“If the art of living were only the art of dialectic! If this 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 green-grocer 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 phenomenon and you find
the personality; off with the marvel and on with the man. In a letter
to me, written in 1904, Mr. Shaw gave due, almost undue, credit to the
influence of training:
“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 hardihood in platform speaking which he deprecatingly
denominates “ordinary self-possession.” When Lecky, in 1879, first
dragged him to a meeting of the Zetetical 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, “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
resolution. 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 aside
an evening for a paper on it by a lady in the “æsthetic” dress of the
period. “I wiped the floor with that meeting,” Shaw once told me, “and
several members confessed to me afterwards 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 unpleasant 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 of an unearned income inflicted on
the community exactly the same injury as a burglar. Fortified by _sæva
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.[57] This
was a daring undertaking for Shaw, who had neither the experience nor
the _savoir faire_ of his colleagues. 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 Zetetical 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 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 enormously 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.”
[Illustration: =Program of Sunday Afternoon Lectures. South Place
Institute, South Place, Finsbury, E. C. March, 1886.=]
It was not without severe training and incessant work that Shaw
and his fellow Fabians acquired the equipment in the historic 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 Podmore's, in Dean's Yard, Westminster.[58] Certain of
the Fabians 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 attainments,
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 performances “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, extraordinary 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 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 preserving the _haut 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 accurately 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,
Benthamite 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 Molière always taking his material where he found 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.
Whenever 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 outspokenness was that everybody repudiated his monstrous
exaggerations, 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:
“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.”[59]
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 aristocratic and also, as it turned
out, the cheapest place of meeting 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 unsuspecting 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.
“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 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 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 gibberings 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 “_l'auguste vie quotidienne 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. 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. Furnival.
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 æsthetes,” 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.”[60] 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.”[61] Shaw was afterwards 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 vacant, whether it was for a street corner, a
chapel, or a drawing-room. He spoke to audiences of every description,
from University dons to London washerwomen. From 1883 to 1895,
with virtually no exception, he delivered a harangue, with debate,
questions, and so on, every Sunday--sometimes twice or even thrice--and
on a good many weekdays. This teeming and tumultuous life was passed
on many platforms, from the British Association to the triangle at the
corner of Salmon's Lane in Limehouse.
In 1888, when he became a critic of music, Shaw was restricted solely
to lectures on Sundays, as he could not foresee whether he should have
the opera or a concert to attend on week-nights. It is remarkable how
much he managed to do, even with this handicap, especially as he had
to speak usually on short notice.[62] At last, as was inevitable with
a man burning the candle at both ends, the strain began to tell; Shaw
found it impossible to deal with all the applications he received.
For an advanced and persistently progressive thinker like Shaw, the
unavoidable repetition of the old figures and the old demonstrations
in time grew irksome. He felt the danger of becoming, like Morell,
a windbag--what George Ade calls a “hot-air machine.” By 1895, the
machine was no longer by any means in full blast; the breakdown of
Shaw's health, in 1898, finished him as a systematic and indefatigable
propagandist. His work went on almost uninterrupted, however, although
it was no longer explicit propagandism. Indeed, he worked more
strenuously than ever on the St. Pancras Vestry, now the St. Pancras
Borough Council. Since 1898, Shaw has lectured only occasionally, but
often enough for a man who wishes to preserve his health and strength.
His labour as head of the Fabian Society, during the years 1906-7, in
giving form and definiteness to the policy of that society, was one of
the greatest works of his life--a work to which he gave his time and
energy without stint. Many of his Fabian colleagues assured me that no
one but Bernard Shaw could have accomplished so signal and so sweeping
a victory. Within a year or two, he will doubtless resign his arduous
duties as head and centre of the Fabian Society. And it is probable, he
recently told me, that he will never again undertake another platform
campaign.
