, three
in number, under the general heading Karl Marx and ' Das Kapital,'
appeared in Vol. L., pages 84-86, 106-108, 117-118. On receiving a
cheque for these articles at a rate which he felt sure the National Reformer
could not afford, Shaw found that the beneficent Mrs. Besant had made
a contribution from her private purse, which Shaw characteristically hurled
back with indignant gratitude.
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Shavian Socialism
Shaw discerned one who "wrote of the nineteenth century as
if it were a cloud passing down the wind, changing its shape and
fading as it goes ; whilst Ricardo the stockbroker and De Quincey
the high Tory, sat comfortably down before it in their office and
study chairs as if it were the Great Wall of China, safe to last until
the Day of Judgment with an occasional coat of whitewash."
While refusing to deify Marx as a god, Shaw lauds him with what
is, for him, the rarest of panegyrics. " He (Marx) never con-
descends to cast a glance of useless longing at the past : his cry
to the present is, always, 4 Pass by : we are waiting for the future/
Nor is the future at all mysterious, uncertain, or dreadful to him.
There is not a word of hope or fear, nor appeal to chance or provi-
dence, nor vain remonstrance with Nature, nor optimism, nor
enthusiasm, nor pessimism, nor cynicism, nor any other familiar
sign of the giddiness which seizes men when they climb to heights
which command a view of the past, present and future of human
society. Marx keeps his head like a god. He has discovered the
law of social development, and knows what must come. The
thread of history is in his hand."
The point to be grasped, however, is contained in Shaw's
admonition : " Read Jevons and the rest for your economics, and
read Marx for the history of their working in the past, and the
conditions of their application in the present. And never mind
the metaphysics." Shaw stood upon the shoulders of giants,
for Jevons had laid the foundations, and Wicksteed it was who
first pointed out to English Socialists the flaw in Marx's analysis
of wares.* But in that remarkably succinct and lucid style for
which he is justly famous, Shaw elaborately analyzed the ques-
tionable points in the Marxian structure and explained the latent
errors involved, for the comprehension, not simply of the econo-
mist, but of the man-in-the-street. It is neither possible, nor
even desirable, here to give the steps by which Shaw controverted
Marx ; reference to Shaw's numerous articles on the subject will
* These ideas seem to have found expression simultaneously in England
and Austria. Compare The Theory of Political Economy, by W. S. Jevons,
London, 1871 ; GrundsaUe der Volhswirtschaftslehre, by Anton Menger,
Vienna, 1871.
l6l II
George Bernard Shaw
give these to the curious. But the conclusions he reached are
worthy of enumeration.* In the first place, Shaw objected to
Marx's dogmatic assertion of the generally accepted Ricardian
theory that " wares in which equal quantities of labour are em-
bodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same
value " ; and for the simple reason that the Jevonian theory called
this dogma into question. In the second place, following Wick-
steed, Shaw takes Marx to task for first insisting that the abstract
labour used in the production of wares does not count unless it is
useful, and then contradicting himself by stripping the wares of
the abstract utility conferred upon them by abstractly useful
work. The logical consequence of admitting abstract utility as
a quality of wares produced by abstract human labour is conclu-
sively to disconnect value from mere abstract human labour.
Marx thus adroitly begs the question : as Shaw says : " It is as if
he (Marx) had proved by an elaborate series of abstractions that
liquids were fatal to human life, and had finished by remarking :
' Of course, the liquids must be poisonous.' " Armed with the
fact of abstract utility, and the Jevonian weapons of " the law of
indifference " and " the law of the variation of utility," Shaw was
enabled to prove with mathematical rigour that value does not
represent the specific utility of the article, but its abstract utility ;
and not its total abstract utility, but its final abstract utility —
at the " margin of supply," in Wicksteed's phrase — i.e., the
utility of the final increment that is worth producing. Translated
into terms of labour, this means that the value of the ware repre-
sents, not the quantity of human labour embodied in it, but the
" final utility," in Jevonian phrase, of the abstract human labour
socially necessary to produce it. As Shaw puts it : " Instead of
wares being equal in value because equal quantities of labour have
been expended on them, equal quantities of labour will have been
* The question of the validity of the Marxian theory is not now a live subject
in England. Mr. Hyndman's defence of the Marxian position is to be found
in his Economics of Socialism, in which he attempts to demonstrate the
' final futility of final utility." It is still a mooted question on the Con-
tinent ; compare, for example, the works of Bohm-Bawerk, perhaps the
most eminent of the " Austrian School " of political economists.
l62
Shavian Socialism
expended on them because they are of equal value (or equally
desirable), which is quite another thing. That slip in the analysis
of wares whereby Marx was led to believe that he had got rid of
the abstract utility when he had really only got rid of the specific
utility, was the first of his mistakes." Under certain ideal con-
ditions, there is a coincidence between " exchange value " and
" amount of labour contained " ; but as these ideal conditions
seldom, if ever, occur in practice, no scientific validity attaches
to the Marxian statement that " commodities in which equal
quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in
the same time, have the same value." Lastly, Shaw insists that
if Marx's theory of value were correct, it would refute, not confirm,
Marx's theory of " surplus value." The proprietor's monopoly
completely upsets those ideal conditions on which Marx's theory
of value is based. It can be demonstrated by Jevonian principles
that Marx's assumption, that the subsistence wage is the value of
the labour force, is untenable, even on Marxian principles. Marx
did not see that it is impossible, according to the " law of indiffer-
ence," for one part of the stock of a commodity available at any
given time to have value whilst another part has none, since no
man will give a price for that which he can obtain for nothing.
Moreover, when he attempts to differentiate labour power from
steam poorer, Marx's logic breaks down. As Shaw says : " Marx's
whole theory of the origin of surplus value depends on the
accuracy of his demonstration that steam power, machinery,
etc., cannot possibly produce surplus value. If Marx were right
then a capital of ten thousand pounds, invested in a business
requiring nine thousand pounds for machinery and plant, and
one thousand pounds for wages (or human labour power), would
only return one-ninth of the surplus value returned by an equal
capital of which one thousand pounds was in the form of plant
and nine thousand pounds in wage capital. As a matter of fact,
the ' surplus value ' from both is found to be equal."*
• These conclusions were reached before the third volume of Capital
appeared. The editor of the first volume, Mr. Frederick Engels, promised
that the third volume, when it appeared, would reconcile these and other
seeming contradictions. Marx does seem to have modified certain of his
theories in the third volume.
163 II*
George Bernard Shaw
Shaw saw plainly enough that the theory of value did not
matter in the least so far as the soundness of Socialism was con-
cerned. For, as he once expressed it in a letter to me, " if you
steal a turnip the theory of the turnip's value does not affect the
social and political aspect of the transaction." But, of course,
Hyndman and the few Socialists who had read Marx and nothing
else, were furious over Shaw's iconoclastic articles in the
National Reformer. In view of the fact that the opponents
of Socialism continually damaged the cause of the Socialists by
alleging that the Socialists' economic basis was Marx's theory
and was untenable, with the result that the Socialists persisted
in accepting the allegation and defending Marx, Shaw resolutely
forced the quarrel into publicity as far as he could. His prime
object was to make it clear that the Fabians were quite inde-
pendent of the Marxian value theory. A heated controversy
on the subject in the Pall Mall Gazette of May, 1887, engaged in
by Shaw, Hyndman, and Mrs. Besant, did not down the ghost
of the value theory ; for the controversy was reopened in To-Day
two years later. An Economic Eirenicon, by Graham Wallas,
was followed by Marx's Theory of Value, contributed by H. M.
Hyndman, in which, it seems, he merely repeated the old Marxian
demonstration without making any attempt to meet the Jevonian
attack. Whereupon Shaw " went for " Hyndman in his most
aggravating style in an article entitled Bluffing the Value Theory,
which finished the campaign except for a series of letters in
Justice by various hands, the tenth of which, in July, 1889,
was written by Shaw. There were other letters by Shaw on
the same subject, written at different times, which appealed in
the Daily Chronicle. William Morris never made any pretence
of having followed the controversy on its abstract technical side ;
and perhaps the most amusing feature of the entire campaign was
a sort of manifesto which Belfort Bax induced Morris to sign,
in which Hyndman, Bax, Aveling and Morris declared that
all good Socialists were Marxites ! Shaw was once denounced
in public meeting by a Marxian Socialist for pooh-poohing Marx
as an idiot. His own position, as he himself once remarked to
me, lay somewhere between this and that of worshipping Marx
164
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Shavian Socialism
as a god. In one of the most remarkable essays ever written by
Shaw, entitled The Illusions of Socialism, Shaw pointed out why
it was that a difficult and subtle theory like that of Jevons could
never be as acceptable as a crude and simple labour theory like
that of Marx, which seemed to imply that wealth rightly belonged
to the labourer.*
From the standpoint of the Marxian religionist, the second
heresy of which Shaw is guilty consists in his recognition of the
Class War doctrine as a delusion and a suicidal political policy.
To Shaw, the form of organization deduced from the Class War
doctrine is always the same. " All you have to do is to form a
working-class association, declare war on property, explain the
economic situation from the platform and at the street corner,
and wait until the entire proletariat (made ' class-conscious '
by your lucid lectures) joins you. This being done simultaneously
in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, etc., etc., nothing
remains but a simultaneous movement of the proletarians of all
countries, and the sweeping of capitalism into the sea because
' ye are many : they are few. 9 What can be easier or more
scientific ? " But a study of the history of Socialism led Shaw
to the discovery that the Class War theory had gone to pieces
every time it had been invoked. Lassalle attempted to organize
the imaginary class-conscious proletariat, only to be disillusioned
* In the Pall Mall Gazette the following articles appeared : Marx and
Modern Socialism, by Shaw, May 7th, 1887, page 3 ; Hyndman's reply, May
nth, page 11 ; Shaw's rejoinder — Socialists at Home (this heading doubtless
a jibe of the editor). May 12th, page 11 ; Hyndman's rejoinder. May 16th,
page 2; Mrs. Besant's article on the same subject. May 24th, page 2. In
To-Day, Vol. XI., New Series, 1889, appeared: An Economic Eirenicon, by
Graham Wallas, pages 80-86; Marx's Theory of Value, by Hyndman, same
volume, pages 94-104; Shaw's reply, Bluffing the Value Theory, following
Hyndman, May, 1889, pages 128-135, was lately reprinted by Eduard Bern-
stein in SoMialistische Monatshefte. Shaw's letter in Justice appeared on page
3 of the issue of July 20th, 1889. The fine essay, entitled The Illusions of
Socialism, quite penetrating in its psychology, although caviare to the
ordinary reviewer, originally appeared in German in Die Zeit (Vienna), in
1896: No. 108, October 24th, and No. 109, October 31st; later it appeared
in English in Forecasts of the Coming Century, edited by Edward Carpenter,
Manchester: Labour Press, 1897; it afterwards appeared in French in
UHumaniU NouveUe (Ghent and Paris), August, 1900, edited by Auguste
Hamon, the well-known Socialist and the French translator of Shaw's plays.
X65
George Bernard Shaw
before the end of the first year ty the " damned wantlessness "
of the real proletariat. Owen before him likewise had failed,
after apparently converting all Trade-Unionism to his New Moral
World. When Marx planned the Socialist side of " The
International " in the sixties, he showed his contempt for the
trade-union side, with the result : "On the trade-union side a
great success. ... On the Socialist side, futility and disastrous
failure, culminating, in 1871, in one of the most appalling massacres
known to history/' Marx can scarcely be said to have tried to
organize the class-conscious proletariat ; but the moment his
useless vituperation of Thiers, " brilliant as a sample of literary
invective, but useless for the buttering of parsnips," made known
to English workmen his real opinion of bourgeois civilization,
they abandoned him in horror and left the International
memberless. In Germany, " Liebknecht made no serious
headway until he became a parliamentarian, playing the parlia-
mentary game more pliably than Parnell did, though always
' old-soldiering ' his way with the greenhorns by prefacing each
compromise with the declaration that Social Democracy never
compromised." In France, Jaurds and Millerand have not so
much abandoned the class-war doctrine as wholly neglected and
ignored it, thus reducing the old Gudsdist Marxism to absurdity.
In England, " the once revolutionary Social-Democratic Federation
has been forced by the competition of the quite constitutional
Independent Labour Party to give up all its ancient Maccabean
poetry, and, after a period of uselessness and surpassing
unpopularity as an anti-Fabian Society with a speciality for
abusing Mr. John Burns, to settle down into a sort of Ultra-
Independent Labour Party, ready to amalgamate with its rival
if only an agreement can be arrived at as to which is to be con-
sidered as swallowing the other."
Not merely a study of the Class War doctrine from the historical
standpoint, but also an examination into the assumptions upon
which it rests, have thoroughly convinced Shaw that Socialists
have for long been making overdrafts upon their Capital. Shaw
has never sought to shirk the real point at issue by the quibble
of substituting the sort of class-consciousness called snobbery,
166
y
Shavian Socialism
mighty as is that social force, for the economic class-consciousness
of the German formula. In Shaw's interpretation, Hyndman
and the Marxists use the term " Class War " to denote a war
between all the proletarians on one side and all the property-
holders on the other — in Schaeffle's phrase " a definite confronta-
tion of classes " — which will be produced when the workers become
conscious that their economic interests are opposed to those of
the property holders. Shaw's position is effectively summed up
in his words :
"The people understand their own affairs much better
than Marx did, and the simple stratification of society into
two classes . . . has as little relation to actual social facts
as Marx's value theory has to actual market prices. If the
crude Marxian melodrama of ' The Class War ; or, the
Virtuous Worker and the Brutal Capitalist,' were even
approximately true to life, the whole capitalist structure
would have tumbled to pieces long ago, as the ' scientific
Socialists ' were always expecting it to do, instead of con-
solidating itself on a scale which has already made Marx
and Engels as obsolete as the Gracchi had become in the time
of Augustus. By throwing up fabulous masses of ' surplus
value,' and doubling and trebling the incomes of the
well-to-do middle classes, who all imitate the imperial luxury
and extravagance of the millionaires, Capitalism has created,
as it formerly did in Rome, an irresistible proletarian body-
guard of labourers whose immediate interests are bound up
with those of the capitalists, and who are, like their Roman
prototypes, more rapacious, more rancorous in their Primrose
partisanship, and more hardened against all the larger social
considerations, than their masters, simply because they are
more needy, ignorant and irresponsible. Touch the income
of the rich, and the Conservative proletarians are the first
to suffer,"*
In Shaw's opinion, the social struggle does not follow class
«
* Ths Class War, in the Clarion. September 30th* 1904.
X67
George Bernard Shaw
lines at all, because the people who really hate the capitalist
system are, like Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy, Hyndman, Marx and
Lassalle, themselves capitalists, whereas the fiercest defenders
of it are the masses of labourers, artisans, and employees whose
trade is at its best when the rich have most money to spend.
Socialists like Shaw, who " do not accept the class war," are simply
expressing " first, a very natural impatience of crying ' War,
War ! ' where there is no war ; and, second, their despair at seeing
Socialism, like Liberalism, perishing because it is trying to live
on the crop of home-made generalizations so plentifully put forth
during the great Liberal boom of 1832-80 by middle-class paper
theorists like Malthus, Cobden, Marx, Comte and Herbert Spencer
— fine fellows, all of them, but stupendously ignorant of the
industrial world." The basic divergence between the Fabian
and the " S. D. F." policy is epitomized in Shaw's words : " There
is a conflict of interests between those who pay wages and those
who receive them; and this is organized by the trade unions.
There is another conflict of interests between those workers and
proprietors whose customers live on rent (in its widest economic
sense), and those whose customers live on wages; but the lines
of this conflict run, not between the classes, but right through
them, and do not coincide with the lines of the trade union con-
flict. And any form of Socialist organization, or any tactics
toward the trade union movement, based on the theory that
the lines of battle do run between the classes and not through
them, or do coincide with the trade union lines of battle, will
prove, and always has proved, disastrously impracticable." Shaw
exasperatingly said in a recent article* that he refused to agree
with anybody on any subject whatsoever. " Let them agree
with me if my arguments convince them. If not, let them plank
down their own views. I will not have my mouth stopped and
my mind stifled." And those mystic forces — historical develop-
ment, and Progress with a large P — in which the Marxists rest
* Shaw's position in regard to the Class War is ably set forth in his three
articles, under the general heading, Ths Class War, which appeared in
the Clarion, London ; dates : September 30th, October 21st and November
4th, 1904.
168
I
Shavian Socialism
their firmest hope, Shaw regards in the spirit of Ingoldsby's
sacristan :
" The sacristan he said no word to indicate a donbt ;
But he put his thumb unto his nose, and he spread his fingers out."
There are two factors which strongly militate against the
progress of Socialism; the resolute adherence of Socialists to
those theories and policies of Marx which time, experience, and
modern economic science have combined to discredit; and the
tendency of the popular mind to confuse Socialism with
Anarchism.* Shaw's most important negative and destructive
achievements consist in those amazingly clever and interesting
papers in which he attempts to expose Marx's theory of value
as an exploded fallacy, to show that the Class War will never come,
and to demonstrate the impossibilities of Anarchism. In the
technical sense of Socialist economics, Shaw occupies the opposite
pole to Individualism and Anarchism. And yet in a very
definite and general sense, Shaw is a thorough-paced individualist
and anarchist. If individualist means a believer in the Shakes-
spearean injunction " To thine own self be true ! ", in the Ibsenic
doctrine "Live thine own life!", then Shaw is an individualist
heart and soul. If anarchist means an enemy of convention, of
tradition, of current modes of administering justice, of prevailing
moral standards, then Shaw is the most revolutionary anarchist
now at large. If, on the other hand, Individualist means one
who distrusts State action and is jealous of the prerogative of
the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the
other as far as is humanly possible, then Shaw is most certainly
not an Individualist. If Anarchist means dynamitard, incendiary,
assassin, thief ; champion of the absolute liberty of the individual
* In 1888 Shaw wrote two very clever articles, which so far seem to have
escaped attention, although the disguise is so thin as to be negligible. These
two articles are, respectively, My Friend FiUthunder, the Unpractical
Socialist, by Redbarn Wash — note the anagram — (To-Day, edited by Hubert
Bland, August, 1888), and FiUthunder on Himself — A Defence, by
Robespierr e Marat FiUthunder (To-Day, September, 1888). These very
amusing papers, both written by Shaw, it is needless to say, constitute a
reductio ad absurdum of the unpractical and revolutionary Socialist ; FiU-
thunder is evidently a composite picture, made up from a number of Shaw's
Socialist confreres.
