He also experimented with some literary groups, passing calm evenings with the New Shakespere Society, and more breezy ones with the Browning Society. In 1886 he acted as press officer for the Shelley Society’s private production of The Cenci. This five-act blank-verse tragedy was, Shaw wrote, ‘a strenuous but futile and never-to-be-repeated attempt to bottle the new wine in the old skins’.
He was surprised to find that the Shelley Society presented the poet ‘as a Church of England country gentleman whose pastime was writing sermons in verse’. When he announced to the Society that ‘I am a Socialist, an Atheist and a Vegetarian’, two members resigned. Having begun to submerge his self-consciousness into a social conscience, he wanted, like Shelley, to pierce the illusions that made the present order seem eternal, and show the world its future. He wanted ‘a cause and a creed to live for’.
He found them on the evening of 5 September 1882 at the non-conformist Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street where the American economist, Henry George, was speaking on Land Nationalization. George spoke with an appealing American intonation. He was simple, he was sentimental; and, like the best avant-garde Americans, he was fifty years behind the times in most of Europe. But he gave to politics the powerful orchestration of religion.
George’s Progress and Poverty, which Shaw bought that evening for sixpence, offered an explanation as to why increasing economic progress brought increasing poverty. The ownership of land had always been a precondition of power in Britain. These few landowners monopolized the birthright of the people, but the nationalization of this land would give the people back their birthright.
For the first time it flashed on Shaw that all this controversy between Science and Religion, Darwin and the Bible, was barren ground. ‘The importance of the economic basis dawned on me.’ George’s book helped Shaw come to terms with his own past. He had been betrayed into his one exhibition of feeling (seizing and kissing his mother’s hand) over the possession of Torca Cottage – and that had led to disillusion. Now he could find an impersonal reason, bleached of grievance, for his loveless home and miserable years in the estate office of Uniacke Townshend. All had been part of an inhumane system of property-owning.
Henry George was to reduce Land Nationalization to a single tax on land – a casting back to the impôt unique of Honoré Mirabeau. His Single Tax was a stepping stone to socialism, and socialists stepping over it did not take it with them. They were converted by George, but not to him. Shaw, who played Voltaire to George’s Mirabeau, had no sooner read Progress and Poverty than he went on to Karl Marx, and finally ‘devoted about four years to the study of abstract economics so as to get my foundations sound for my work as a socialist in devising practicable methods of industrial and political reconstruction’.
He spoke at clubs; he read in the British Museum. He searched among new organizations for a political headquarters. He tried out his voice at the Bedford Debating Society organized by an Irish Unitarian preacher, Stopford Brooke (on whom Shaw partly modelled the Reverend James Morrell in Candida); he joined two discussion groups in Hampstead, and he went to meetings of the Democratic Federation, the first political organization of socialists in Britain.
The Federation was led by H. M. Hyndman who saw himself, in his immaculate frock-coat, fine gloves and silk hat, leading his rough proletarian army to a revolutionary dawn. But it was ballet rather than revolution. His drilling of the unemployed and parading of the working class in the streets appeared to be rehearsals for the Apocalypse which was fixed for 1889, the anniversary of the French Revolution. With his high-chested carriage, he already looked like a prime minister. Hyndman had known Marx and, when leaving his house one day, put on his hat by mistake and found that it fitted. In 1881 he had published a book, England for All, that, while introducing Marxist doctrines to English readers, did so without mentioning Marx’s name – except (a point that failed to satisfy Marx) in a Preface. But it was Hyndman’s connection with Henry George that had attracted Shaw to what became known as the Social Democratic Federation. At his first meeting, he mentioned George and was told to go off and read Marx. There was no English version available so he studied the first volume of Das Kapital in Deville’s French translation, working during the autumn of 1883 at the British Museum. ‘That was the turning point in my career,’ he told Hesketh Pearson. ‘Marx was a revelation... He opened my eyes to the facts of history and civilization, gave me an entirely fresh conception of the universe, provided me with a purpose and a mission in life.’ Das Kapital, he wrote, ‘achieved the greatest feat of which a book is capable – that of changing the minds of the people who read it’.
But when, brimming with Marxism, he returned to the SDF, he found that Hyndman’s lieutenants had not read him themselves. He was now a ‘candidate member’ of the SDF, but for two reasons decided not to join. The first was Hyndman’s own incapacity for teamwork. His famous temper was responsible for driving away many socialists – Edward Aveling, Belfort Bax, Walter Crane, Eleanor Marx and William Morris, who formed themselves into an anti-parliamentary group called the Socialist League, soon to be infiltrated by the anarchists.
But there was a second reason why Shaw turned his back on Hyndman. ‘I wanted to work with men of my own mental training.’ It was then that he came across the first tract, Why are the Many Poor?, of the newly formed Fabian Society. Here was an educated body appealing to the middle-class intelligentsia: ‘my own class in fact.’ From this tract he discovered the Society’s address and on 16 May 1884 turned up for its next meeting.
