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 the 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 _intransigéance_ 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 introductory 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 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 adventitious 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
Michelangelo, in art, music, 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[35] 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 Shorthand--which he could
write at the rate of twenty words per 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 rejection, 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,[36]
find their _raison d'être_ 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
language-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 anything that had previously
occurred in fiction.
In the winter of 1879, Lecky joined a debating club, called The
Zetetical Society, numbering among its members Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr.
Emil Garcke, and Mr. J. G. Godard. It was a sort of “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 conclusion 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 Dialectical
and Zetetical Societies into the “blind cave of eternal night.”
[Illustration: =Sidney Webb.=]
Reproduced from the original photo-drawing.
_Jessie Holliday._
_Courtesy of the artist._
One night in the winter of 1879, Lecky dragged Shaw to a meeting of the
Zetetical Society, which then met weekly in the rooms of the Woman's
Protective and Provident League in Great Queen Street, Long Acre. It
will be related elsewhere why Shaw decided to join the society at
once; suffice it to say here that he 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
Zetetical 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 knew 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 Zetetical 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 subsequently joined another
debating society, the Bedford, presided 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 imperturbability of
the statesman.
During these years he had gradually widened and deepened his knowledge
of the subjects which periodically came up for discussion 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 movement, 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 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.[37] “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 without 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 5th, 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.
[Illustration: =Henry George.=]
From a photograph taken in 1882.
[Illustration: =Karl Marx.=]
_By special permission._
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 intellectually,
was a mere middle-class business. Suppose it could have produced a
nation of Matthew Arnolds and George Eliots!--you may well shudder.
The importance of the economic basis dawned on me.”[38] 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.[39]
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 condescending retort of the Social Democrats.
Shaw promptly went and did so, and then found, as he once said, that
his advisers were awestruck, as they had not read it themselves! 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_!
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, historically 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 respectability, of revolt against its
benumbing and paralyzing 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 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.”[40]
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 expression of all those social convictions,
grievances and wrongs which seethed in the crater of his being. He
became that most determined, 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 propagandism. He
accepted invitations to address all sorts of bodies on every day in
the week, Sunday not excepted. Remember 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 ceaselessly 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. 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.[41] 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.[42]
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 Whitmanite, 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 ineffaceable 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. Although 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, 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 horrendum_, 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.”[43]
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 upon Shaw's career.[44]
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 proletarian 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.”
[Illustration: =Facsimile of Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2.=]
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; 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.[45]
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
organization constituted under the title of “The Fabian Society.”[46]
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 revolution 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 established 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 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.[47]
Tract No. 4, _What Socialism Is_, answering the 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 unaided,
Shaw at once bethought him of Sidney Webb. That “walking encyclopædia,”
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 profoundly 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 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 complementary--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 encyclopædic mind and Shaw's literary sense.
The next publication 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
doctrinairism 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 denunciation 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 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 Kropotkinist Anarchists, joined the Fabians, a sort
of influenza of Anarchism spread through the society.[48] 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 outspokenly catastrophic and alarmingly
ignorant of the multifarious delicate adjustments consequent upon a
widespread social cataclysm. “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.”[49]
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,” was “to bring about a tremendous smash-up
of existing society, to be succeeded by complete Socialism.” This
romantic, almost childlike faith in the early consummation of that
far-off divine event, towards which the whole of Socialist creation
moves, meant nothing more nor less, as Shaw freely admits, than that
they had no true practical understanding 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 controversy, 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 aspirations,
not to mention our way of chaffing our opponents in preference
to denouncing them as enemies of the human race, repelled
from us some warm-hearted and eloquent Socialists, 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 submissively 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 process 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 atmosphere 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.”[50]
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.[51] The Social Democrats 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 concerned, 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
Conventions, viewed with indignation and repudiated with scorn the
tactics of “that disreputable gang,” the S. D. 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 leadership 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
injustices of our social system; and when Mr. Hyndman was expelled
from his club for declaring on the Thames Embankment 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 simultaneously 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!”[52] 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 as 'Bloody Sunday.' The heroes
of it were Burns and Cunninghame 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 overwork
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.”[53]
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 anyone 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 afternoons 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.[54] 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 production 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,” discountenancing 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 Mrs. Wilson. The preliminary manifesto of this body,
dated February, 1887, gives the first sketch of the Fabian policy of
to-day.[55] 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.”
[Illustration: =The Socialist.=]
From a photograph taken in July, 1891.
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 Conservative,
Associations, to become members of the nearest Radical 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 misgiving on a subscription edition of a
thousand, it went off 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....”[56]
In the _Political Outlook_, last of the _Fabian Essays_, Hubert Bland
wisely predicted that the moment the party leaders had 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
permeation boom, but to face the fact that it was over. The time had
come for a new departure. In his address before that conference, 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
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.”
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Author of the article on Temperament (systems of tuning keyed
instruments) in the first edition of Grove's _Dictionary of Music_.
[36] Among Shaw's many articles on these topics, may be cited the
following: _A Plea for Speech Nationalization_, in the _Morning
Leader_, August 16th, 1901; _Phonetic Spelling: a Reply to Some
Criticisms_, _ibid._, August 22d, 1901; _Notes on the Clarendon Press
Rules for Compositors and Readers_, in _The Author_, April, 1902, pp.
171-2. See also Mr. William Archer's two articles: _Spelling Reform v.
Phonetic Spelling_, in the _Daily News_, August 10th, 1901; and _Shaw's
Phonetic World-English_, in the _Morning Leader_, August 24th, 1901.
[37] Compare _Land Nationalization: Its Necessity and Its Aims_, by
Alfred Russel Wallace. Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., 1892.
[38] Compare Chapter VI. for Shaw's own account of his conversion by
Henry George.
[39] 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! 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!
[40] _Who I Am, and What I Think._--Part I. In the _Candid Friend_, May
11th, 1901.
[41] Entering the Colonial Office twenty-five years ago, he served as
Colonial Secretary of the Island of Jamaica from 1899 to 1904, and on
three occasions 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.
[42] _Life of Francis Place._ Longmans, 1898.
[43] 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 tenacious 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.
[44] In this connection, compare _Socialism in England_, by Sidney
Webb. Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., 1890.
[45] The society was entitled “The Fellowship of the New Life,” 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.”
[46] Compare _Memorials of Thomas Davidson, the Wandering Scholar_,
collected and edited by William Knight. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1907.
[47] 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 division
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--especially
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 the attachment to the soil of a numerous body of
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.”
[48] Compare Fabian Tract No. 41.
[49] _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.
[50] Tract No. 41, _The Fabian Society: Its Early History_, by G.
Bernard Shaw.
[51] 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.
[52] For an interesting account of the early movements of Socialistic
consciousness in England, compare _An Artist's Reminiscences_, by the
artist, Walter Crane; Chapter “Art and Socialism,” pp. 249-338. Methuen
and Co., 1907.
[53] 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!”
[54] Compare _To-Day_, edited by Hubert Bland, for the year 1886.
[55] This manifesto, in full, is to be found in Fabian Tract No. 41,
pp. 13-14.
[56] Tract No. 41: _The Fabian Society: Its Early History_, by G.
Bernard Shaw.
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 Diabolonian Ethics._ In _Three Plays for
Puritans_, p. xxii.