169
George Bernard Shaw
and the removal of all governmental restraint ; or even a believer,
as Communist, in a profound and universal sense of high moral
responsibility present in all humanity, then Shaw is a living
contradiction of Anarchism.
Shaw opposes Individualist Anarchism since, under such a social
arrangement, the prime economic goal of Socialism : the just
distribution of the premiums given to certain portions of the
general product by the action of demand, would never be attained.
As this system not only fails to distribute these premiums justly,
but deliberately permits their private appropriation, Individualist
Anarchism is, in Shaw's view, " the negation of Socialism, and is,
in fact, Unsocialism carried as near to its logical completeness as
any sane man dare carry it." The Communist Anarchism of
Kropotkin, Shaw also opposes because of his own lack of faith
in humanity at large, in the present state of development of the
social conscience. If bread were communized, the common
bread store obviously would become bankrupt unless every con-
sumer of the bread contributed to its support as much labour
as the bread he consumed cost to produce. Were the consumer
to refuse thus to contribute, there would be two ways to compel
him : physical force and the moral force of public opinion. If
physical force is resorted to, then the Anarchist ideal remains
unattained. If moral force, what will be the event ? The answer
reveals Shaw as a confirmed sceptic in regard to the value of
public opinion as a moral agent. " It is useless," he avers, " to
think of man as a fallen angel. If the fallacies of absolute
morality are to be admitted into the discussion at all, he must
be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil who is being
slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize that in
disregarding his neighbours' happiness, he is taking the surest way
to sacrifice his own." Under Anarchistic Communism, public
opinion would no doubt operate as powerfully as now. But, in
Shaw's opinion, public opinion cannot for a moment be relied upon
as a force which operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men to
act morally. Keen, incisive, pitiless, his words descriptive of public
opinion show how little he is tinged with the poetry, the passion,
and the religion which are the very life blood of Socialism.
170
Shavian Socialism
" Its operation is for all practical purposes quite arbitrary,
and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile to
the reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and
worships Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall
hat and going to church, on his marrying the woman he
lives with, and on his pretending to believe whatever the
rest pretend to believe. . . . But there is no sincere public
opinion that a man should work for his daily bread if he
can get it for nothing. Indeed, it is just the other way;
public opinion has been educated to regard the performance
of daily manual labour. as the lot of the despised classes.
The common aspiration is to acquire property and leave
off working. Even members of the professions rank below
the independent gentry, so-called because they are inde-
pendent of their own labour. These prejudices are not
confined to the middle and upper classes : they are rampant
also among the workers. . . . One is almost tempted in this
country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the
snob, until you get down to those who are so oppressed that
they have not enough self-respect even for snobbery, and
thus are able to pluck out of the heart of their misery a
certain irresponsibility which it would be a mockery to
describe as genuine frankness and freedom. The moment
you rise into the higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you
find that envy, ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony,
love of petty titles, precedence and dignities, and all the
detestable fruits of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly
among those who lose as among those who gain by it. In
fact, the notion that poverty favours virtue was clearly
invented to persuade the poor that what they lost in this
world they would gain in the next."*
When Shaw attended the International Socialist Congresses
in Zurich and in London, he reported them in the Star as
* Fabian Tract, No. 45 : The Impossibilities of Anarchism, a paper by
Shaw, written in 1888, read to the Fabian Society on October 16th, 1891,
and published by the Fabian Society, July, i8o3»
171
I
George Bernard Shaw
unsparingly as he would have reported a sitting of Parliament.
The Socialists, amazed and indignant at their first taste of real
criticism, concluded that Shaw was going over to the enemy.
This Fabian policy of unsparing criticism, inaugurated and carried
out ruthlessly by Shaw, ended in freeing the Fabians, in great
measure, from the illusions of Socialism, and in imparting to their
Society its rigidly constitutional character. An incident, which
Mr. Shaw once described in a letter to me, gives one some insight
into the causes of his reaction against the German Socialists'
policy of playing to the galleries by spouting revolutionary rant
and hinting catastrophically of impending revolutions.
" At the Zurich Congress I first became acquainted with
the leaders of the movement on the Continent. Chief among
them was the German leader Liebknecht, a '48 veteran who,
having become completely parliamentarized, still thought
it necessary to dupe his younger followers with the rhetoric
of the barricade. After a division in which an attempt to
secure unanimity by the primitive method of presenting the
resolution before the Congress to the delegates of the different
nations in their various languages in several versions adapted
to their views, so that whilst they believed they were all
saying ' Yes ' to the same proposition, the wording was really
very different in the different translations, and sometimes
highly contradictory, it turned out that the stupidity of the
English section had baffled the cleverness of the German-Swiss
bureau, because the English voted ' No ' when they meant
' Yes,' and upset the apple-cart. Happening to be close to
Liebknecht on the platform at the luncheon adjournment,
I said a few words to him in explanation of the apparently
senseless action of the English. He looked wearily round at
me; saw a comparatively young Socialist whom he did not
know; and immediately treated me to a long assurance
that the German Social Democrats did not shrink from a
conflict with the police on Labour Day (the 1st of May) ;
that they were as ready as ever, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
I turned away as soon and as shortly as I could without
17a
1
Shavian Socialism
being rude; and from that time I discounted the German
leaders as being forty years out of date, and totally negligible
except as very ordinary republican Radicals with a Socialist
formula which was simply a convenient excuse for doing
nothing new.
" When the German leaders visited London in the eighties
they treated the Fabian Society as a foolish joke. Later
on they found their error ; and Liebknecht was entertained
at a great Fabian meeting; but to this day the German
Socialist press does not dare to publish the very articles it
asks me to write, because of my ruthless criticism of Bebel,
Singer, and the old tradition of the 'old gang' generally.
My heresy as to Marx is, of course, another horror to the
Germans who got their ideas of political economy in the
'48^71 period."
After 1875, let us recall, the old pressure and discontent of the
eighteen-thirties descended upon England with renewed force.
In 1881, " as if Chartism and Fergus O'Connor had risen from the
dead," the Democratic Federation, with H. M. Hyndman at its
head, inaugurated the revival of Socialist organization in England.
Like those other haters of the capitalist system — the capitalists
Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy, Marx and Lassalle — Hyndman " had
had his turn at the tall hat and was tired of it." Shortly after
the formation of the Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society,
a revolting sect from the Fellowship of the New Life, founded by
Professor Thomas Davidson, came into being. Hyndman and
his Marxists, Kropotkin and his Anarchists, did not realize, with
Shaw, that the proletariat, instead of being the revolutionary,
is in reality the conservative element of society. They refused
to accept this situation, not realizing that they were confronted
by a condition, not a theoty. " They persisted in -believing that
the proletariat was an irresistible mass of Felix Pyats and
Ouidas." On the point of joining the Democratic Federation,
Shaw decided to join the Fabian Society instead. He did accept
the situation, helped, perhaps, as he once said, by his inherited
instinct ifor anti-climax. " I threw Hyndman over, and got to
173
George Bernard Shaw
work with Sidney Webb and the rest to place Socialism on a
respectable bourgeois footing; hence Fabianism. Burns did the
same thing in Battersea by organizing the working classes there
on a genuine self-respecting working-class basis, instead of on
the old romantic middle-class assumptions. Hyndman wasted
years in vain denunciation of the Fabian Society and of Burns ;
and though facts became too strong for him at last, he is still
at heart the revolted bourgeois." Prior to the year 1886, there
had been no formal crystallization of the Fabian Society into a
strictly economic association, avowedly opportunist in its political
policy; after September 17th of that year the thin edge of the
wedge went in. The Manifesto of the Fabian Parliamentary
League contains the nucleus of the Fabian policy of to-day.* The
Fabian Society was a dead letter until Shaw, Webb, Olivier and
Wallas joined it ; from that moment, it became a force to be
reckoned with in English life. Almost from the very first, as
Mr. Sidney Webb once wrote me, the Society took the colour of
Shaw's mordantly critical temperament, and bore the stamp of
his personality. The promise of the Fabians lay in their open-
mindedness, their diligence in the study of advanced economics,
and their resolute refusal of adherence to any formula, however
dear to Socialist enthusiasts, which did not commend itself un-
reservedly to their intelligence. By 1885, it had only forty
members; and in 1886, it was still unable to bring its roll of
members to a hundred names. In 1900, it boasted a membership
of eight hundred, and at present about twenty-six hundred names
are found upon its rolls, f It is neither possible nor advisable
for me to record the history of the Fabian Society — that may be
found in the numerous publications of the Society. But I cannot
refrain from stating that the membership increased by forty-three
per cent, in the year 1906-7, that this was a year of unpre-
cedented activity ; and that the Society has recently been greatly
strengthened by the accession of many well-known men in English
* Compare the former chapter ; complete details are to be found in
Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 12-15.
t In the twenty-seventh Annual Report on the work of the Fabian Society
(for the year ended March 31st, 1910], the membership is given as 2,627.
174
Shavian Socialism
public life. There were then eight Fabians in the London County
Council; and in Parliament, Labour and Socialism have in the
last five years been better represented, I believe, than ever before
in the history of that body. I have recently talked at length
with many of the ablest Socialists in England. The remark-
able growth of the Fabian Society and the Socialist representa-
tion in English literature, I was told again and again, is not due
to any sudden and untrustworthy inflation of Socialist values,
but is largely due to the fact that Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb,
Hubert Bland, and their coterie have been planting the seeds
for twenty years. Such ideas as are embodied in Mr. Lloyd
George's budget and the Old Age Pension Bill are unmistakable
marks of that gradual Socialistic leavening of English political
thought upon which' the Fabians have been engaged ever since
1884. " The recent steady influx into the Fabian Society," Mr.
Bland said to me energetically, " is a clear proof to my mind
that the ideas which have been lurking in the air for a long,
long time are at last taking definite shape simultaneously in the
minds of a great many people. Such men as Bernard Shaw have
brought this thing to pass."*
During the years from 1887 to 1889, the years we are especially
concerned with at present, compensation for its paucity of
numbers was found not only in the intellectual capacity, but also
in the economic inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness of the leaden
in the Fabian Society. This is best revealed in Shaw's sketch of
this period :
* Worthy of record in connection with the new policy of the Fabian
Society, although discussion is outside the scope of this work, is the move-
ment inaugurated by Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. A. R. Orage, after-
wards joint-editors of the London Socialist organ. The New Age, in the
foundation of the Leeds Art Club in 1905. " The object of the Leeds Art
Club," their syllabus read, " is to affirm the mutual dependence of art and
ideas." This movement, supported by a group of able lecturers, proved
so successful and so stimulating as to eventuate in the formation of the
Fabian Art Group (Bernard Shaw presiding over the initial meeting), the
declared object of which is " to interpret the relation of Art and Philosophy
to Socialism." Admirable pamphlets and brochures have been published
under its auspices ; and its meetings, and the Fabian Summer School in
Wales, have been addressed by many of the most brilliant and advanced
thinkers in England.
*75
George Bernard Shaw
" By far our most important work at this period was our
renewal of that historic and economic equipment of Social-
Democracy of which Ferdinand Lassalle boasted, and which
has been getting rustier and more obsolete ever since his time
and that of his contemporary, Karl Marx. ... In 1885 we
used to prate about Marx's theory of value and Lassalle's
Iron Law of Wages as if it were still 1870. In spite of
Henry George, no Socialist seemed to have any working know-
ledge of the theory of economic rent : its application to
skilled labour was so unheard of that the expression ' tent
of ability ' was received with laughter when the Fabians first
introduced it into their lectures and discussions ; and as for
the modern theory of value, it was scouted as a blasphemy
against Marx. ... As to history, we had a convenient stock
of imposing generalizations about the evolution from slavery
to serfdom and from serfdom to free wage labour. We drew
our pictures of society with one broad line dividing the
bourgeoisie from the proletariat, and declared that there were
only two classes really in the country. We gave lightning
sketches of the development of the mediaeval craftsman into
the manufacturer and finally into the factory hand. We
denounced Malthusianism quite as crudely as the Malthu-
sians advocated it, which is saying a great deal ; and we raged
against emigration, national insurance, co-operation, trade-
unionism, old-fashioned Radicalism, and everything else that
was not Socialism ; and that, too, without knowing at all
clearly what we meant by Socialism. The mischief was, not
that our generalizations were unsound, but that we had no
detailed knowledge of the content of them : we had bor-
rowed them ready-made as articles of faith; and when
opponents like Charles Bradlaugh asked us for details we
sneered at the demand without being in the least able to
comply with it. The real reason why Anarchist and Socialist
worked then shoulder to shoulder as comrades and brothers
was that neither one nor the other had any definite idea of
what he wanted, or how it was to be got. All this is true
to this day of the raw recruits of the movement, and of some
176
1
1
Shavian Socialism
older hands who may be absolved on the ground of invin-
cible ignorance ; but it is no longer true of the leaders of the
movement in general. In 1887 even the British Association
burst out laughing as one man when an elderly representative
of Philosophic Radicalism, with the air of one who was
uttering the safest of platitudes, accused us of ignorance of
political economy ; and now not even a Philosophical Radical
is to be found to make himself ridiculous in this way. The
exemplary eye-opening of Mr. Leonard Courtney by Mr.
Sidney Webb lately in the leading English economic review
surprised nobody, except perhaps Mr. Courtney himself.
The cotton lords of the north would never dream to-day of
engaging an economist to confute us with learned pamphlets
as their predecessors engaged Nassau Senior in the days of
the Ten Hours' Bill, because they know that we should be
only too glad to advertise our Eight Hours' Bill by flattening
out any such champion. From 1887 to 1889 we were the
recognized bullies and swashbucklers of advanced economics/'*
Not without reason have the Fabians been called the Jesuits of
the Socialist evangel in England. The " waiting " of the Fabian
motto is synonymous, not with inaction, but with unflagging
energy, f The Fabians eschewed pleasures and recreations of
every kind in favour of public speaking and public instruction ;
their policy has always been one of education and permeation.
In the year ending April, 1889, to take a single example, the number
of lectures delivered by members of the Fabian Society alone was
upwards of seven hundred. In addition to writing or editing
many publications of the Fabian Society, Shaw has delivered,
in the last twenty-odd years, something like a thousand public
lectures and addresses. Until the close of 1889, the Fabians had
confined their propagandist campaign to three directions : publica-
* Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 15-16 ; date, 1892.
t The Fabian motto, suggested by Mr. Frank Podmore, runs : " For the
right moment yon must wait, as Fabins did most patiently when warring
against Hannibal, though many censured his delays ; but when the time
comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain
and fruitless."
177 12
George Bernard Shaw
ti6n of manifestos and pamphlets ; delivery of public addresses
and holding of conferences, and exciting efforts towards the per-
meation of the Liberal party. In December, 1889, the Fabian
Society published the well-known book, Fabian Essays in
Socialism, edited by Shaw, and containing, in addition to two
essays of his own, essays by Sidney Olivier, William Clarke,
Hubert Bland, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant and Graham Wallas.*
The authors, constituting the Executive Council of the Fabian
Society, made no claim to be more than communicative learners :
the book was the outcome of their realization of the lack of any-
thing like authoritative, and at the same time popular, presenta-
tions of the political, economic, and moral aspects of contemporary
Socialism.
In general, it may be said that the Fabians, while strenuously
avowing themselves strict evolutionists, are in reality highly
revolutionary. The boast of the Fabian Society is freedom from
the illusions and millennial aspirations of the great mass of
Socialists. It is a society of irreverence and scientific iconoclasm,
bowing to the fetishism neither of George nor of Marx. Towards
Marx and Lassalle, some of whose views must now be discarded
as erroneous or obsolete, the Fabian Society insists on the neces-
sity of maintaining as critical an attitude as these eminent So-
cialists themselves maintained towards their predecessors St.
Simon and Robert Owen. In origin anarchistic and revolutionary
as could be desired, in spirit the Fabians remain anarchistic and
revolutionary. In principle avowedly orderly and constitutional,
in policy frankly opportunist, in practice strictly scientific and
economic, the Fabians may be called the realists of the Socialist
movement. They have ruthlessly snatched the masks from the
faces of the Utopian dreamers and romancers, f While the rank
and file of the " S. D. F." have been the very good friends of the
Fabians, the radical differences in their respective policies have
* This book has now gone into its seventieth thousand, and has been re-
published in both Germany and America. It is regarded to-day as the
standard text in English for Socialist lecturers and propagandists.
f Compare Fabian Tract No. 70: Report on Fabian Policy, the bomb-
shell thrown by the Fabian Society into the International Socialist Workers*
and Trade Union Congress, 1896.
178
EDITED BY tt. BERNARD SHAW.,
PRICE ONE SHILLING.
SOCIALISM'
Essays by G. Bernard Shaw, Sydney Olivier, Wm. Clarke.
Hubert Bland, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant, G. Wallas.
Facsimile of Cover Design of Fabian Essays (1890}.
George Bernard Shaw
that the way to get at the vestry was to put a programme into
their hands. So we sent them all a pamphlet, requesting replies —
a pamphlet entitled, ' Questions for Vestrymen,' or something of
the sort. The vestrymen were thus forced to the wall and driven
to decide upon issues. They actually began to make up their
minds on many subjects of which hitherto they had had no con-
ception. Slowly the vestries, under this discipline, began to take
on a truly representative character. The personnel of the vestry
was now permanently altered for the better. Men were elected
who not only took an interest in municipal affairs, but likewise
were willing to do any amount of hard work. I was ' co-opted '
—*".*., chosen by the committee, by agreement with the opposite
party, obviously beaten if a vote were taken. So that I was
fortunate enough to escape the terrors of a popular election."
It is quite beyond the scope of this book to enter into the details
of Shaw's work as Vestryman, afterwards Borough Councillor.