Shaw's “knack of drafting things,” as he calls it, has played
no inconsiderable figure in his career. Simultaneously with his
desperate attack on the platform, Shaw was acquiring what he
denominates the “committee habit.” Whenever he joined a society--even
the Zetetical--his marked executive ability soon placed him on
the committee. In learning the habits of public life and action
simultaneously with the art of public speaking, he gained a great
deal of valuable experience--experience which cannot be acquired
in conventional grooves. The constant and unceremonious criticism
of men who were at many points much abler and better informed than
himself, developed in Shaw two distinctive traits--self-possession and
impassivity. It is certain that his experience as a man of affairs
actively engaged in public work, municipal and political, gave him that
behind-the-scenes knowledge of the mechanism and nature of political
illusion which seems so cynical to the spectators in front.
According to the current view, Shaw has always been a voracious
man-eater, like a lion going about seeking whom he might devour. On
the contrary, instead of flinging down the gauntlet to any and every
one, Shaw never challenged anyone to debate with him in public. To
Shaw, it seemed an unfair practice for a seasoned public speaker,
and no test at all of the validity of his case--a duel of tongues,
of no mort value than any other sort of duel. In the eighties, the
Socialist League, of which William Morris was the leading figure, made
an effort to arrange a debate between Shaw and Charles Bradlaugh, who
had graduated from boy evangelism to the rank of the most formidable
debater to be found in the House of Commons. In more than one place,
but notably in _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, Shaw has paid the
highest tribute 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 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 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 always
offence, it would have been a great gratification to tackle 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.[63] The debate lasting
two nights, 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 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 conclusion 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 until they have learned
from experience the true conditions of social freedom.”[64]
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-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 anything 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. Shaw lectured often in Battersea
because it was John Burns' stronghold. Never was Shaw's skyrocketing
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 felt the shabbiest of impostors, 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 anti-Fabian
sort, led 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 amendment, 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 imprisoned--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!
One of the most remarkable speakers in England to-day, Bernard Shaw
is not simply a talent, a personality: he is a public institution.
People flock to his lectures and addresses, and his _bons mots_ are
quoted in London, New York, Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg. 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 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
fundamental 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 distinctive, as is his style
as an essayist or his fingering as a dramatist. That priceless and
inalienable gift which has helped to make Jean Jaurès 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 Jaurès 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 Zetetical Society. He has delivered considerably more than
a thousand public addresses, and the best of them were masterpieces of
their 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.
[Illustration: =The Cart and Trumpet.=]
Shaw addressing the dockyard men outside dockyard gate on behalf of
Alderman Sanders. G. B. S. is annoyed with the interrupter, but is
ready with an instant retort.
_Courtesy of_ Stephen Cribb, Southsec.
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 meeting, 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 trace. He is the arch-foe of
personal hypnotism, of romance, of sensuous glamour. He has sought the
accomplishment of the demand of his will; he never practised speaking
as an art or an accomplishment. 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 things that he has either spoken or written: “_Ils donnent à
penser furieusement_.” As a speaker, he first startled and provoked
his audience to thought, and then annihilated their objections 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 characteristically 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
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.”[65]
FOOTNOTES:
[57] On March 6th, Mrs. Annie Besant (Fabian Society) spoke _versus_
Mr. Corrie Grant, subject: “That the existence of classes who live
upon unearned 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.”
[58] 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 Gazette_: _A Scotland Yard for
Spectres_, being a notice of the _Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research_ (January 23d, 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
_séance_, 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.
[59] Tract No. 41, _The Fabian Society: Its Early History_, by G.
Bernard Shaw.
[60] The Gonner here referred to is E. C. K. Gonner, M.A., now Brunner
Professor of Economic Science at the University College, Liverpool.
[61] 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.
[62] “Take the amusing, cynical, remarkable George Bernard Shaw, whose
Irish humour and brilliant gifts have partly helped, partly hindered
the (Fabian) Society's popularity. This man will rise from an elaborate
criticism of last night's opera or Richter concert (he is the musical
critic of the _World_), and after a light, purely vegetarian meal, will
go down to some far-off club in South London or to some street corner
in East London, or to some recognized place of meeting in one of the
parks, and will there speak to poor men about their economic position
and their political duties.”--William Clarke, in _The Fabian Society
and Its Work_. Preface to _Fabian Essays_. Ball Publishing Co., Boston,
1908.
[63] 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! A
bas les Socialistes! A la lanterne!_”
[64] _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.
[65] _Who I Am, and What I Think._ Part I. The _Candid Friend_, May
11th, 1901.
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_.