*
The nominal founder of the Fabian Society had been Thomas Davidson, the illegitimate son of a Scottish shepherd. Davidson was an inspired talker and very strong on immortality. In 1881 he had blazed through London, inflaming miscellaneous agitators and idealists with what William James called his ‘inward glory’. On his next visit two years later some of these acolytes formed ‘a sort of club’. Members were of two conditions: those whose impulse was primarily religious; and others, more politically minded, who wished to reconstruct society. Soon the club split up into two branches – ‘The Fellowship of the New Life’ attracting the former and the Fabian Society the socialists.
‘What does the name mean? Why Fabian?’ asked Edward Pease, the first secretary of the Society. The Fabian Society’s motto was printed as an epigraph to the Fabian Tract that Shaw read in the spring of 1884.
‘For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did, most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be vain and fruitless.’
When critics asked the name of the history from which this quotation came, Pease answered gleefully that the work of the Fabian Society was not to repeat history, but to make it. Since the instincts of the early Fabians were literary as well as political, their business – chiefly under Shaw’s influence – was to alter history by rewriting it.
The Minutes of the meeting of 16 May had a famous mauve-ink side-note in unmistakably Shavian hand and style – the careful signature with its incongruous flourish of defiance: ‘This meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Bernard Shaw.’ On 5 September he formally enrolled and before the end of the year had published an unsigned two-page leaflet entitled A Manifesto, listed as Fabian Tract No. 2. Never again was Shaw so succinct. His seventeen propositions have a trenchancy and wit giving it a different tone from other socialist documents. Under present circumstances, he wrote, ‘wealth cannot be enjoyed without dishonour or foregone without misery’; the result of nineteenth-century capitalism in Britain had been to divide society ‘into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme and large dinners and no appetites at the other’; under laissez-faire, competition ‘has the effect of rendering adulteration, dishonest dealing and inhumanity compulsory’; instead of leaving National Industry to organize itself, the State should compete ‘with all its might in every department of prod
uction’; and there should be equal political rights for the sexes, since ‘Men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against Women’. The Manifesto ended with the proposition: That we had ‘rather face a Civil War than such another century of suffering as the present one has been’.
By the beginning of 1885 two things had been achieved. The Fabians had found a programme – and Shaw a platform.
2
Heroes and Friends
I found that I had only to say with perfect simplicity what I seriously meant just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh. My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity. And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest.
During 1884 and 1885, Shaw had taken on two gruelling jobs. Between November and April he edited for H. H. Champion’s Modern Press an edition of Lawrence Gronland’s The Cooperative Commonwealth, an exposition of socialism that had recently appeared in the United States. ‘By God, I never read [such] English!’ he exclaimed to Champion. Shaw’s editing gave the book a sparkling tone. He polished it with optimism. His payment for this editing was to be £5, ‘if the book ever produces anything over the costs & advts’ – a figure that became more remote once Gronland, repudiating Shaw’s version, published his American ‘authorized’ edition, with a preface addressed ‘To the British Reader’.
Even less profitable was a commission Shaw had accepted as early as January 1884 to provide a glossary and index for the Hunterian Club’s edition of Thomas Lodge’s Works. ‘I wasted the year deplorably,’ he noted in his diary. At intervals over the following year he would receive imploring letters from the Club, and these would result in desperate resolutions to buy an alarm clock. In July 1885 he transferred the commission to Thomas Tyler, a ‘rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless... man of letters of an uncommercial kind’ who had previously made a translation of Ecclesiastes. Tyler completed the job but not long afterwards died, ‘sinking unnoted like a stone in the sea’ – though remaining for the grateful Shaw ‘a vivid spot of memory in the void of my forgetfulness’.
During 1885 Shaw ‘slipped into paid journalism’. This had come about through his friendship with William Archer who, two months younger than Shaw, had already made his name with a charming series of articles on theatre in the London Figaro. Working at the British Museum Reading Room in 1883, Archer’s attention had been drawn to what appeared as an undelivered brown paper parcel on the next seat. This was Shaw. ‘There I used to sit day by day,’ Archer recalled, ‘beside a pallid young man with red hair and beard, dressed in Jaeger all-wool clothing which rather harmonized with his complexion. My interest was excited... by the literature to which he devoted himself day after day. It consisted of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in French, and a full orchestral score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.’ Before long they were introduced. ‘We had many interests in common,’ Archer recalled, ‘and soon became intimate friends.’
Shaw loved Archer and Archer reciprocated this love. They shared an intimacy of humour, and neither mistook the other’s emotional reticence for lack of feeling. When emotional, Archer grew so wooden that, on the point of tears, he looked like a piece of mahogany. Shaw admired him for his unpretentiousness and integrity. They teased and chided and fathered monstrous advice on each other freely. The candour of their exchanges was a relief to them both, for they inflicted no malice and received no wounds. Under the device of open disagreement they made a secret code of their affection.