Suffice it to say, that he was chosen in 1897, entered at once upon
the performance of his duties, and prosecuted them for several
terms with great zeal and tireless energy. His various letters to
the Press during that period, and occasional reminiscences, show
that he was always outspoken and vehement in behalf of all
reforms which tended to the betterment of the poorer classes,
equalization of public privileges of men and women, better
sanitary conditions, and the municipalization of such industries
as promise to give the people at large better service and greater
value for their money than privately operated concerns. The
most tangible result of his work as Vestryman and Borough
Councillor is his book, Municipal Trading, which he once told
me he regarded as one of the best and most useful things he had
ever done.*
At the expiration of his career as Borough Councillor, he stood
as the candidate for the Borough of St. Pancras in the London
* For highly appreciative summaries of The Common Sense of Municipal
Trading (Archibald Constable and Co.}, and of Shaw's article. Socialism
for Millionaires (first published in the Contemporary Review of February,
1896, and afterwards, in 1901, as Fabian Tract No. 107), compare Mr. Hoi-
brook Jackson's monograph, Bernard Shaw, pages 114-131.
182
Shavian Socialism
County Council — the seat afterwards occupied by the well-known
actor, Mr. George Alexander. " I was beaten/' Mr. Shaw recently
told me, " because I alienated the Nonconformist element by
favouring the improvement of the Church schools. I was con-
vinced that such improvement would lead to the betterment of
the education of the children. The Nonconformists were enraged
beyond measure by the proposal, looking with the utmost horror
upon any measure which tended to strengthen the Church. I
remember one rabid Nonconformist coming to me one day, almost
foaming at the mouth, and protesting with violent indignation
that he would not pay a single cent towards the maintenance of
the schools of the Established Church. ' Why, my dear fellow,'
I replied, ' don't you know that you pay taxes now for the sup-
port of the Roman Catholic Church in the Island of Malta ? '
Although this staggered the irate Nonconformist for the moment,
it did not reconcile his element to the extension of the principle to
London. My contention was that under the conditions prevailing
at the time, the children were poorly taught and poorly housed,
the schools badly ventilated, and the conditions generally un-
satisfactory. ' Improve all the conditions,' I said ; ' appoint youjr
own inspectors, and in the course of time you will control the
situation. Pay the piper and you can call the tune.' But I could
not override the tremendous prejudice against the Church, and
I was badly beaten." One of Shaw's intimate friends told me not
long ago that what lost the seat in the L. C. C. for Shaw was his
intrepid assertion, repeated throughout the campaign, that he
and Voltaire were the only two truly religious people who had
ever lived ! Shaw's own account of this, when I taxed him with
it, was that he had often pointed out that the religious opinions of
the Free Churches (the Nonconformist sects) in England to-day
were exactly those of Voltaire, and that what I had been told
was quite as near his meaning as most people contrived to get
without reading him. And only the other day a well-known
politician and a friend of Shaw's made the remark to me that Shaw
was an " impossible political candidate," too rash and indivi-
dualistic in his assertions to avoid alienating many people — even
some of the very men who under ordinary circumstances might
183^
George Bernard Shaw
confidently be relied upon to support a progressive and energetic
reformer.
And yet it is noteworthy that as far back as the year 1889 Shaw
was asked to stand as a Member of Parliament. Below is given
the text of a letter, from Shaw, at 29, Fitzroy Square, W., London,
dated March 23rd, 1889, to Mr. W. Sanders, then Secretary of the
Election Committee of the Battersea branch of the S. D. F., and
now a prominent Fabian and member of the London County
Council. This letter, a copy of which was most kindly given me
by Mr. Sanders, was sent in reply to a letter from him to Mr. Shaw
asking him to allow his name to be put forward as a candidate
for the parliamentary representation of Battersea subsequent to a
conference between the Battersea L. and R. Association and the
Battersea branch of the S. D. F. Mr. Shaw was mistaken in
addressing Mr. Sanders as the Secretary of the Election Com-
mittee of the Battersea L. and R, Association.
" Dear Sir,—
" I wish it were possible for me to thank the Batter-
sea L. and R. Association for their invitation, and accept it
without further words. But there is the old difficulty which
makes genuine democracy impossible at present — I mean the
money difficulty. For the last year I have had to neglect
my professional duties so much, and to be so outrageously
unpunctual and uncertain in the execution of work entrusted
to me by employers of literary labour, that my pecuniary
position is worse than it was ; and I am at present almost
wholly dependent on critical work which requires my presence
during several evenings in the week at public performances.
Badly as I do this at present, I could not do it at all if I had
parliamentary duties to discharge ; and as to getting back any
of the old work that could be done in the morning, I rather
think the action I should be bound to take in Parliament
would lead to closer and closer boycotting. As to the serious
literary work that is independent of editors and politics, I
have never succeeded in making it support me ; and in any
case it is not compatible with energetic work in another
184
Shavian Socialism
direction carried on simultaneously. You must excuse
my troubling you with these details; but the Association,
consisting of men who know what getting a living means,
will understand the importance of them. As a political
worker outside Parliament I can just manage to pay my way
and so keep myself straight and independent. But you
know, and the Association will know, how a man goes to
pieces when he has to let his work go, and then to run into
debt, to borrow in order to get out of debt by getting into
it again, to beg in order to pay off the loans, and finally
either to sell himself or to give up, beaten.
" If the constituency wants a candidate, I see nothing
for it but paying him. If Battersea makes up its mind to
that, it can pick and choose among men many of whom axe
stronger than I. And since it is well to get so much good
value for the money as can be had, I think poor constituencies
(and all real democratic constituencies are poor) will for some
time be compelled to kill two birds with one stone, and put
the same man into both County Council and Parliament.
This, however, is a matter which you are sure to know your
own minds about, and it is not for me to meddle in it
" Some day, perhaps, I may be better able to take an extra
duty ; for, after all, I am not a bad workman when I have time
and opportunity to show what I can do ; and I need scarcely
say that if the literary employers find that there is money to
be made out of me, they will swallow my opinions fast
enough.
" I am, dear Sir,
" Yours faithfully,
"G. Bernard Shaw.
" Mr. W. Sanders."
In many quarters, even among his Socialist confrires, Bernard
Shaw is regarded as primarily destructive in his proposals. And
yet, at different times and in various places, he has constructively
outlined his programme of complete Socialism. In essential
agreement with such Collectivism as ftmile Vandervelde, Jean
Jaurts and August Bebel, Shaw differs from them only in regard
185
George Bernard Shaw
to the successive mutations in the process of Socialist evolution.
The gradual extension of the principle of the income tax — e.g.,
a " forcible transfer of rent, interest, and even rent of ability
from private holders to the State, without compensation," is the
scheme of capitalistic expropriation the Collectivists have in mind.
By a gradual process of development, the imposition of gradually
increased taxes, the State will secure the means for investment
in industrial enterprises of all sorts. Instead of forcibly extin-
guishing private enterprises, the State would extinguish them
by successfully competing against them. Thus, as Proudhon
said, competition would kill competition ; in America Mr. Gaylord
Wilshire never tires of exclaiming : " Let the Nation own the
Trusts." If, as Shaw claims, the highest exceptional talent could
be had, in the open market, for eight hundred pounds, say, nearly
half the existing wages of ability and the entire profits of capital
would be diverted from the pockets of the able men and the
present possessors of capital, and would find its way into the
pockets of the State. The vast sum thus accruing to the State
would swell the existing wages fund, and would be employed in
raising the wages of the entire community. After the means of
production have been Socialized, and the State has become the
employer, products or riches will be distributed roughly, " accord-
ing to the labour done by each man in the collective search for
them." In his celebrated tilt with Shaw, Mr. W. H. Mallock
attacked the validity of the economics which furnish the
substructure of Fabian Essays* Mr. Mallock's contention re-
* Fabian Economics, in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1894. Mr.
Mallock purposed to show how the defenders of a broad and social Con-
servatism, as outlined by himself, " may be able, by a fuller understanding
of it, to speak to the intellect, the heart, and the hopes of the people of this
country (England), like the voice of a trumpet, in comparison with which
the voice of Socialism will be merely a penny whistle." Shaw delightfully
termed his rejoinder, On Mr. Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance,
which brought forth, in the same magazine, not one, but two rejoinders
from Mr. Mallock. In 1909 an attack by Mr. Mallock on Mr. Keir Hardie
in the Times provoked Shaw to a fierce onslaught on his old opponent, and
the Fabian Society presently republished the correspondence and the old
Fortnightly article under the title, Socialism and Superior Brains. The
latter, in a shilling edition, is also published by A. C. Fi field, London, in the
Fabian Socialist Series.
186
Shavian Socialism
solves itself into the assertion that exceptional personal ability,
and not labour, is the main factor in the production of wealth.
Far from repudiating this assertion, Shaw embraced it, he said,
in the spirit of His. Prig : " Who deniges of it, Betsy ? " We
support and encourage ability, Shaw contends, in order that we
may get as much as possible out of it, not in order that it may
get as much as possible out of us. Give men of ability and their
heirs the entire product of their ability, so that they shall be
enormously rich whilst the rest of us remain as poor as if they
had never existed, and " it will become a public duty to kill them,
since nobody but themselves will be any the worse, and we shall
be much the better for having no further daily provocation to the
sin of envy." Accordingly, the business of Society is " to get the
use of ability as cheaply as it can for the benefit of the community,
giving the able man just enough advantage to keep his ability
active and efficient. From the Unsocialist point of view this is
simply saying that it is the business of Society to find out exactly
how far it can rob the able man of the product of his ability with-
out injuring itself, which is precisely true (from that point of
view)," though whether it is a " reduction of Socialism to dis-
honesty or of Unsocialism to absurdity" may be left an open
question. " If Mr. Mallock will take his grand total of the earn-
ings of Ability," Shaw asserts, " and strike off from it, first, all
rent of land and interest on capital, then all normal profits, then
all non-competitive emoluments attached to a definite status in the
public service, civil or military, from royalty downwards, then
all payments for the advantages of secondary or technical educa-
tion and social opportunities, then all fancy payments made to
artists and other professional men by very rich commonplace
people competing for their services, and then all exceptional pay-
ments made to men whose pre-eminence exists only in the
imaginative ignorance of the public, the remainder may with some
plausibility stand as genuine rent of ability." And to Mr. Mal-
lock's assertion that " men of ability will not exert themselves
to produce income when they know that the State is an organized
conspiracy to rob them of it," Shaw characteristically retorts,
" Mr. Mallock might as well deny the existence of the Pyramids on
187
George Bernard Shaw
the general ground that men will not build pyramids when they
know that Pharaoh is at the head of an organized conspiracy to
take away the Pyramids from them as soon as they are made."
Shaw holds the fundamentally sound view that " as to the
entire assimilation of Socialism by the world, the world has never
yet assimilated the whole of any ism, and never will." In that
most subtle and distinguished of all his contributions to the
Socialist literature of our time, The Illusions of Socialism, Shaw
has expressed his firm conviction that it is not essential for the
welfare of the world to carry out Socialism in its entirety.
Unfettered by the dogmas of a political creed, unhampered by
the bonds of a narrow partisanship, Bernard Shaw stands forth
as a great and free spirit in his prophetic declaration that, long
before it has penetrated to all corners of the political and social
organization, Socialism will have relieved the pressure to which
it owes its elasticity, and will recede before the next great social
movement, leaving everywhere intact the best survivals of in-
dividualistic liberalism. And far from agreeing with Ibsen in
his impossibilist declaration that the State must go, Shaw not
only asserts that we must put up with the State, but also expresses
no doubt whatsoever that under Social-Democracy the few will
still govern. It is a mark of Shaw's British practicality and
clear-sightedness that he recognizes in the State a practical
instrumentality for effecting and directing social reform. The
State is indispensable as a means for making possible one great
consummation : the development of the strong, sound, creative
personality. The unsocial man he regards as a " hopelessly
private person," The opportunity for the free development of
the individual he regards as the fundamental prerequisite and
condition for the individual's social and material wellbeing.*
"That great joint-stock company of the future, the Social-
Democratic State, will have its chairman and directors as surely
as its ships will have captains." But this admission involves no
* In his analysis of the situation in his native land, he insisted that Home
Rule was a necessity for Ireland, because the Irish would never be content,
would never feel themselves free, until Home Rule was granted them. It
was not a question of logic, but a question of natural right.
188
Shavian Socialism
endorsement, on Shaw's part, of the State as at present constituted.
" Bakounine's comprehensive aspiration to destroy all States and
Established Churches, with their religious, political, judicial,
financial, criminal, academic, economic and social laws and institu-
tions, seems to me perfectly justifiable and intelligible from the
point of view of the ordinary ' educated man,' who believes that
institutions make men instead of men making institutions." The
State, as at present constituted, Shaw views as simply a huge
machine for robbing and slave-driving the poor by brute force.
While he laughs at the Individualism expressed in Herbert
Spencer's The Coming Slavery, at the Anarchy expressed in the
word Liberty, and in those " silly words " of John Hay on the
title-page of Benjamin Tucker's paper, Shaw is, nevertheless, both
an individualist and an intellectual anarchist. The alleged
opposition between Socialism and Individualism, Shaw has always
strenuously maintained, is false and question-begging. " The true
issue lies between Socialism and Unsocialism, and not between
Socialism and that instinct in us that leads us to Socialism by its
rebellion against the squalid levelling down, the brutal repression,
the regimenting and drilling and conventionalizing of the great
mass of us to-day, in order that a lucky handful may bore them-
selves to death for want of anything to do, and be afraid to walk
down Bond Street without a regulation hat and coat on." Like
Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkin, Shaw sees the whole imposture
through and through, " in spite of its familiarity, and of the illu-
sions created by its temporal power, its riches, its splendour, its
prestige, its intense respectability, its unremitting piety, and its
high moral pretension/'
At bottom, it was a deeply religious, a fundamentally humani-
tarian motive, which drew Shaw into Socialism. The birth of
the social passion in his soul finds its origin in the individual
desire to compass the salvation of his fellow man. A burning
sense of social injustice, a great passion for social reform, directed
his steps. In his inmost being he felt his complicity in the social
ills of the world. He realized that only by personally seeking
to effect the salvation of society could he achieve the salvation
of his own souL The Will to Socialism was thus grounded in a
Z89
George Bernard Shaw
profound individualism : he felt their organic connection. Social-
ism was the need of the age; and it could only be achieved
through the freedom and development of the individual.
That other wit and paradoxer, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, told the
very truth itself When he said that Bernard Shaw "has done
something that has never been done in the world before. He has
become a revolutionist without becoming a sentimentalist. He
has revolted against the cant of authority, and yet continued in
despising the cant of revolt." To Shaw, the middle-class origin
of the Socialist movement is in nothing so apparent as in the per-
sistent delusions of Socialists as to an ideal proletariat, forced by
the brutalities of the capitalist into an unwilling acquiescence
in war, penal codes, and other cruelties of civilization. " They still
see the social problem," Shaw wittily remarks, " not sanely and
objectively, but imaginatively, as the plot of a melodrama, with
its villain and its heroine, its innocent beginning, troubled middle,
and happy ending. They are still the children and the romancers
of politics."*
Shaw finds a sort of sly gratification in the reflection that the
world is becoming so familiar with the Socialist, that it no longer
fears, but only laughs at him. " I, the Socialist, am no longer
a Red Spectre. I am only a ridiculous fellow. Good : I embrace
the change. It puts the world with me. ... All human pro-
gress involves, as its first condition, the willingness of the pioneer
to make a fool of himself. The sensible man is the man who adapts
himself to existing conditions. The fool is the man who persists
in trying to adapt the conditions to himself. Both extremes have
their disadvantages. I cling to my waning folly as a corrective
to my waxing good sense as anxiously as I once nursed my good
sense to defend myself against my folly." Shaw is the very man
of whom his own Don Juan said : " He can only be enslaved
whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason."
* Socialism at ths International Congress, in Cosmopolis, September, 1896.
190
THE ART CRITIC
" Produce me your best critic, and I will criticize his head oft.'* — On
Diabolonian Ethics. In Three Plays for Puritans. Preface, p.
CHAPTER VII
SHAW'S career as a critic dates from the period of his first
acquaintance with Mr. William Archer, in 1885. After
living for nine years, according to his own story, on the six
pounds of which he is so fond of speaking, Shaw was at last
reduced to quite straitened financial circumstances. He eagerly
seized the opportunity to become a critic afforded him by Mr
Archer's ingenious kindness. " Our friend, William Archer,"
Shaw relates, " troubled by this state of things, to which the
condition of my wardrobe bore convincing testimony, rescued me
by a stratagem. Being already famous as the ' W. A.' of the
WorkCs drama, he boldly offered to criticise pictures as well.
Edmund Yates was only too glad to get so excellent a critic.
Archer got me to do the work, resigned the post as soon as I had
got firm hold of it, and left me in possession." The years from
1885 to 1889, during which he lived at 29, Fitzroy Square, Shaw
devoted in part to criticism of art, contemporary English art in
particular; during this period, he once told me, he criticized
every picture show in London. He also published many un-
signed literary reviews and sallies in the Pall Mall Gazette ; whilst
a number of his criticisms of pictures appeared in unsigned para-
graphs, both in the World, 1885 to 1888, and in Truth, 1889.
A few of his art critiques also appeared in a magazine called Our
Corner.
I recently read Shaw's critical reviews of this period, especially
the complete file of his articles in the Pall Mall Gazette from May
16th, 1885, to August 31st, 1888, placed at my disposal by Mr.
Shaw. The articles are pertinent and shrewd, but only compara-
tively few are marked by that peculiar and fantastic humour
which has come to be known as Shavian. They embrace every
193 13
J
George Bernard Shaw
sort of subject from Ouida's novels to the Life of Madame
Blavatsky, from Grant Allen to W. Stanley Jevons, from Cairo
to the Surrey Hills — art, fiction, music, drama, science, theology.
Occasionally Shaw took delight in adding to the gaiety and
curiosity of his readers by putting forth some Shavian frivolity,
under an assumed name. Such, for example, was his letter
to the Pott Matt Gazette on The Taming of the Shrew, dated
June 8th, 1888, the earliest instance I have of his so-called
" Shakspearean Bull-baiting " — a letter copied innumerable times
and in almost every paper in the United Kingdom. It ran as
follows :
To the Editor of the Pali Matt Gazette.
Sir, — They say that the American woman is the most
advanced woman to be found at present on this planet. I
am an Englishwoman, just come up, frivolously enough,
from Devon to enjoy a few weeks of the season in London,
and at the very first theatre I visit I find an American woman
playing Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew — a piece which
is one vile insult to womanhood and manhood from the first
word to the last. I think no woman should enter a theatre
where that play is performed ; and I should not have stayed
to witness it myself, but that, having been told that the
Daly Company has restored Shakspeare's version to the
stage, I desired to see with my own eyes whether any civi-
lized audience would stand its brutality. Of course, it was
not Shakspeare : it was only Gar-rick adulterated by Shak-
speare. Instead of Shakspeare's coarse, thick-skinned money
hunter, who sets to work to tame his wife exactly as brutal
people tame animals or children — that is, by breaking their
spirit by domineering cruelty — we had Garrick's fop who
tries to ' shut up ' his wife by behaving worse than sh© — a
plan which is often tried by foolish and ill-mannered young
husbands in real life, and one which invariably fails igno-
miniously, as it deserves to. The gentleman who plays
Petruchio at Daly's — I neither know nor desire to know his
name — does what he can to persuade the audience that he is
194
i
SHAW'S SECOND HOME IN LONDON.
FiiiroT SvM.it (No. 291.
The Art Critic
not in earnest, and that the whole play is a farce, just as
Garrick before him found it necessary to do ; but in spite of
his fine clothes, even at the wedding, and his winks and
smirks when Katharine is not looking, he cannot make the
spectacle of a man cracking a heavy whip at a starving woman
otherwise than disgusting and unmanly. In an age when a
woman was a mere chattel, Katharine's degrading speech
about
•• • Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign : one that cares for thee (with a whip),
And for thy maintainance ; commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land/ etc.
might have passed with an audience of bullies. But imagine
a parcel of gentlemen in the stalls at the Gaiety Theatre, half
of them perhaps living idly on their wives' incomes, grinning
complacently through it as if it were true or even honourably
romantic. I am sorry that I did not come to town earlier
that I might have made a more timely protest. In the
future I hope all men and women who respect one another
will boycott The Taming of the Shrew until it is driven off the
boards.
" Yours truly,
" HORATIA RlBBONSON.
" St. James's Hotel, and Fairheugh Rectory, North Devon f
June 7th."
In his capacity as art critic, when time was priceless and
hundreds of pictures had to be examined critically, Shaw found his
knowledge of phonography invaluable. I recently looked over a
collection of his art catalogues during a single year, and his phono-
graphic notes give a miniature forecast of the art criticism he is
presently to write. Beside the titles of certain pictures often
appears a single adjective : " gaudy," " brilliant," " stupid," and
the like ; beside others, " Wilkie," " Reynolds," and the names of
other artists, indicating his detection of resemblance to or imita-
tion of the works of the masters. Beside the mention of a " light-
house " picture is pencilled the explanatory note, a mixture of
195 13*
George Bernard Shaw
praise and blame : " Too green. Has a lamp lighted. Good sub-
ject." One recognizes the Shavian timbre in such laconic notes
as " Fluffy style ; " " What does he mean ? " " Very dreadful i "
and " Same old game/' And we feel sure that Shaw will " gore
and trample " the unfortunate wretches who called forth the
damning comments — " wheels awful," " idiotic," and " green
blush and pasty face."
During these years, however, from 1885 to 1888 in especial,
Socialism was the living centre of all Shaw's interests. His time
was principally devoted to the most active form of Socialist pro-
pagandism. The literary articles of this period do not possess the
piquant interest of the " C. di B," or the " G. B. S." criticisms,
which are quite marvellous for epigram, satire and paradox. Most
of them are almost unintelligible now that they can no longer be
read with the context of the events of the week in which they
appeared. Shaw has always been a leader of forlorn hopes ; at
this time, willy-nilly, he was on the side of the majority. I remem-
ber one day quoting Clarence Rook's remark to the effect that
Shaw is like the kite, and can rise only when the poptdaris aura
is against him. " No, that is a radical mistake," Mr. Shaw said
forcibly. " I have never worked with the sense that everybody
is against me. On the contrary, my inspiration springs from a
sense of sympathy with my views." Still, one might say that it
has always been as a defiant and vexatious personality that Shaw
has best succeeded in arousing and challenging clamorous protest.
Hermann Bahr insists that Bernard Shaw possesses in rich
measure the remarkable and exceptional talent of the great artist-
critic : the ability to arouse the whole state, the whole nation,
against him. Not only was that opposition, which is the very
breath of his nostrils, non-existent : there was no great battle on
in the world of art in London comparable to those that were yet
to be waged. It is true that the Impressionist movement was
struggling for life in London, and while Shaw defended it vigor-
ously, neither its day nor his day was yet come. As an almost
totally unknown, comparatively unskilled critic of literature and
art, he could scarcely be expected to create the unparalleled
sensations which he subsequently achieved as a Shakespearean
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The Art Critic
image-breaker, a champion of Wagner and Ibsen, and the most
radical exponent of the newest forms of the New Drama.
And yet it was during these very years that he developed those
marvellous qualities which have won him the title of the most
brilliant of contemporary British journalistic critics. On all
sides the younger generation, which included Mr. Shaw as one
of its most daring and iconoclastic members, rose up in revolt
against academicism in style. The New Journalism came into
being. " Lawless young men," says Shaw, " began to write
and print the living English language of their own day instead
of the prose style of one of Macaulay's characters named Addison.
They split their infinitives and wrote such phrases as * a man
nobody ever heard of/ instead of, ' a man of whom nobody had
ever heard ' ; or, more classical still, ' a writer hitherto unknown.'
Musical critics, instead of reading books about their business and
elegantly regurgitating their erudition, began to listen to music
and to distinguish between sounds ; critics of painting began to
look at pictures ; critics of the drama began to look at some-
thing besides the stage ; and descriptive writers actually broke
into the House of Commons, elbowing the reporters into the back-
ground, and writing about political leaders as if they were mere
play-actors. The interview, the illustration and the cross-
heading hitherto looked on as American vulgarities impossible
to English literary gentlemen, invaded all our papers; and,
finally, as the climax and masterpiece of literary Jacobinism,
the Saturday Review appeared with a signed article in it. Then
Mr. Traill and all his generation covered their faces with their
togas and died at the base of Addison's statue, which all the while
ran ink." " Don't misunderstand my position," Mr. Shaw once
remarked to me. " It is true that I was opposed to academicism
in style, not to style itself. I believe in style. I thought that
the academicism we had was not good academicism. I was
pedantic enough myself when I first began to write — when I wrote
my first novel. Afterwards I came to the conclusion that a phrase
meant much only after it had been washed into shape in the
mouths of dozens of generations. The fact of the matter is that
I am extremely sensitive to the form of art." Shaw simply
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George Bernard Shaw
repudiated the classical tradition of writing like " a scholar and
a gentleman." As far as his scholarship was concerned, he took
the greatest pains to dissemble the little he possessed. More-
over, he doubted if it had ever been worth while being a " gentle-
man/' and used every means in his power to discredit this anti-
quated survival of the age of sentimentalism. He always aimed
at accuracy, but scoffed consumedly at the notion of achieving
"justice" in criticism. "I am not God Almighty," he said
in effect, " and nobody but a fool could expect justice from me,
or any other superhuman attribute." He wrote boldly according
to his bent ; he said only what he wanted to say, and not what
he thought he ought to say, or what was right, or what was just.
To Shaw, this affected, manufactured, artificial conscience of
morality and justice was of no use in the writing of genuine
criticism, or in the making of true works of art. For that, he
felt that one must have the real conscience that gives a man courage
to fulfil his will by saying what he likes. An epigram I once heard
him make : " Accuracy only means discovering the relation of
your will to facts instead of cooking the facts to save trouble " —
is a note of his entire criticism. Shaw sought simply to write
as accurately, as frankly, as vividly, and as lightly as possible.
He hesitated neither at violating taste, nor at being vexatious,
even positively disagreeable. " If I meet an American tourist
who is greatly impressed with the works of Raphael, Kaulbach,
Delaroche and Barry," he once said, " and I, with Titian and
Velasquez in my mind, tell him that not one of his four heroes
was a real painter, I am no doubt putting my case absurdly ;
but I am not talking nonsense, for all that : indeed, to the adept
seer of pictures I am only formulating a commonplace in an
irritatingly ill-considered way. But in this world if you do not
say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as well not say it
at all, since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that
does not trouble them."
Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the great English Socialist, once told
me that he was really the first person in England to discover
Shaw, " In 1883," he explained, " I wrote a letter of recom-
mendation for Shaw to Frederick Greenwood, at that time editor
198
The Art Critic
of the Pall Mall Gazette. The letter led to nothing, it is true ;
but that is not material. The point is, that in that letter I com-
pared Shaw to Heine — a comparison for which I have been un-
mercifully chaffed many times since. Of course, Shaw does not
possess Heine's wonderful gift of lyrism ; but as iconoclastic
critics, they have many qualities in common. In his power to
turn up for our inspection the seamy side of the robe of modern
life, and make us recoil at the sight, Bernard Shaw is without a
peer.
" I have always been inclined to class Bernard Shaw and my
dear friend George Meredith together. In enigmatic character and
faculty of mystification as to their real opinion, they are remarkably
alike."
Of Shaw, in all his criticism, might be quoted his own words
descriptive of George Henry Lewes as a critic of the drama :
" He expressed his most laboured criticisms with a levity which
gave them the air of being the unpremeditated whimsicalities
of a man who had perversely taken to writing about the theatre
for the sake of the jest latent in his own outrageous unfitness
for it."
If the world is convinced that Shaw is only a gay deceiver, he
himself has felt from the very beginning that the rdle he plays is
that of the candid friend of society. " Waggery as a medium is
invaluable," he once explained. " My case is really the case of
Rabelais over again. When I first began to promulgate my
opinions, I found that they appeared extravagant, and even
insane. In order to get a hearing, it was necessary for me to
attain the footing of a privileged lunatic, with the licence of a
jester. Fortunately the matter was very easy. I found that I
had only to say with perfect simplicity what I seriously meant
just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh. My method,
you will have noticed, is to take the utmost trouble to find the
right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity. And
all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest." It is Shaw's
supreme distinction that he refuses to view life through the con-
fining, beclouding medium of convention. His primal claim to
serious attention is based upon the assertion of his freedom from
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George Bernard Shaw
illusion. If he appears grotesque and eccentric, it is not so much
because he expresses himself grotesquely and eccentrically: it
is primarily because he scrutinizes life with a more aquiline eye-
sight than that of the illuded majority. His levity has saved him
from martyrdom ; for, although it is a very difficult thing to speak
disagreeable truths, it is a still more difficult thing to listen to them.
Recall the treatment the British public gave to George Moore for
his advocacy of realism, to Vizetelly for his championing of Zola,
even to Shaw himself for his defence of Ibsen ! Shaw has based
all his brilliancy and solidity, Mr. Chesterton acutely observes,
upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger
than fiction. And Shaw himself has cleverly put the case in his
own paradoxical way. " There is an indescribable levity — not
triviality mind, but levity — something spritelike about the final
truth of a matter ; and this exquisite levity communicates itself
to the style of a writer who will face the labour of digging down
to it. It is the half-truth which is congruous, heavy, serious,
and suggestive of a middle-aged or elderly philosopher. The whole
truth is often the first thing that comes into the head of a fool
or a child ; and when a wise man forces his way to it through
the many strata of his sophistications, its wanton, perverse air
reassures him instead of frightening him."*
This spritelike quality, this indescribable levity inherent in
the final truth of a matter, has communicated itself to Shaw's
style in the most intimate way. With the not unnatural result
that it is difficult for the average man to believe that opinions
advanced with such light-hearted levity carry any of the weight
of final truth. It is for this reason that all of Shaw's attempts
to write genuine autobiography have been greeted with the most
amiable scepticism. Shaw himself is able to speak with more
confidence on the folly of writing scientific natural history, because
he has tried the experiment, within certain timid limits, of being
candidly autobiographical.
" I have produced no permanent impression," he declares,
* Who I Am, and What I Think. Part. II., in the Candid Friend, May
1 8 th, 1901.
200
The Art Critic
" because nobody has ever believed me. I once told a
brilliant London journalist* some facts about my family,
running to forty first cousins and to innumerable seconds
and thirds. Like most large families, it did not consist
exclusively of teetotalers, nor did all its members remain
until death up to the very moderate legal standard of sanity.
One of them discovered an absolutely original method of
committing suicide. It was simple to the verge of triteness,
yet no human being had ever thought of it before. It was
also amusing. But in the act of carrying it out, my relative
jammed the mechanism of his heart— -possibly in the paroxysm
of laughter which the mere narration of his suicidal method
has never since failed to provoke — and if I may be allowed to
state the result in my Irish way, he died a second before he
succeeded in killing himself. The coroner's jury found that
he died ' from natural causes ' ; and the secret of the suicide
was kept not only from the public, but from most of the
family.
"I revealed the secret in private conversation to the
brilliant journalist aforesaid. He shrieked with laughter
and printed the whole story in his next causerie. It never
for a moment occurred to him that it was true. To this day
he regards me as the most reckless liar in London."
Had Shaw ever attempted to write the Rougon Macquart
history of his family in twenty volumes, along the candid lines
of the above narrative, it is not improbable that he would there-
after have been permanently and forcibly deprived of his
privileges as a lunatic. " I have not yet ascertained the truth
about myself," he wrote some years ago. " For instance, am I
mad or sane ? I really do not know. Doubtless, I am clever
in certain directions ; my talent has enabled me to cut a figure
in my profession in London. But a man may, like Don Quixote,
be' clever enough to cut a figure and yet be stark mad. A critic
recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having ' a
kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have
• Mr. A. B. Walkley, Mr. Shaw lately told me.
201
George Bernard Shaw
been nearer the mark than dislike ; for man is the only animal
of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid. I have never
thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he
is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a
lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no
gentility ; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he
does not want to eat. In the late war, the Americans burnt
the Spanish fleet, and finally had to drag men out of hulls that
had become furnaces. The effect of this on one of the American
commanders was to make him assemble his men and tell them
that he believed in God Almighty. No lion would have done
that. On reading it and observing that the newspapers, repre-
senting normal public opinion, seemed to consider it a very
creditable, natural and impressively pious incident, I came to the
conclusion that I must be mad. At all events, if I am sane, the
rest of the world ought not to be at large. We cannot both see
things as they really are."
It was at a somewhat later time that the critics came to treat
Shaw as a reckless liar and a privileged lunatic. At this period,
he impressed the self-conscious literary clique as a witty, but
frivolous, ignoramus, totally incompetent to discuss the high
subjects of which he professed such penetrating comprehension.
I once had an interesting discussion with Mr. Shaw about the
subject of his flippancy. " Do you accept as just the criticism,
made in some quarters," I asked Mr. Shaw, " that you and
Whistler were very much alike in your attitude towards the
general public ? "
" Not at all, that is a crude error," replied Mr. Shaw earnestly.
" Whistler came to grief because he gave himself up to clever
smartness, which is abhorrent to the average Englishman. As for
me, I have never for a moment lost sight of my serious relation
to a serious public. You see, I had an advantage over Whistler
in any case, for at least three times every week I could escape
from artistic and literary stuff, and talk seriously on serious
subjects to serious people. For this reason — because I persisted
in Socialist propagandism — I never once lost touch with the
real world."
202
*
<
i
The Art Critic
Shaw's critiques, sallies, and reviews were the combination of
a laborious criticism with a recklessly flippant manner. Into
literature he carried the methods he adopted on the platform,
where he tossed off the most diligently acquired, studiously
pondered information with all the insouciance of omniscience. As
a critic, Shaw has ever laboured for the scanty wages of the
" intolerable fatigue of thought." In characteristic style, he has
gone so far as to declare that good journalism is much rarer and
more important than good literature ; he has no sympathy with
Disraeli's view of a critic as an author who has failed. " I know as
one who has practised both crafts," wrote Shaw in 1892, " that
authorship is child's play compared to criticism ; and I have,
you may depend upon it, my full share of the professional instinct
which regards the romancer as a mere adventurer in literature
and the critic as a highly skilled workman. Ask any novelist
or dramatist whether he can write a better novel or play than I ;
and he will blithely say ' Yes. 1 Ask him to take my place as critic
for one week ; and he will blench from the test. The truth is
that the critic stands between popular authorship, for which he
is not silly enough, and gxeat authorship, for which he is not
genius enough."*
While Mr. Shaw was laboriously striving to impart lightness
and insouciance to his literary style, and to acquire careless
sang-froid as a platform speaker, he was likewise making the
acquaintance of certain distinguished men of his day. His
relation and association with William Morris, for example,
exercised no small influence upon his art ; moreover, it certainly
did no less than accentuate certain distinct traits of his character.
Unmistakably, in this way, does this association serve to give us
a clearer insight into the rationale of Shaw's — popularly-called —
idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, it furnishes us a new aspect
of Morris from the Shavian point of view.
Readers of the authorized edition of Cashel Byron's Profession
will recall that William Morris, who, like Shaw, had thrown him-
self into the Socialist revival of the early eighties, first became
* The Author to the Dramatic Critics, Appendix I. to the first Edition of
Widowers' Houses. London, Henry and Co., Bouverie Street, E.C., 1893.
203
George Bernard Shaw
curious about Shaw through reading the monthly instalments of
An Unsocial Socialist as they appeared in the Socialist magazine
To-Day. Shaw had heard of Morris, to be sure ; and had even,
years before, once seen him — of all places in the world ! — in the
Dor6 Gallery. Yet his notions about Morris were, in reality, of
the vaguest. He knew nothing beyond the meagre facts that he
was a poet, that he belonged to the Rossetti circle, and that he
was associated with Burne-Jones and with what was then called
iEstheticism. He had never read a line of Morris's, and, in fact,
had taken no definite measure of his calibre. This was the situa-
tion when Shaw found himself one evening in Gatti's big restaurant
in the Strand at the table with Morris and H. M. Hyndman.
Morris belonged to Mr. Hyndman's society, the Democratic Fede-
ration, now the Social-Democratic Federation, while Mr. Hynd-
man himself was the head centre of London Socialism. With
naive simplicity, Morris humbly announced that he was prepared
to do whatever he was told and go wherever he was led : that
was all he could say. In a letter to me describing the interview,
written many years afterwards, Mr. Shaw said that, while' it was
only snap-judgment — a personal impression across the table — he
could not help being " privately tickled by this announcement
from an obviously ungovernable man who was too big to be led
by any of us."
In ignorance concerning Morris, Shaw was not alone : the
other Socialists were in precisely the same predicament. Morris
himself said afterwards that it was among his Socialist confrires
that he first realized he was an elderly duffer. His old Rossettian
associates used to call him Topsy ; but, as readers of Lady Burne-
Jones's Memorials will recall, Burne-Jones used to be angry
when she applied this embarrassing nickname to Morris before
strangers. If Morris was affectionately regarded as a young
man by his associates of the " P. R. B.," to his Socialist allies
he looked older than he was — sixty at fifty, though a magnificent
sixty — a sort of " sixty- years-young " patriarch. Morris and
Shaw, after they settled down to the routine of Socialist agitation,
were at the opposite poles of the movement. Shaw headed the
Fabian Society, while Morris, after his secession from the S. D. F.,
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The Art Critic
organized the Socialist League, which shortly went to pieces —
because, as Shaw says, there was only one William Morris ; he
was afterwards the leading spirit in the Hammersmith Socialist
Society. Despite this fundamental difference in view point —
for Morris's fundamental conceptions were " Equality, Com-
munism, and the rediscovery under Communism of Art as ' work-
pleasure,' " whereas Shaw, as a Fabian, aimed simply at the
reduction of Socialism to a constitutional political policy — there
was never any personal friction between the two. Indeed, they
did a great deal of speaking together in the early days, most of
it at the street corner, and often thought themselves lucky if they
had an audience of twenty. In after years, we find Morris with the
broadest of views endeavouring to settle the differences which
arose between the various Socialist sects. By 1893, when he
gave his well-known address entitled Communism before the
Hammersmith Socialist Society, Morris had acquired an intimate
knowledge of the attempt to organize Socialism in England which
began in the early eighties. " He had himself undertaken and
conducted," writes Shaw, " that part of the experiment which
nobody else would face : namely, the discovery and combination,
without distinction of class, of all those who were capable of under-
standing Equality and Communism as he understood it, and their
organization as an effective force for the overthrow of the existing
order of property and privilege. In doing so he had been brought
into contact, and often into conflict, with every other section of
the movement. He knew all his men and knew all their methods.
He knew that the agitation was exhausted, and that the time had
come to deal with the new policy which the agitation had shaken
into existence. Accordingly, we find him in this (the above-
mentioned) paper, doing what he could to economize the strength
of the movement by making peace between its jarring sections,
and recalling them from their disputes over tactics and programs
to the essentials of their cause."*
None of Morris' Socialist associates were in the least degree
hero-worshippers, at least where he was concerned : they never
* Note of the Editor, G. B. Shaw, of Fabian Tract No. 113 : Communism—
a lecture by William Morris, published by the Fabian Society.
205
George Bernard Shaw
bothered at all about his eminence. " I was not myself conscious
of the impression he had made on me," Mr. Shaw once remarked
to me, in explaining his feeling for Morris, " until one evening, at
a debating society organized by Stopford Brooke, when Morris,
in a speech on Socialism in the course of a debate, astonished
me by saying that he left the economics to me — ' in that respect
I regard Shaw as my master.' The phrase meant only that he
left that side of the case to me, as he always did when we cam-
paigned together, but though I knew this, still it gave me a shock
which made me aware that I had unconsciously rated him so
highly that his compliment gave me a sort of revulsion." It
was genuine modesty which once prompted Shaw to say that
he never liked to call himself Morris's friend, because he was too
much his junior and too little necessary or serviceable to him in
his private affairs. And yet he enjoyed an unstinted and un-
reserved intercourse with Morris : one of Shaw's best-known
Fabian tracts, The Transition to Social Democracy, for example,
was written at Morris's mediaeval manor-house, Lechlade, on
the Thames, and was heartily approved on its historical side
by that erudite student of the Middle Ages. Shaw once said
that no man was more liberal in his attempts to improve Morris's
mind than he was ; " but I always found that, in so far as I was
not making a most horrible idiot of myself out of misknowledge
(I could forgive myself for pure ignorance), he could afford to
listen to me with the patience of a man who had taught my
teachers. There were people whom we tried to run him down
with — Tennysons, Swinburnes, and so on ; but their opinions
about things did not make any difference, Morris's did."*
Morris greatly enjoyed a number of Shaw's essays, for the prime
reason that in those essays Shaw said certain things which Morris
wanted to have said. After Shaw's celebrated reply to Max
Nordau, Morris suddenly began to talk to Shaw about Whistler
and the Impressionists in a way which showed that he knew all
about them and what they were driving at, though before that
* Obituary essay : Morris as Actor and Dramatist, in the Saturday
Review, October ioth f 1896. Reproduced in Dramatic Opinions and Essays,
Vol. II-
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The Art Critic
Shaw had given Morris up as — on that subject — an intolerant
and ignorant veteran of the pre-Raphaelite movement. That
this was highly characteristic of Morris from Shaw's standpoint
is evidenced by some paragraphs in Shaw's obituary notice of
Morris in the Saturday Review. " When an enthusiast for some
fashionable movement or reaction in art would force it into the
conversation, he (Morris) would often behave so as to convey
an impression of invincible prejudice and intolerant ignorance,
and so get rid of it. But later on, he would let slip something
that showed, in a flash, that he had taken in the whole movement
at its very first demonstration, and had neither prejudices nor
illusions about it. When you knew the subject yourself, and
could see beyond it and around it, putting it in its proper place
and accepting its limits, he could talk fast enough about it ; but
it did not amuse him to allow novices to break a lance with him,
because he had no special facility for brilliant critical demonstra-
tion, and required too much patience for his work to waste any
of it on idle discussions. Consequently there was a certain
intellectual roguery about him of which his intimate friends were
very well aware ; so that if a subject were thrust on him, the
agressor was sure to be ridiculously taken in if he did not calculate
on Morris's knowing much more about it than he pretended."
He thus often presented himself as imperious and prejudiced,
because up to a certain point he would neither agree nor discuss,
simply giving you up as walking in darkness. But the moment
you had worked your way through the subject and come out on
the other side, as Shaw expressed it, Morris would suddenly begin
to talk like an expert and show all sorts of knowledge — scientific,
political, commercial, intellectual-as-opposed-to-artistic, and so
on — that you never suspected him of. " He was fond of quoting
Robert Owen's rule : * Don't argue : repeat your assertion,' "
Mr. Shaw recently told me;" and mere debatiog, which he knew
to be an intellectual game and not. an essential part of the Will-to
Socialism (so to speak), did not interest him enough to make him
good at it. But he highly enjoyed hearing anyone else do it
cleverly on his side, and was furious when it was done on the other
side. In point of command of modern critical language, he was by
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George Bernard Shaw
no means a ready man ; and as I was in great practice just then,
he would take a prompt from me (if it was the right one) with as
much relief and simplicity as if I had found his spectacles for
him."
Shaw once said that, as far as he was aware, he shared with
Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the distinction of being the only modern
dramatist, except the author of Charley's Aunt, which bored
Morris, whose plays were witnessed by Morris. Shaw did not
pretend to claim Morris's visits as a spontaneous act of homage
to modern acting and the modern drama, but only as a tribute of
personal friendship ; for Morris was a " twelfth-twentieth-century
artist," exclusively preoccupied with a vision of beauty unrealized
upon the modern stage. In a passage in a letter to me, Mr. Shaw
has tersely etched the firm figure of the artist and the man, who
could not be induced " to accept ugliness as art, no matter how
brilliant, how fashionable, how sentimental, or intellectually
interesting you might make it."
" Morris's artistic integrity was, humanly speaking,
perfect. You could not turn him aside from the question
of the beauty and the decency of a thing by bringing up its
interest, scientific, casuistic, novel, curious, historical, or
what not. That was most extraordinary in so clever a man ;
for he was capable of all the interests. Compared to him
Ruskin was not an artist at all : he was only a man whose
interest in Nature led him to study Turner, and whose
insight into religion gave him a clue to the art of the really
religious painters. He would not give twopence for a rarity
or a curiosity or a relic ; but when he saw a sanely beautiful
thing, and it was for sale, he went into the shop ; seized it,
held it tight under his arm (it was generally a mediaeval
book) ; and, after the feeblest and most transparent show of
bargaining, bought it for whatever was asked. Once, when
he was rebuked for paying eight hundred pounds for some-
thing that a dealer would have got for four hundred and fifty
pounds, I said, ' If you want a thing, you always get the worst
of the bargain.' Morris was delighted with my wisdom,
208
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The Art Critic
and probably spent many unnecessary pounds on the strength
of that poor excuse.
" This artistic integrity of his was what made him un-
intelligible to the Philistine public. When the Americans
set to work to imitate his printing, they showed that they
regarded him as a fashionably quaint and foolish person ;
and the Roycroft Shop and all the rest of the culture-curiosity
shops of the States poured forth abominations which missed
every one of his lessons and exaggerated every one of the
practices he tried to cure printers of. In the same way his
houses at Hammersmith and Kelmscott were, though quite
homely, as beautiful in their domestic way as St. Sophia's
in Stamboul ; but other people's ' Morris houses ' always
went wrong, even when he started them right."
One day Mr. Shaw and I were discussing Morris and the
influence he exerted upon Shaw. " What Morris taught
me," confessed Mr. Shaw, " was in the main technical —
printing, for example.* And I soon came to realize that his
most characteristic trait was integrity in the artistic sense.
By watching Morris, I first learned that Ruskin wasn't strong
as a critic of works of art. In a sense, Ruskin was a
naturalist because he understood Turner. And the key to
his comprehension of the pre-Raphaelites was his religious
sense. And yet he could not discover so glaring an error as
Bernardo Lurnio's employment of the same model for the
Virgin and the Magdalen. The trouble with Ruskin was that
he invariably fell into egregious blunders when he didn't have
his religious clue."
" I learned a great deal from Morris," he added, " because
Morris and I worked together — for I was intensely interested
in the pre-Raphaelite movement."
It was always a source of regret to Shaw that he never met
Bnrne-Jones, Morris's greatest friend. When Morris died, Shaw
* In this connection, compare The Author's View. A Criticism of Modern
Booh Printing. By Bernard Shaw. In the Caxton Magazine, January,
190a.
209 14
George Bernard Shaw
wrote obituary articles in the Daily Chronicle and in the
Saturday Review ; and when McKail's Life of Morris appeared, he
reviewed it in the Daily Chronicle. Burne-Jones was pleased
by the Saturday Review article, and wanted to meet Shaw. They
made appointment after appointment ; but something always
occurred — an illness, a journey, or the like — to defeat them. At
last they resolved that the meeting must come off ; and a firm
arrangement was made — for a Sunday lunch, it seems — to be kept
at all hazards. But Destiny had a card up its sleeve that they
did not reckon with. Burne-Jones died the day before ; so Shaw
never met him as an acquaintance, and only saw him twice, once
at an exhibition where he heard him say that a picture attributed
to Morris had been partly painted by Madox Brown, and once
at a theatre, where their seats happened to be next one
another.
When Shaw became a critic of music in 1888, he began to
consider whether he was making enough money by the very hard
work of plodding through all the picture exhibitions. At last he
counted his gains, and found, to his amazement, that his re-
muneration for paragraphs at fivepence per line, worked out
at — according to his recollection afterwards — less than forty
pounds a year; whereas two hundred pounds would not have
been at all excessive for the work. " Edmund Yates, when I
resigned and told him why," Mr. Shaw once told me, " was as
much staggered as I was myself, and proposed a much more
lucrative arrangement by which I should divide the work with
Lady Colin Campbell. But the division would not have been fair
to her ; and Yates, recognizing this, did what I asked, which was,
to hand the whole department over to Lady Colin, and confine
my contributions to music alone."
The period of Shaw's activities as an art critic is memorable
less for the quality and value of his criticism than for the revela-
tion of the essential moral integrity of the man so often denounced
as the cranky immoralist of this, our time. This, as we shall
see, appears most clearly in his relations with W. £. Henley, the
story of which, I believe, has never been told in print ; yet other
crucial instances, equally revelative, are worthy of record. Shaw's
azo
The Art Critic
experience amply justifies his statement that the public has
hardly any suspicion of the rarity of the able editor who is
loyal tQ, his profession and to his staff ; and that without such
an editor even moderately honest criticism is impossible. Take,
for example, the case of Shaw and a London paper. Shaw
wrote about pictures for the best part of a season until a naive
proposal was made to him that he should oblige certain artist-
friends of the editorium by favourable notices, and was assured
that he might oblige any friends of his own in the same way.
" This proposal was made in perfect good faith and in all
innocence/ 1 Shaw candidly avers, " it never having occurred to
those responsible that art criticism was a serious pursuit or
that any question of morals or conduct could possibly arise
over it. Of course I resigned with some vigour, though with-
out any ill humour; but some I know were quite sincerely,
pathetically hurt by my eccentric, unfriendly and disobliging
conduct." During his career as a critic Shaw was repeatedly
urged by colleagues to call attention to some abuse which they
themselves were not sufficiently strongly situated to mention.
He had to resign very desirable positions on the critical staff
of London papers ; in the case above mentioned, because he
considered it derogatory to write insincere puffs ; and in another
case, " because my sense of style revolted against the inter-
polation in my articles of sentences written by others to express
high opinions of artists, unknown to fame and to me." This
second resignation followed the appearance of an Academy
notice, written by Shaw in the capacity of art critic to another
London paper. This article on an Academy exhibition appeared
padded out to an extraordinary length by interpolations praising
works which Shaw had never seen — " No. 2,744 is a sweet head
of Mrs. by that talented young artist, Miss -," and so on.
It is needless to add that Shaw resigned in a highly explosive
manner. And so Shaw vanished from the picture galleries. His
comment on the conduct of the management of these papers
explains his own attitude, testifying conclusively to the rigour
of the moral standard to which he always conformed. " They
were no more guilty of corruption," Mr. Shaw expressed the
211 14*
George Bernard Shaw
case to me, " than a man with no notion of property can be
guilty of theft ; and to this day they probably have not
the least idea why I threw up a reasonably well-paid* job and
assumed an attitude vaguely implying some sort of disapproval ot
their right to do what they liked with their own paper."
It was probably at the particular Press view just referred to,
some time after 1889, t ^ at Henley's meeting with Shaw occurred.
To go back a little, James Runciman, the uncle of J. F. Runciman,
the musical critic, was a Cashel Byronite, and used to write Shaw
letters containing occasional references to Henley, who also
admired Cashel Byron's Profession. Between Runciman, who
had known Henley and quarrelled with him, and Cashel Byron,
Shaw got into correspondence with Henley. Among the various
literary and artistic Dulcineas whose championship Henley
mistook for criticism, was Mozart. Mr. Shaw thus explained the
situation to me :
" As I also knew Mozart's value, Henley induced me to write
articles on music for his paper, the Scots Observer, afterwards the
National Observer; and I did write some — not more than half
a dozen — perhaps not so many. Henley was an impossible editor.
He had no idea of criticism except to glorify the masters he liked,
and pursue their rivals with quixotic jealousy. To appreciate
Mozart without reviling Wagner was to Henley a blank injustice
to Mozart. Now, he knew I was what he called a Wagnerite,
and that I thought his objections to Wagner vieux jeu, stupid,
ignorant and common. Therefore he amused himself by
interpolating abuse of Wagner into my articles over my signature.
Naturally he lost his contributor ; and it was highly characteristic
of him that he did not understand why he could not get any more
articles from me. At the same time he made the National Observer
an organ, politically and socially, of the commonest sort of pluto-
cratic and would-be aristocratic Toryism, and clamoured in the
usual forcible-feeble way for the strong hand to ' put down '
the distress which then — in the eighties — was threatening insur-
rection. For this sort of thing I had no mercy. I did not object
to tall talk about hanging myself and my friends who were trying
to get something done for the condition of the people ; but what
212
The Art Critic
moved me to utter scorn was the association of the high republican
atmosphere of Byron, Shelley and Keats, and the gallantry
of Dumas pire — another idol of ours — with the most dastardly
class selfishness and political vulgarity. When Henley at last
pressed me very hard for another article, I wrote him in a per-
fectly friendly but frankly contemptuous strain, chaffing him
rather fiercely as the master of his fate, the captain of his soul,
with his head bloody but unbowed, and his hat always off
to the police and the upper classes." Shaw always believed
that, even then, Henley was simply puzzled, and thought Shaw
was only making a senseless literary display of smartness at
his expense.
Clearly Shaw was revolted by the atrocious vulgarity of Henley's
politics as contrasted with the pretentiousness of his literary
attitude. The defence of Henley after his death, to the effect
that he knew nothing of politics, and that he placed himself as
to the politics of the paper in the hands of his friend Charles
Whibley, disarmed Shaw, as I have good reason to know. For
Shaw liked Whibley well enough, regarding him as a clever
fellow in literary matters, but quite impossible politically.
Opinions similar to those quoted below may be found in the only
criticism Shaw ever wrote of Henley — a review of his poems in
the old Pall Mall Gazette under Mr. Stead's editorship. The
following quotation from a hitherto unpublished letter to me
vividly clarifies the whole matter by defining the grounds of
Shaw's criticism of Henley.
" Henley interested me as being what I call an Elizabethan,
by which I mean a man with an extraordinary and imposing
power of saying things, and with nothing whatever to say.
The real disappointment about his much discussed article on
Stevenson was not that he said spiteful things about his
former friend, but that he said nothing at all about him that
would not have been true of any man in all the millions then
alive. The world very foolishly reproached him because he
did not tell the usual epitaph monger's lies about ' Franklin,
my loyal friend.' But the real tragedy about the business
213
George Bernard Shaw
was that a man who had known Stevenson intimately, and
who was either a penetrating critic or nothing, had nothing
better worth saying about him than that he was occasionally
stingy about money and that when he passed a looking-glass
he looked at it. Which Stevenson's parlour-maid could have
told as well as Henley if she had been silly enough to suppose
that the average man is a generous sailor in a melodrama,
and totally incurious and unconscious as to his personal
appearance. But it was always thus with Henley. He
could appreciate literature and enjoy criticism. He could
describe anything that was forced on his observation and
experience, from a tom-cat in an area to a hospital operation.
Give him the thing to be expressed, and he could find its
expression wonderfully either in prose or verse. But beyond
that he could not go : the things he said — or the things he
wrote (I know nothing of his conversation) — are always
conventionalities, all the worse because they are selected
from the worst part of the great stock of conventionalities
— the conventional unconventionalisms. He could discover
and encourage talent, and was thus half a good editor, but he
could not keep friends with it ; and so his papers finally fell
through."
As in the case of his obituary notices of Sir Augustus Harris
and Sir Henry Irving, Shaw was accused of nothing short of
brutality in his attitude towards Henley, the Cashel Byronite
who had wished to see Shaw's novel dramatized. In the first
place, Henley admired Shaw, and it seemed ungenerous for Shaw
to repay him by a denial of the sort of talent he desired to excel
in. And in the second place, it seemed to Shaw's detractors that
it was doubly ungenerous of a man sound in wind and limb to dis-
parage a man who was physically a wreck, fighting bravely against
infirmity and pain. I was not surprised to find, on inquiring
of Mr Shaw his real feelings and attitude in the matter,
that he regarded both these reasons as absurd, sentimental and
pointless.
" People have a strong feeling," Mr. Shaw explained, " that
214
The Art Critic
if a man has lost his hearing or sight bravely in a noble cause
the world is thereby bound in decency to assume for ever after
that he had the eye of an eagle and the ear of a hare." He
continued, impressively : " I have never belittled a misfortune
in that way. Long ago, when a blind poet died, and certain
maudlin speeches of his were repeated in print as expressions of
the pathos of his darkened existence, I said, also in print, that he
always said these things when he was drunk, and that the fact
that he was blind may have added to the pity of them, but did
not give them any sort of validity. < ! * t&'^i
" In the same way when, in the European revolutionary move-
ment, men came with horrible experiences of prison and Siberian
wanderings on them, and women whose husbands had been hanged
or committed suicide, I have always had to stand out against the
notion that they were the better instead of the worse for their
misfortunes, or that they derived any credit or authority what-
ever from them. Give them the indulgence due to enforced
weakness or the help due to unavoidable distress ; but don't make
them heroes and leaders ex-officio because they have been unlucky
enough to be lamed.
" And so, I have often conveyed to sentimental people an
impression of revolting callousness simply because I know that
suffering is suffering, and not merely the acquisition of a romantic
halo. Henley's infirmities were to me trifles compared to those
which I had encountered in other cases ; and in any case, I was
trained to look in the face the fact that infirmities disable people
instead of reinforcing them. People who learn in suffering what
they teach in song usually give very dangerous lessons ; and
I admire Henley for having no doctrine of that sort. Besides, I
have always abhorred the petty disloyalties which men call sparing
one another's feelings.
" To make an end of the matter," Mr. Shaw concluded, " Henley,
though a barren critic and poet, had enough talent and character
to command plenty of consideration. A man cannot be every-
thing. I am as fond of music as Henley was of literature," he
added, his grey-blue eyes twinkling brightly ; " but I am the worst
of players, and have a very poor voice."
215
George Bernard Shaw
"Then Henley exercised no traceable influence upon your
career ? " I inquired.
" Not the very slightest," replied Mr. Shaw, decisively. " If
Henley had been a good fellow, I should doubtless have influenced
him."
The opinion that Shaw's art during this period is less interesting
than his life does not necessarily involve any reflection upon the
value of his experience as an art critic in giving direction and
tendency to the subsequent course of his development. Indeed
Shaw has been mainly influenced by works of art in his artificial
culture : he has always been more consciously susceptible to music
and painting than to literature. It is no idle assertion— one that
Shaw is fond of repeating — that Mozart and Michael Angelo count
for a great deal in the making of his mind. And, however para-
doxical it may sound, the English dramatists after Shakespeare
are practically negligible as concerning their influence in the
development of his peculiar and highly specialized dramatic genius.
His close and familiar daily intercourse with the music masters
of the past ; his instant recognition of Wagner's overwhelming
greatness ; his rapturous delight in that king of music-dramatists,
Mozart ; his dogged attempts, alone and unaided, to master the
difficulties of pianoforte playing, which eventuated in his becoming
a congenial, sympathetic accompanist — all early marked him as
a natural and undiscouragedly persistent lover of music. His
individual studies of Italian art, in its history and its expression,
while he was still in his teens, his frequent visits to the Dublin
Gallery, the many hours passed in London at the priceless picture
galleries in Trafalgar Square and Hampton Court, testify with
equal force to his spontaneous preoccupation with the best
that has been thought and done in the world of art. It would
carry one too far afield to pursue the inquiry as to what
influence Michael Angelo might possibly have exerted upon the
dramas of Bernard Shaw. But there can be little doubt that
what Shaw found to wonder at and glorify in Michael Angelo
was his passion for anatomy, his devotion to the studiously
realistic, and his unlimited mastery of form acquired through
" profound and patient interrogation of reality." Shaw, the
216
The Art Critic
close, searching student of life, found untold inspiration in the
discovery of the genuinely naturalistic spirit in which Michael
Angelo worked ! Words he once used in speaking to me of the
influence of Michael Angelo upon his art are very illuminative.
" I never shall forget climbing an enormously high, rickety frame-
work, in company with Anatole France," he remarked, " in order
to get a closer look at the Delphic Sibyl. We were close enough
to touch it with our hands ; and I was surprised to discover that,
instead of losing, it gained impressiveness on nearer view. The
grand, set face made a tremendous impression upon me. For
the first time, I fully realized that Michael Angelo was a great
artist, and a great man as well — because his every subject is a
person of genius. He never had a commonplace subject. His
models are extraordinary people. They are all Supermen and
Superwomen."
" Michael Angelo, you see," he continued, " taught me this —
always to put people of genius into my works. I am always
setting a genius over against a commonplace person."
In the same spirit, Shaw praised Madox Brown as a realist,
" because he had vitality enough to find intense enjoyment in
the world as it really is, unbeautified, unidealized, untitivated
in any way for artistic consumption." The sad, sensuous day-
dreams of Rossetti, the gentlemanly draughtsmanship of Leighton,
the whole romantic trend of English art, with its delicacy of senti-
ment, its beauty-fancying, its reality-shirking philosophy, found
Shaw coldly, cruelly condemnatory. " Take the young lady
painted by Ingres as ' La Source,' for example. Imagine having
to make conversation for her for a couple of hours." This gives
the tone of his criticism. His deepest scorn was aroused by that
form of art which sets up " decorative moral systems contrasting
roseate and rapturous vice with lilied and languorous virtue,
making ' Love ' face both ways as the universal softener and
redeemer." The artist who sought to depict life with perfect
integrity — in Browning's phrase, " to paint man man, whatever
the issue" — the artist who sought to express the veracity and
reality of life rather than its imagined beauty and poetry, found
in Shaw an unhesitating champion. This passion for unidealized
217
George Bernard Shaw
reality was the outcome of long and deliberate study of art works,
concerning each of which Shaw deliberately forced himself to
form an intelligent and conscious estimate. This was the solid
residuum of his studies, rescued from a ruck of sophistication.
" I remember once when I was an art critic/' wrote Shaw in 1897,
" and when Madox Brown's work was only known to me by a
few drawings, treating Mr. Frederick Shields to a critical demon-
stration of Madox Brown's deficiencies, pointing out in one of the
drawings the lack of ' beauty ' in some pair of elbows that had
more of the wash-tub than of ' The Toilet of Venus ' about them.
Mr. Shields contrived without any breach of good manners to
make it quite clear to me that he considered Madox Brown a great
painter and me a fool. I respected both convictions at the time ;
and now I share them. Only, I plead in extenuation of my folly
that I had become so accustomed to take it for granted that what
every English painter was driving at was the sexual beautifica-
tion and moral idealization of life into something as unlike itself
as possible, that it did not at first occur to me that a painter could
draw a plain woman for any other reason than that he could not
draw a pretty one."*
Shaw stood forth as a champion of all forms of art — pictorial
fictive and dramatic — which aim at realistic exposure of the
sheer facts of life without idealistic falsification and romantic
sublimation. He lauded Madox Brown, for example, as he lauded
Ibsen, and for the same reason : they both took for their themes
11 not youth, beauty, morality, gentility and prosperity as con-
ceived by Mr. Smith of Brixton and Bayswater, but real life
taken as it is, with no more regard for poor Smith's dreams and
hypocrisies than the weather has for his shiny silk hat when he
forgets his umbrella." It is no matter for surprise that the un-
shirking student of sociological conditions should have chosen
to write Widowers 9 Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession ; it
would have been astounding had he not done so. And yet the
catholicity of his taste in art enabled him to realize, not simply
one aspect of English art, but the real English art-culture of
* Madox Brown, Watts, and Ibsen. In the Saturday Review, March 13th,
1897.
2l8
The Art Critic
to-day. To Shaw, indeed, the significance of the modern move-
ment in England had its germ in the growing sense of the " naive
dignity and charm " of thirteenth-century work, in a passionate
affection for the exquisite beauty of fifteenth-century art. " The
whole rhetorical school in English literature, from Shakespeare
to Byron/' he once wrote, " appears to us in our present mood
only another side of the terrible degringolade from Michael Angelo
to Canova and Thorwaldsen, all of whose works would not now
tempt us to part with a single fragment by Donatello, or even
a pretty foundling baby by Delia Robbia." He maintained that
William Morris made himself the greatest living master of the
English language, both in prose and verse, by picking up the
tradition of the literary art where Chaucer left it; that Burne-
Jones made himself the greatest among English decorative painters
by picking up the tradition of his art where Lippi left it, and
utterly ignoring " their Raphaels, Correggios and stuff " ; and
that Morris and Burne-Jones, close friends and co-operators in
many a masterpiece, form the highest aristocracy of English art
of our day.*
The only controversial question that came up during Shaw's
period as an art critic was raised by the Impressionists ; and
his reputation, with the select few, for consistency is sustained
by the course he adopted. He recognized Impressionism as a new
birth of energy in art, a movement in painting which was wholly
beneficial and progressive, and in no sense insane and decadent.
Despite the fact that the movement, like all new movements in
art, was accompanied by many absurdities— exhibition of count-
less daubs, the practice of optical distortion, the substitution
of " canvases which looked like enlargements of obscure photo-
graphs for the familiar portraits of masters of the hounds in
cheerfully unmistakable pink coats, mounted on bright chest-
nut horses " — Shaw supported it vigorously because, " being the
outcome of heightened attention and quickened consciousness
on the part of its disciples, it was evidently destined to improve
pictures greatly by substituting a natural, observant, real style
for a conventional, taken-for-granted, ideal one." It is needless
* Cf. King Arthur. In the Saturday Review, January 19th, 1895.
219
George Bernard Shaw
to say that Shaw did not fall into the Philistine trap and talk
" greenery yallery " nonsense about Burne- Jones and the pre-
Raphaelite school : his admiration was checked by the sternest
critical reservations. He applauded the Impressionists for their
busy study of the atmosphere, and of the relation of light and
dark between the various objects depicted, i.e., of " values."
Like Zola in his championship of Monet, Shaw led a miniature
crusade in behalf of Whistler, whose pictures at first quite
naturally amazed people accustomed to see the " good north
light " of a St. John's Wood studio represented at exhibitions as
sunlight in the open air — for example, Bouguereau's " Girl in a
Cornfield." More than this need not be said : that Shaw never
joined the ranks of the moquers who called Mr. Whistler
" Jimmy."
It is worthy of record that Shaw vigorously and ably cham-
pioned the Dutch school, earnestly advocating the claims of James
Maris as a great painter ; and he stood up for Van Uhde, not only
in defence of his pictures of Christ surrounded by people in tall
hats and frock coats, but also in favour of his excellent painting
of light in a dry, crisp, diffused way then quite unfashionable.
But his most signal art criticism of the last decade, beyond
question, has had to do with photography. In 1901, he announced
that " the conquest by photography of the whole field of mono-
chromatic representative art may be regarded as completed by
the work of this year." His position is based on the dictum that
" in photography, the drawing counts for nothing, the thought
and judgment count for everything ; whereas in the etching
and daubing processes where great manual skill is needed to
produce anything that the eye can endure, the execution counts
for more than the thought." This is no new or sudden notion,
derived from the study of some photographic exhibition, but the
mature statement of a judgment arrived at over a quarter of a
century ago. In An Unsocial Socialist, Trefusis astounds Erskine
and Sir Charles Brandon with those same remarkable views on
photography which to-day, in the mouth of Bernard Shaw, so
delight the patrons of the Photographic Salon.*
* Compare Photography, October 26th, 1909.
220
The Art Critic
" It is more than twenty years since I first said in print
that nine-tenths (or ninety-nine-hundredths, I forget which)
of what was then done by brush and pencil would presently
be done, and far better done, by the camera. But it needed
some imagination, as well as some hardihood, to say this at
that time . . . because the photographers of that day were
not artists. . . . Let us admit handsomely that some of the
elder men had the root of the matter in them as the younger
men of to-day ; but the process did not then attract artists.
... On the whole, the process was not quite ready for the
ordinary artist, because (i) it could not touch colour or even
give colours their proper light values ; (2) the Impressionist
movement had not then rediscovered and popularized the
great range of art that lies outside colour; (3) the eyes of
artists had been so long educated to accept the most grossly
fictitious conventions as truths of representation that many
of the truths of the focussing screen were at first repudiated
as grotesque falsehoods; (4) the wide-angled lens did in
effect lie almost as outrageously as a Royal Academician,
whilst the anastigmat was revoltingly prosaic, and the silver
print, though so exquisite that the best will, if they last,
be one day prized by collectors, was cloying, and only suitable
to a narrow range of subjects; (5) above all, the vestries
would cheerfully pay fifty pounds for a villainous oil-painting
of a hospitable chairman, whilst they considered a guinea
a first-rate price for a dozen cabinets, and two-pound-ten a
noble bid for an enlargement, even when the said enlarge-
ment had been manipulated so as to be as nearly as possible
as bad as the fifty pound painting. But all that is changed
nowadays. Mr. Whistler, in the teeth of a storm of ignorant
and silly ridicule, has forced us to acquire a sense of tone,
and has produced portraits of almost photographic excellence ;
the camera has taught us what we really saw as against what
the draughtsman used to show us; and the telephoto lens
and its adaptations, with the isochromatic plate and screen,
and the variety and manageableness of modern printing
processes, have converted the intelligent artists, smashed the
221
George Bernard Shaw
picture-fancying critics, and produced exhibitions such as
those now open at the Dudley and New Galleries, which
may be visited by people who, like myself, have long since
given up as unendurable the follies and falsehoods, the tricks,
fakes, happy accidents, and desolating conventions of the
picture galleries. The artists have still left to them invention,
didactics, and (for a little while longer) colour. But selection
and representation, covering ninety-nine-hundredths of our
annual output of art, belong henceforth to photography.
Someday the camera will do the work of Velasquez and Peter
de Hooghe, colour and all ; and then the draughtsmen and
painters will be left to cultivate the pious edifications of
Raphael, Kaulbach, Delaroche, and the designers of the
S. P. C. K. But even then they will photograph their
models instead of drawing them."*
In a paper Maurice Maeterlinck wrote for Mr. Alvin Langdon
Coburn, who kindly gave me a copy, he charges art with having
held itself aloof from " the great movement which for half a
century has engrossed all forms of human activity in profitably
exploiting the natural forces that fill heaven and earth." Maeter-
linck lauds the camera as an instrument of thought, proclaiming it
the best of mediums, because it serves " to portray objects and
beings more quickly and more accurately than can pencil or
crayon." Just as Maeterlinck concludes that thought has at
last found a fissure through which to penetrate the mystery of
this anonymous force (the sun), " invade it, subjugate it, animate
it, and compel it to say such things as have not yet been said in
all the realm of chiaroscuro, of grace, of beauty and of truth,"
so Shaw expresses his belief that " the old game is up," and that
" the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush
as an instrument of artistic representation."
Shaw is a vigorous champion of the photographic art in its
integrity; attempts at imitation of etching or painting draw
his hottest fire. The idea of sensitive photographers allowing
* Th* Exhibitions — /., by G. Bernard Shaw. In the Amateur Photographer,
October ist, 1901.
222
*a«
The Art
themselves to be bull-dosed into treating painting, not as an
obsolete makeshift which they have surpassed and superseded,
but as a glorious ideal to which they have to live up ! ! ! One day
Mr. Shaw was showing me some striking examples of his own
photographic work — a remarkable picture of Sidney Webb, I
recall in especial, an effect got by omitting to do something in
taking the photograph. Mr. Shaw remarked that some of the
most unique and fantastic pictures he had ever taken were the
results of accidents. One day, for instance, he spilled some
boiling water over a photograph of himself, which immediately
converted it into so capital an imitation of the damaged parts
of Mantegna's frescoes in Mantua that the print delighted him
more in its ruin than it had in its original sanity. And, in view
of his violently-expressed detestation of photographic imitation
of painting, it is very refreshing to hear him confess that his own
experience as a critic and picture fancier had sophisticated him
so thoroughly, that " those accidental imitations of the products
of the old butter-fingered methods of picture-making often
fascinate me so that I have to put forth all my strength of mind
to resist the temptation to become a systematic forger of damaged
frescoes and Gothic caricatures."
Mr. Shaw was harshly ridiculed and sharply censured for per-
mitting the exhibition in 1906 of a nude photograph of himself
by Alvin Langdon Coburn. In this connection, I recall a conversa-
tion with fcduard J. Steichen, who was showing me a collection
of his masterly prints, including several nudes. The faces of the
nude figures were averted ; and Steichen told me, with a laugh,
that Shaw had ridiculed him unmercifully for permitting his
subjects to call attention to their embarrassment and shame by
averting their faces. And in 1901, Mr. Shaw wrote :
" The camera will not build up the human figure into a
monumental fiction as Michael Angelo did, or coil it cun-
ningly into a decorative one, as Burne-Jones did. But it
will draw it as it is, in the clearest purity or the softest
mystery, as no draughtsman can or ever could. And by the
seriousness of its veracity it will make the slightest lubricity
intolerable. ' Nudes from the Paris Salon ' pass the moral
223
George Bernard Shaw
octroi because they justify their rank as ' high art ' by the
acute boredom into which they plunge the spectator. Their
cheap and vulgar appeal is nullified by the vapid unreality of
their representation. Photography is so truthful — its sub-
jects are so obviously realities, and not idle fancies — that
dignity is imposed on it as effectually as it is on a church
congregation. Unfortunately, so is that false decency,
rightly detested by artists, which teaches people to be ashamed
of their bodies ; and I am sorry to see that the photographic
life school still shirks the faces of its sitters, and thus
gives them a disagreeable air of doing something they are
ashamed of."*
One morning in Paris, during the period that Shaw was sitting
to Rodin, Coburn, with his camera, caught Shaw coming out
of his morning bath ; whereupon he laughingly bade Shaw to
" be still and look pleasant." " I casually assumed, as near as
I could recall it," Mr. Shaw told me, " the pose of Rodin's ( Le
Penseur.' It was all done in a moment, and although I am not
like * Le Penseur,' at least my pose is not unlike his." Mr. Shaw
permitted the photograph to be put on exhibition as an object-
lesson, so to speak, to the photographic life school ; as Steichen
expressed it to me : "I believe Mr. Shaw wanted to show the
courage of his convictions, by publicly taking the medicine he
so unhesitatingly prescribed for others."
It is needless to point out that Bernard Shaw, the analytic critic
and clear thinker par excellence, would naturally prefer photo-
graphy to painting. When away from London he is seldom to
be seen without a camera slung over his shoulders ; and he has
been taking pictures, and dabbling away at interesting photo-
graphic experiments, for many years. Without talent as an
artist himself, but with almost a passion for photography, we
need not be surprised to hear him praise the photographer because
he is free of " that clumsy tool — the human hand — which will
always go its own single way, and no other." Steichen and
Coburn, he has told me and he has told them, are the two greatest
* The Exhibitions — //., in the Amateur Photographer, October 18th, 190 1.
224
The Art Critic
photographers in the world ; and he once said to me of Coburn :
" Whenever his work does not please you, watch and pray for a
while and you will find that your opinion will change. 11 *
To Shaw the true conquest of colour no longer seems far off
in the light of Lumi&re's discoveries, and the day will soon come,
he surmises, when work like that of Hals and Velasquez may be
done by men who have never painted anything except their own
nails with pyro. "As to the painters and their fanciers, I snort
defiance at them ; their day of daubs is over." He once declared
for two photographs of himself against anything of Holbein, Rem-
brandt, or Velasquez. " When I compare their subtle diversity
with the monotonous inaccuracy and infirmity of drawings, I
marvel at the gross absence of analytic power and of imagination
which still sets up the works of the great painters, defects and all,
as standard, instead of picking out the qualities they achieved
and the possibilities they revealed, in spite of the barbarous
crudity of their methods." There are certain quite definite things
the photographer has not yet achieved : Shaw's imagination as
a creative dramatist teaches him this, even though he insists that
the decisive quality in a photographer is the " faculty of seeing
certain things and being tempted by them." Oscar Wilde acutely
remarked that in certain modern portraits — Sargent's, notably,
I should say — there is often as much of the artist as of the subject.
Bernard Shaw insists that in the pictorial and dramatic phases of
the photographic art of the future, both the artist and the sub-
ject must be imaginative artists, working in conjunction. " As
to the creative, dramatic, story-telling painters — Carpaccio, and
Mantegna, and the miraculous Hogarth, for example — it is clear
that photography can do their work only through a co-operation
of sitter and camerist which assimilates the relations of artist ,/
and model to those at present existing between playwright and
actor. Indeed, just as the playwright is sometimes only a very
humble employee of the actor or actress manager, it is conceivable
that in dramatic and didactic photography the predominant
partner will not be necessarily either the photographer or the
• Compare Shaw's article, Coburn the Camerist, in the Metropolitan
Magazine, May, 1906.
2*5 15
George Bernard Shaw
model, but simply whichever of the twain contributes the rarest
art to the co-operation. Already that instinctive animal, the
public, goes into a shop and says : ' Have you any photographs of
Mrs. Patrick Campbell ? ' and not ' Have you any photographs
by Elliott and Fry, Downey, etc., etc. ? ' The Salon is altering
this, and photographs are becoming known as Demachys, Holland
Days, Horsley Hintons, and so forth, as who should say Greuzes,
Hoppners and Linnells. But, then, the Salon has not yet touched
the art of Hogarth. When it does, ' The Rake's Progress ' will
evidently depend as much on the genius of the rake as of the
moralist who squeezes the bulb, and then we shall see what we
shall — "
3t6
THE MUSIC CRITIC
" CORNO DI BASSETTO " AND " G. B. S."
" Don't be in a harry to contradict G. B. S., as he never commits himself
on a musical subject until he knows at least six times as much about it as
you do." — Music. In the World, January 18th, 1893.
15*
CHAPTER VIII
IN 1888 a gentleman described in the World at that time as
"a Chinese statesman named Tay Pay,"* founded the Star,
claiming for it the distinction of the first and only halfpenny
paper, and ignoring the Echo, which early succumbed to the treat-
ment. On the recommendation of Mr. H. W. Massingham, Shaw
was placed on the editorial staff as leader writer, on the second
day of the paper's existence. At that time the Fabian Society
had just invented the municipal modification of Socialism called
Progressivism ; and the sole object of Shaw, then a " moderate
and constitutional, but strenuous Socialist," in joining the Star
was to foist this new invention upon it as the latest thing in
Liberalism. Here Shaw's " impossibilism " broke out worse than
ever ; and Mr. O'Connor, an Irishman too, and a skilled journalist
in the bargain, was not to be taken in. He refused to print the
articles. " Then the Fabian Society ordered all its members to
write to the Star** records Shaw, " expressing indignant surprise
at the lukewarmness of its Liberalism and the reactionary and
obsolete character of its views. This was more successful : the
paper became Progressive, and London rose so promptly to the
new programme, that the first County Council election was fought
and won on it. The Liberal leaders remonstrated almost daily
with T. P., being utterly bewildered by what was to them a most
dangerous heresy. But the Star articles became more and more
Progressive, then ultra-Progressive, then positively Jacobin ;
and the further they went the better London liked them. They
were not, I beg to say, written by me, but by Mr. H. W. Massing-
ham."t
* Mr. T. P. O'Connor.
t III speaking of his first appearance as a journalistic writer — in a " Lon-
don Letter," written, at the age of fifteen, for a well-known journal in Scar-
229
George Bernard Shaw
While the Fabians were thus engaged in "collaring the Star
by this stage-army stratagem/' Shaw, to the utter consternation
of the Chinese statesman, was writing political leaders for which
the country was not ripe by about five hundred years, according
to the political computation of the eighties. Too good-natured
to do his duty and put Shaw out summarily, Tay Pay, in despera-
tion, proposed that Shaw should have a column to himself, to be
headed " Music," and to be " coloured by occasional allusions to
that art." It was with a gasp of relief that he heard Shaw's
acceptance of the proposition ; and so a new career opened for
Shaw as " Corno di Bassetto,"* a " person now forgotten, but
I flatter myself, very popular for a couple of years in the Star."
Among Shaw's colleagues on the Star at this time were Clement
K. Shorter and Richard Le Gallienne. A. B. Walkley, the dis-
tinguished dramatic critic of the London Times, was then the
" Star man " in the theatres, and although he was more fastidious
and dignified than the incorrigible " Bassetto," he was quite as
amusing. " I am far from denying that a man of genius may make
even a newspaper notice of the Royal Academy or of a ' Monday
Pop.' permanently valuable and delightful," Mr. Archer once
said ; " all I maintain is that it assuredly takes a man of genius
to do so. Mr. Bernard Shaw . . . has to my thinking a peculiar
genius for bringing day-by-day musical criticism into vital rela-
tion with aesthetics at large, and even with ethics and politics —
in a word, with life. . . ." According to his subsequent confes-
borough — Max Beerbohm once wrote (the Saturday Review, January 26th,
1901J : "I well remember that the first paragraph I wrote was in reference
to the first number of the Stair, which had just been published. Mr. T. P.
O'Connor, in his editorial pronunciamento, had been hotly philanthropic.
' If, 1 he had written, ' we enable the charwoman to put two lumps of sugar
in her tea instead of one, then we shall not have worked in vain.' My com-
ment on this was that if Mr. O'Connor were to find that charwomen did not
take sugar in their tea, his paper would, presumably, cease to be issued.
... I quote it merely to show that I, who am still regarded as a young
writer, am exactly connate with Mr. Shaw. For it was in this very number
of the Star that Mr. Shaw, as ' Corno di Bassetto/ made his first bow to
the public." This latter statement, although inaccurate, is essentially
correct.
* The name of a musical instrument which went out of use in Mozart's
time.
*3<>
V ..A
The Music Critic
sion, " The Stafs own captious critic," as Shaw was denominated
at the time, used the word music in a platonically comprehensive
sense ; for he wrote about anything and everything that came into
his head. He once spoke of his column in the Star, signed " Corno
di Bassetto," as "a mixture of triviality, vulgarity, farce and
tomfoolery with genuine criticism." George Henry Lewes' style,
as Mr. Archer has shrewdly observed,* reminds one of that of
" Corno di Bassetto " ; but the dramatic essays of Lewes, Shaw
freely confesses, are miles beyond the crudities of Di Bassetto,
although the combination of a laborious criticism with a reck-
lessly flippant manner is the same in both. Indeed, Shaw's column
in the Star was perhaps the most startling evidence of the insur-
gency and iconoclasm of the New Journalism as represented by
the Star, its foremost exponent. Imagine a column a week in
the sprightly vein of the following :
" I warn others that Offenbach's music is wicked. It is
abandoned stuff : every accent in it is a snap of the fingers
in the face of moral responsibility, every ripple and sparkle
on its surface twits me for my teetotalism, and mocks at the
early rising which I fully intend to make a habit of some
day. ... In Mr. Cellier's scores, music is still the chastest
of the muses. In Offenbach's she is— what shall I say? —
I am ashamed of her. I no longer wonder that the Germans
came to Paris and suppressed her with fire and thunder.
Here in England how respectable she is ! Virtuous and
rustically innocent her six-eight measures are, even when
Dorothy sings, ' Come, fill up your glass to the brim ' ! She
learned her morals from Handel, her ladylike manners from
Mendelssohn, her sentiment from the ' Bailiff's Daughter of
Islington.' But listen to her in Paris, with Offenbach. Talk
of six-eight time : why, she stumbles at the second
quaver, only to race off again in a wild Bacchanalian,
Saturnalian, petticoat spurning, irreclaimable, shocking
quadrille."
* In his introduction to the Dramatic Essays of John Forsier and G$org$
Htnry Ltwes.
231
George Bernard Shaw
No more accurate characterization of the work of Di Bassetto
can be conceived than is to be found in Shaw's own confession.
He secured the privileges he usurped, he says, in two ways : first,
by taking care that " Corno di Bassetto " should always be
amusing; and, secondly, by using a considerable knowledge of
music, which nobody suspected him of possessing, to provide a
solid substratum of genuine criticism for the mass of outrageous
levities and ridiculous irrelevancies which were the dramatic charac-
teristics of " Bassetto." " I daresay these articles would seem
shabby, vulgar, cheap, silly, vapid enough if they were dug up
and exposed to the twentieth century light ; but in those days,
and in the context of the topics of that time, they were sufficiently
amusing to serve their turn."*
It will be recalled that Shaw, from his early childhood, had been
in close contact with the best that had been thought, felt, and
written in music. It was his practice as a boy to whistle to him-
self the operatic themes he heard continually practised at his
home, precisely as a street gamin wliistles the latest piece of
" rag-time." He was introduced to Wagner's music for the first
time by hearing a second-rate military band play an arrangement
of the Tannhduser march. He thought it a rather commonplace
plagiarism from the famous theme in Der Frrischulz. This boyish
impression was exactly the same as that recorded of the mature
Berlioz, who was to Shaw at that time the merest shadow of a
name which he had read once or twice. Shaw learned his notes
at the age of sixteen ; and although for a long time thereafter he
inflicted untold suffering on his neighbours, he became in time
quite a good accompanist. In the early days in London, when he
was not laboriously writing five pages a day on one of his novels,
Shaw occasionally tried his hand at musical composition, at
writing and setting words to music. I have before me now a folded
sheet of pink paper, dated " 23rd of June, 1883," in Shaw's fine
handwriting, on which he had written music for one of Shelley's
poems, Rossetti edition, Vol. III., p. 107. On the inside of
the folded sheet, in Shaw's hand, is copied the poem, headed
Lines, beginning:
* In the Days of Our Youth. In the Star, February 19th, 1906.
232
The Music Critic
M When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dnst lies dead ;
When the cloud is scattered.
The rainbow's glory is shed ;
" When the lute is broken,
Sweet notes arc remembered not ;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot."
Shaw was deeply interested in a study of Wagner's music, and
took great pains in studying Wagner's methods of composition.
I have seen Shaw's musical notes made during this period — sheets
of stiff paper on which he had written out the musical scores of
the various distinct leit motifs in the Wagnerian operas — the
Ring motive, the Rheingold motive, etc., etc. — with fine marginal
stenographic notes in the Pitman system. He once made quite a
study of counterpoint ; and, as we learned in an earlier chapter,
acquired a grounding in " Temperament " through his acquaintance
with his friend, James Lecky. When Mr. O'Connor transferred
Shaw from the editorial staff to the post of musical critic for the
Star, believing that he could do no great harm there, his wisdom
was justified by the result. All his experience in writing and
criticism on the Star, combined with his early knowledge of music,
filled Shaw's hands with weapons. And when Louis Engel, the
" best hated musical critic in Europe," as Shaw calls him, found
t necessary to give up his position as musical critic of the
World, his post fell to " Corno di Bassetto."
At the time when Shaw first entered the lists as a musical critic,
he was possessed of the strongest convictions on the subject of
music, musicians, and true musical genius. In Love Among the
Artists Shaw has given expression to his decided views con-
cerning the pedantry of the academic schools, the absurd jargon
of conventional musical criticism, and the vacuity and incon-
sequence of all music, based on method alone, which does not
come into being through unaffected enthusiasm for, art, and the
sincere effort toward? the complete realization of personality. The
musical criticism which takes the analysis of " Bach in B minor "
as its point of departure is there held up to unmeasured scorn.
It seems something more than a coincidence that the avoidance
«33
George Bernard Shaw
of this very subject, with all its implications, should have been
the condition on which Shaw began his career as a critic of music.
In connection with his appointment as musical critic of the Star,
Shaw relates this story of Mr. O'Connor : " He placed himself in
my hands with one reservation only. l Say what you like/ he
said ; ' but for — (here I omit a pathetic Oriental adjuration) —
don't tell us anything about Bach in B minor.' It was a bold
speech, considering the superstitious terror in which the man who
has the abracadabra of musical technology at his fingers' end
holds the uninitiated editor ; but it conveyed a golden rule."
Shaw was in perfect accord with the editor in the belief that
" Bach in B minor " is not good criticism, not good sense, not
interesting to the general readers, not useful to the student. He
fulfilled his part of the contract far more completely than the
" Chinese statesman " had any right to expect. Not only did
Shaw not tell us anything about " Bach in B minor " : he spent
six years of his life in holding the practice up to ridicule and
contempt !
Bernard Shaw brought his critical faculty to bear upon music
in England during the period when the academic faction held full
sway. There was a large reserve of native musical talent in
England at this time, but it found nothing like full scope for its
development, largely because of the commercial pandering to
popular taste. The so-called masters of contemporary music in
England were all reared on the methodology of the schools. Dr.
Mackenzie, the Principal of the Rdyal Academy of Music, was
probably the leader of the academic faction. Sir George Grove,
author of that standard work, the Dictionary of Musicians.
was an honoured figure in the world of music. Dr. Hubert Parry,
at the height of his creative activity, was writing and occasionally
conducting his oratorios, such as Job and Judith. These and
other earlier works of his — notably, L' Allegro ed il Pensieroso
and Prometheus — Shaw took the utmost pleasure in declaring
to be " without any merit whatsoever," or " the most conspicuous
failures," despite their fine feeling, their scrupulous moderation,
and other pleasant and perfectly true irrelevancies. At the
Albert Hall, Sir Joseph Barnby, Principal of theJRoyal Choral
*34
The Music Critic
Society, in his measured and complacent style, was leading those
huge, lumbering choirs which are still the pride of Great Britain.
Villiers Stanford, that Irish professor ever trifling in a world of
ideas, was writing his Eden, and other works, which entitled
him to a high place in the councils of academicism. Goring
Thomas, for his Golden Web, and other operas, had already
attained a position as a dramatic composer, which, according to
Shaw, at least, " placed the production of an opera of his beyond
all suspicion as a legitimate artistic enterprise." Arnold Dol-
metsch, that rarely fine interpreter of ancient music, was giving
those unique viol concerts in the hall of Barnard's Inn and else-
where which charmed Arthur Symons yesterday as they charmed
Bernard Shaw long ago. Gilbert and Sullivan had once more
joined forces in Utopia, scoring another operatic triumph, some-
what less decisive and conspicuous, it must be confessed, than
Pinafore, The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. Cowen was
winning encomiums as a conductor, and Sterndale Bennett was
still a name to conjure with. To the many, Wagner, like Ibsen,
was still an offensive impostor. But Ashton Ellis's exhaustive
task of translating Wagner's works was slowly proceeding ; and
Armbruster, that Bayreuth extension lecturer, so to speak, aided
by Shaw in the Star and in the World, was paving the way for a
more general comprehension and appreciation of Wagner in
England. Paderewski was slowly mounting to the position of
the foremost living pianist, and Patti had begun to give her
" Farewell Concerts."
In musical criticism, as in all other phases of his strangely
diversified career, Shaw is essentially a revolutionary. His attack
upon Parry's Job, so he always maintained, threatened to call forth
a great national protest ! He fought for Wagner with the same
revolutionary enthusiasm which enlisted him in the cause of
Ibsen — and Shaw. If Shaw were writing musical criticism to-day,
he would no doubt attack Edward Elgar's Dream of Gerontius
with the same fierce zeal that marked his indictment of Job. He
had no tolerance for anything traditional, not even for traditional
versions of old airs, for the simple reason that they were always
inaccurate. So jealous was he of his critical sense, for fear of its
235
George Bernard Shaw
prostitution by irrelevant beauty or factitious romance, that he
steadfastly steeled himself against that subtlest of all forces in
undermining critical integrity — personal magnetism.
Perhaps the simplest way to arrive at a comprehension of
Shaw, the critic of music, is by taking account of his tastes and
aversions. For example, Shaw usually viewed Paderewski's
performances, at the time when the Polish pianist was first
creating such sensations in England, as brutal contests between
the piano and the pianist to settle the question of the survival of
the fittest. The following description of his sensations on hearing
Paderewski is not without its reminder of that once popular piice
de recitation, How Ruby Played.* " The concerto was over,
the audience in wild enthusiasm, and the piano a wreck. Regarded
as an immensely spirited young harmonious blacksmith, who puts
a concerto on the piano as upon an anvil, and hammers it out with
an exuberant enjoyment of the swing and strength of the pro-
ceeding, Paderewski is at least exhilarating ; and his hammer
play is not without variety, some of it being feathery, if not
delicate. But his touch, light or heavy, is the touch that hurts ;
and the glory of his playing is the glory that attends murder on
a large scale when impetuously done." Three years later, in 1893,
Shaw has reached the conclusion that Paderewski is a weak, a
second-hand composer, but an artist whose genuine creative
achievements have assured him the title of the greatest of living
pianists. " I had rather see Paderewski in his next composition
for orchestra drop the piano altogether," Shaw said. " It is the
one instrument he does not understand as a composer, exactly
because he understands it so well as an executant."
For David Bispham Shaw had the sincerest admiration,
and the De Reszkes won his praise because, as he explained
it, they sang like dignified men, instead of like male viragoes
in the dramatic Italian style. He made a point of insisting,
however, that Edouard de Reszke occasionally abused his
power by " wilful bawling " for the mere fun of making a
thundering noise. On hearing Gerster in 1890, he was suffi-
ciently charmed to say : " The old artistic feeling remained so un-
* The reference is to Rubinstein.
236
The Music Critic
spoiled and vivid that, if here and thexe a doubt crossed me
whether the notes were all reaching the furthest half-crown seat
as tellingly as they came to my front stall, I ignored it for the sake
of the charm which neither singer nor opera (The Huguenots) has
lost for me." Of a concert given in 1893 by " our still adored
Patti," whom he calls " now the most accomplished of mezzo-
sopranos," he gives the following description :
" It always amuses me to see that vast audience (at Albert
Hall) from the squares and villas listening with moist eyes
whilst the opulent lady from the celebrated Welsh castle
fervently sings : ' Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage
again/ The concert was a huge success : there were bou-
quets, raptures, effusions, kissings of children, graceful
sharings of the applause with obbligato players — in short,
the usual exhibition of the British bourgeoisie in the part
of Bottom and the prima donna in the part of Titania. Patti
hazarded none of her old exploits as a florid soprano with an
exceptional range : her most arduous achievement was * Ah,
fors e lui,' so liberally transposed that the highest notes in
the rapid traits were almost all sharp, the artist having been
accustomed for so many years to sing them at a higher pitch.
Time has transposed Patti a minor third down, but the
middle of her voice is still even and beautiful ; and this with
her unsurpassed phrasing and that delicate touch and ex*
pressive nuance which make her caniabile singing so capti-
vating, enables her to maintain what was, to my mind, always
the best part of her old supremacy."*
Of that brilliant executant Essipotf, the wife of Leschetizky,
Shaw said that if it were possible to believe that she cared two
straws about what she played, she would be one of the greatest
executive musicians of Europe. Hollman was, on the whole and
without any exception, in Shaw's opinion, the greatest violoncellist
he had ever heard. Joachim's fineness of tone, perfect dignity of
style, and fitness of phrasing impressed Shaw as truly magnificent ;
* Music, signed G. B. S., in the World, June 7th, 1893.
*37
George Bernard Shaw
and when he heard him play Bach's " Chaconne in D minor/'
he confessed that he came as near as he ever came to calling any-
thing done by mortal artist perfect. Ysaye, that other master-
violinist, moved Shaw as much as he moved Symons by the per-
fectly harmonious blending of his every faculty. Shaw smilingly
reminded all readers of the screed of G. B. S. that " Decidedly,
if Ysaye only perseveres in playing splendidly to us for twenty-
live years more or so, it will dawn on us at last that he is one of
the greatest of living artists; and then he may play how he
pleases until he turns ninety without the least risk of ever hearing
a word of disparagement or faint praise."
In Shaw's view, Mozart is the ideal, the supreme composer.
Again and again, throughout his works, Shaw has lavished upon
Mozart the finely-tempered praise of the clear-eyed devotee. The
critical rating of a composer is overwhelmingly impressive when
it is supported by the avowal of personal indebtedness ; and
Shaw has frequently asserted that Mozart has influenced his
dramatic works more than any English dramatist since Shake-
speare. I remember discussing Mozart with Mr. Shaw one day ;
and I took occasion to express my scepticism as to the possibility
of any profound influence exerted by Mozart the composer upon
Shaw the dramatist. "In a certain sense, Mozart must always
have been a model for me," replied Mr. Shaw. " Throughout the
entire period of my career as a critic of music, I always thought
and wrote of Mozart as a master of masters. The dream of a
musician is to have the technique of Mozart. It was not his
' divine melodies ' but his perfect technique that profoundly
influenced me. What a great thing to be a dramatist for drama-
tists, just as Mozart was a composer for composers ! First, and
above all things else, Mozart was a master to masters"
The second part of Faust impressed Shaw as the summit of
Schumann's achievement ; .n dramatic music ; and he was very
ready to admit that Schumann had at least one gift which has
now come to rank very high among the qualifications of a com-
poser for the stage : a strong feeling for harmony as a means of
emotional expression. He always found Brahms to be insuffer-
ably tedious when he tried to be profound, but delightful when he
238
The Music Critic
merely tried to be pleasant and naively sentimental. " Euphuism,
which is the beginning and end of Brahms' big works/' Shaw
remarks in connection with the " Symphony in E minor," " is
more to my taste in music than in literature. Brahms takes
an essentially commonplace theme ; gives it a strange air by
dressing it in the most elaborate and far-fetched harmonies ;
keeps his countenance severely (which at once convinces an
English audience that he must have a great deal in him) ; and
finds that a good many wiseacres are ready to guarantee him as
deep as Wagner, and the true heir of Beethoven." Dvorak,
Bohemia's most eminent creative musician, famed alike for an
inexhaustible wealth of melodic invention and a rich variety of
colouring, is stamped by Shaw as a romantic composer, and only
that. His " Requiem " Shaw found utterly tedious and me-
chanical, while his " Symphony in G " is " very nearly up to the
level of a Rossini overture, and would make excellent promenade
music at the summer fetes." The announcement of a Mass by
Dvorak affected Shaw very much as would the announcement of a
" Divine Comedy " in ever so many cantos by Robert Louis Steven-
son ! He regarded Verdi as the greatest of living dramatic com-
posers ; and years before Shaw began writing musical criticism,
when Von Biilow and others were contemptuously repudiating
Verdi, Shaw was able to discern in him a man possessing more
power than he knew how to use, or, indeed, was permitted to use
by the old operatic forms imposed on him by circumstances.*
For the solemnly manufactured operas of Saint Saens, Shaw
felt not mere distaste, but genuine contempt. As soon, in fact,
as he discovered the sort of thing that a French composer dreams
of as the summit of operatic achievement, his artistic sympathy
with Paris was cut off at the main. Early in his career, he solemnly
announces, he gave up Paris as impossible from the artistic point
of view ! His characterization of French music is nothing short
of Heinesque.
" London I do not so much mind. Your average Londoner
is, no doubt, as void of feeling for the fine arts as a man can
• In this connection compare Shaw's article : A Word More about Vmr&i
in the Anglo-Saxon Review, Vol. VIII., March, 1901.
239
George Bernard Shaw
be without collapsing bodily ; but, then, he is not at all
ashamed of his condition. On the contrary, he is rather
proud of it, and never feels obliged to pretend that he is an
artist to the tips of his fingers. His pretences are confined
to piety and politics, in both of which he is an unspeakable
impostor. It is your Parisian who concentrates his ignorance
and hypocrisy, not on politics and religion, but on art. In
this unwholesome state of self-consciousness he demands
statues and pictures and operas in all directions, long before
any appetite for beauty has set his eyes or ears aching ; so
that he at once becomes the prey of pedants who undertake
to supply him with classical works, and swaggerers who
set up in the romantic department. Hence, as the Parisian,
like other people, likes to enjoy himself, and as pure pedantry
is tedious and pure swaggering tiresome, what Paris chiefly
loves is a genius who can make the classic voluptuous and the
romantic amusing. And so, though you cannot walk through
Paris without coming at every corner upon some fountain
or trophy or monument for which the only possible remedy
is dynamite, you can always count upon the design including
a female figure free from the defect known to photographers
as under-exposure ; and if you go to the opera — which is,
happily, an easily avoidable fate — you may wonder at the
expensive trifling that passes as musical poetry and drama,
but you will be compelled to admit that the composer has
moments, carried as far as academic propriety admits, in which
he rises from sham history and tragedy to genuine polka
and barcarolle ; whilst there is, to boot, always one happy half-
hour when the opera-singers vanish, and capable, thoroughly
trained, hard-working, technically skilled executants enter-
tain you with a ballet. Of course the ballet, like everything
else in Paris, is a provincial survival, fifty years behind
English time ; but still it is generally complete and well
done by people who understand ballet, whereas the opera
is generally mutilated and ill done by people who don't
understand opera."
Is it any wonder, then, that the " tinpot stage history " of Saint
240
The Music Critic
Saens was the bane of Shaw's existence and the abomination of
his critical sense ? Or that Offenbach's music struck him as
wicked, abandoned stuff ? And of Meyerbeer, then still re-
garded in Paris as a sort of Michael Angelo, he says : " If
you try to form a critical scheme of the development of English
poetry from Pope to Walt Whitman, you cannot by any
stretch of ingenuity make a place in it for Thomas Moore,
who is accordingly either ignored in such schemes or else con-
temptuously dismissed as a flowery trifler. In the same way,
you cannot get Meyerbeer into the Wagnerian scheme except
as the Autolycus of the piece."
The most significant feature of Shaw's career as a musical critic
was his championship of Wagner. Although he had an exalted
admiration for Wagner, he was no hero-worshipper, nor in the
least degree blind to the defects of Wagner as a composer who
failed to preserve philosophic continuity and coherence in his
greatest dramatic achievement. The similarity of tastes in
music between Wagner and Shaw is a very noticeable feature of
the " C. di B." and " G. B. S." criticisms. It was to be ex-
pected that Shaw the dramatist would admire Wagner for com-
posing music designed to heighten the expression of human
emotion ; he realized fully that such music was intensely affect-
ing in the presence of that emotion, and utter nonsense apart
from it. Like Wagner, Shaw had a deep love for Beethoven, an
intense admiration for Mozart, and a sincere appreciation of the
Mendelssohn of the Scotch symphony. And he likewise shared
Wagner's sovereign contempt for the efforts of Schumann and
Brahms to be f< profound."
A German would laugh at the notion that Wagner required any
" championing " during the years from 1888 to 1894 inclusive,
since the Bayreuth performances began in 1876. The chief
novelty in Shaw's Wagner criticisms was his attack on Bayreuth
for the various old-fashioned absurdities perpetrated there the
inadequacy of tnise en sdne, the ridiculous unnaturalness and
inappropriateness of scenery and dress, and the retention in
leading parts of " beer-barrels of singers " who did not know
how to sing. The result of Shaw's first visit, in 1889, was an
*4i 16
George Bernard Shaw
article on Bayreuth for the English Illustrated Magazine ; a later
visit produced an illustrated article in the Pall Mall Budget. Be-
sides this, both visits were reported day by day by Shaw in the
Star, over his signature, " Corno di Bassetto," or " C. di B." Up
to that time, in Shaw's opinion, Bayreuth criticism had been
either worship or blasphemy. " I threw off all this, and criticized
performances of Wagner's works at Bayreuth precisely as I should
have criticized performances of Wagner's works at Covent Garden.
The effect on pious Wagnerians was as though I had brawled in
church."
In his relation of musical critic in England, Shaw took the
greatest pains to ascertain the exact bearings of the controversy
which had raged round Wagner's music-dramas since the middle
of the century. The six years of Shaw's activity as a musical critic
fell within the decade of Sir Augustus Harris's greatest operatic
enterprises. Shaw spent a large part of his time in making on-
slaught after onslaught on the " spurious artistic prestige " of
Covent Garden. For some seasons he was forced to pay for his
own stall ; and there were times, Shaw says, when " I was warned
that my criticisms were being collated by legal experts for the
purpose of proving ' prejudice ' against me, and crushing me by
mulcting my editor in fabulous sums. . . . The World proved
equal to the occasion in the conflict with Covent Garden, and,
finally, my invitations to the opera were renewed ; the impresario
made my personal acquaintance, and maintained the pleasantest
relations with me from that time onward. ..." It is true that
Jean de Reszke made his first appearance on any stage on
July 13th, 1889, as the hero of Die Meislersinger ; but it infuriated
Sir Augustus Harris to be publicly reminded by Shaw that Tristan
and Isolde, having been composed in 1859, was perhaps a little
overdue. Indeed, it was not until 1896 that Tristan and Isolde
at last made its way into the repertory of Royal Italian Opera in
England. Shaw exhausted himself, in the columns of the World,
in " apparently hopeless attempts to shame the De Reszkes out of
their perpetual Faust and Mephistopheles, Romeo and Laurent,
and in pooh-poohed declarations that there were such works in
existence as Die Walkure and Tristan. It was not Sir Augustus
242
The Music Critic
Harris who roused Jean de Reszke from his long lethargy, but his
own artistic conscience and the shock of Vandyk's brilliant success
in Massenet's Manon" And when Shaw's successor on the World,
on the occasion of the death of Sir Augustus Harris in 1896,
declared that the great impresario laboured to cast aside the
fatuous conventions of the Italian school, and to adopt all that
was best in the German stage, Shaw was provoked into a crushing
reply. " Sancta simplicitas / " he exclaimed. " The truth is
that he fought obstinately for the Italian fatuities against the
German reforms. He was saturated with the obsolete operatic
traditions of the days of Tietjens, whose Semiramide and Lucrezia
he admired as great tragic impersonations. He described Das
Rheingold as ' a damned pantomime ' ; he persisted for years in
putting Tannhduser on the stage with Venusberg effects that
would have disgraced a Whitechapel Road gaff, with the twelve
horns on the stage replaced by a military band behind the scenes,
and with Rotten Row trappings on the horses. ... It was only
in the last few years that he began to learn something from Calv6
and the young Italian school, from Wagner, from Massenet and
Bruneau, and from Verdi's latest works. In opera, unfortunately,
he was soaked in tradition, and kept London a quarter of a century
behind New York and Berlin — down almost to the level of Paris —
in dramatic music."*
It happens that Shaw's squarest and solidest contributions to
Wagnerian criticism were written after his career as musical critic
ceased. At the request of Mr. Benjamin Tucker, editor of
Liberty, a journal of Philosophic Anarchy, published in New York,
Shaw wrote a reply to Max Nordau's Degeneration, which was
then (1895) making a great impression on the American mind.
This reply, entitled A Degenerate's View of Nordau, was pub-
lished in a double copy of Liberty, especially printed to make
room for it ; Mr. Tucker sent a copy to every paper in America ;
and, as Shaw avers, Nordau's book has never been heard of in an
American paper since. It was undoubtedly a great piece of
journalism in those days for Mr. Tucker to pick out the right man
— as Shaw unquestionably was — for that stupendous task ; and
* De Mortuis, signed G. B. S., in the Saturday Review, July 4th, 1896.
243 l6*
George Bernard Shaw
Shaw still takes an unholy joy in showing how Tucker the crank
was able to beat all the big fashionable editors at their own game.
Besides being largely imported in England, the article did Shaw
a great private service. For when William Morris read it, he
at once threw off all reserve in talking to Shaw about modern art,
and treated him thenceforth as a man who knew enough to under-
stand what might be said to him on that subject. The article
contained, among many other equally able things, an eminently
sane and intelligible treatment of the development of modern
music, and its relation to Wagner. Mr. Huneker, who regards
this as Shaw's finest piece of controversial work, rightly
declared that it completely swept Nordau from the field of
discussion.*
The other piece of Wagnerian criticism by which Shaw is best
known was the subject of a letter Shaw once wrote to the editor
of the Academy (October 15th, 1895) : "I see you have been
announcing a book by me entitled, ' The Complete Wagnerite/ "
writes Shaw. " This is an error ; you are thinking of an author
named Izaak Walton. The book, which is a work of great merit,
even for me, is called, ' The Perfect Wagnerite/ and is an exposi- j
tion of the philosophy of Der Ring des Nibelungen. It is a
G. B. eSsence of modern Anarchism, or Neo-Protestantism.
This lucid description speaks for itself. As it has been written on
what the whole medical faculty and all the bystanders declare
• In the letter Mr. Tucker wrote to Mr. Shaw at Easter, 1895, Shaw
once told me, he said that he knew Shaw was the only man in the world
capable of tackling Nordau on his various fields of music, literature, paint-
ing, etc. : " He said that if I would find out the highest figure ever paid
by, say, the Nineteenth Century for a single article to any writer, not ex-
cluding Gladstone or any other eminent man, he would pay me that sum •
for a review of ' Degeneration ' for his little paper. This, mind you, from *
a man who was publishing a paper at his own expense, without a chance of I
making anything out of it, and with a considerable chance of finding himself |
in prison some day for telling the truth about American institutions. Mr.
Tucker probably worked double shifts and ate half meals for the next two
or three years to pay off what the adventure cost him/' This essay, some*
what amplified, was recently (February, 1908) published in America by
Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y. — in England by the New Age Press, London—
under the title, The Sanity of Art : an Exposure of the Current Nonsense
about Artists being Degenerate.
244
&*'
;
AHKNOBAKBl'S AT RKHKAKSAL.
( >rg: Bernard Shaw
Shaw ,>ti , t -• :i V M.v in s^owwi. how Tuckt i the crank
was ?•>...> t^ '■ * '• * * : f^-laoiidble edro*< at their own game.
iiCiiii'^ k '• » ;»'»iid in E:.. ; bn:. ? iie arti» le did Shaw
*!■'.. « For when William Morris read.it, he
» * m .. -i • n'N'.*r"e in talking to Shaw ahout modern art,
• . . . <• . ' itli a* a man who knew enough to under-
• !■• «.;i.id to hi.n on that subject. The article
i •
|. 'M' ,
.'( or 'equally able tilings, an eminently
i ■*• ••: ".-le Uc itiiiCat of the development of modern