They disagreed most on whatever interested them most. As dual champions of Ibsen they each regretted that the other was not an Ibsenite. Each wanted the other to succeed – and felt that he alone knew how this quality of success was to be come by. Archer might not be able to combat his high cheek-bones or the outline of his jaw, but he could unbutton the collar that gave ‘his head the appearance of being wedged by the neck into a jampot’ – and, in doing so, Shaw counselled, ‘consent to make an ass of yourself publicly’. Shaw had to do the opposite thing: quell all that reckless extravaganza, grow up, and cease from making an ass of himself in public. ‘He loses influence by being such an incorrigible jester,’ Archer lamented, ‘by wearing the cap and bells in and out of season.’
Both had made one awful error: Shaw in writing plays, and Archer in not writing plays. ‘Why the devil dont you write a play instead of perpetually talking about it?’ Shaw demanded. Goaded by the perpetual stings, when just short of his sixty-fifth birthday, Archer woke up one morning from a dream of a Rajah in the depths of the Himalayas accompanied by his valet – obviously a ‘complete scheme for a romantic melodrama,’ he revealed to Shaw, ‘which only needs your co-operation to be infallibly THE PLAY OF THE CENTURY.’ But Shaw collaborated only to the extent of helping him to transform the dream into a lurid plot ‘about an Asiatic Rajah made cynical by a western education, and a Green Goddess who had to be propitiated by blood sacrifices’. The Green Goddess became a melodramatic success because, Shaw felt, ‘collaboration between us was impossible’. He had learned this when, in the late summer of 1884, he set to work on an earlier theatrical notion of Archer’s.
With our knowledge of Shaw’s success in the theatre, it is easy to ridicule Archer’s cordial discouragement. But Shaw’s plays were not plays. Archer had no trouble in spotting this. His friend had dispensed with plot, with character, with drama and the red corpuscles of life, to demonstrate that argument squeezed into a well-built dramatic machine was as good as any play. So: ‘Let us be grateful for him as he is, and... enjoy and applaud him. He is not, and he never will be, a great dramatist; but he is something rarer, if not better – a philosophic humorist, with the art of expressing himself in dramatic form.’
Archer’s criticism, presented as friendly and despairing advice, required Shaw to change into someone else (or to reverse the change into G.B.S.). ‘I doubt whether there has ever been a more extraordinary and fascinating combination of gifts in one single human brain,’ he acknowledged. He saw through Shaw’s optimism; he did not see Shaw’s need for optimism. It was the urgency of this need that was driving Shaw to hammer together, like a magical raft, his philosophy and float lightly upon it over the sea around him. Archer wanted him to abandon this whimsical craft and plunge into the water. But Shaw’s nourishment came not from reality as Archer witnessed and experienced it, but from a fantasy that, for all its hard businesslike style, slid along a slice of invisible air. His word-addiction kept him incredibly suspended, and he seldom allowed himself to fall victim to events. But Archer believed this limited his appeal. He would never get a ducking. His audiences might not be able to ignore him but, resenting his superiority, they were resolved never to take him seriously.
Archer would occasionally slip along to Shaw’s little room on the second floor of 36 Osnaburgh Street. Troubled by what he saw, he ‘took my affairs in hand,’ Shaw recorded, planting him among the reviewing staff of the Pall Mall Gazette, where he contributed book reviews from May 1885 to December 1888. He also procured him a place on the Magazine of Music, which applied to Shaw for articles pretty regularly during the later months of 1884; and he introduced him to an Irishman named Edwin Palmer who, in February 1885, started the Dramatic Review and employed Shaw as his music critic.
But Shaw was not an easy man to help. ‘I am making more money than I have any present need for, and shall always be glad to help you to keep going until one or other of your argosies comes home,’ Archer wrote to him. Such help, which Shaw was frequently to offer others in a similar manner, he could never receive himself. Archer, however, had hit on a more delicate ruse. He had been prevailed upon by Edmund Yates, editor of The World, through whose columns he had recently begun what Shaw called ‘his victorious career’ as theatre critic, to double as a critic of art. Knowing nothing about pictures, yet knowing Shaw, Archer invited his friend to accompany him round the galleries. Shaw agreed and, as Archer had expected, poured forth a stream of comment and suggestion. Archer listened,
then wrote the article and forwarded to Shaw a cheque for £1 6s. 8d., being half his fee. But Shaw, recommending more exercise and earlier hours, sent it back. Archer, exasperated by his friend’s stubbornness, told him he was a ‘damned fool not to accept the money,’ adding, ‘I certainly should in your position.’ Since Archer’s incorruptibility was notorious this should have served as a telling argument when he sent the cheque back to Shaw: ‘If you took the trouble to read what I do write you would see that every second idea is yours... So be a good fellow and stow your logic.’
But Shaw was proof against this plea. He re-returned the cheque, ‘and if you re-re-return it,’ he warned, ‘I will re-re-re-return it’. He then treated Archer to an outpouring of Shavian economics that, by way of Ricardo’s Law of rent and Lassalle’s Law of wages, concluded that it paid him famously to go without remuneration: ‘I have the advantage of seeing the galleries for nothing without the drudgery of writing the articles.’ Archer was adding to his schooling in the National Gallery of Ireland, with a free education and: ‘we all grow stupid and mad to just the extent to which we have not been artistically educated.’
Archer had no way of telling that the arrangement he was proposing reproduced for Shaw those ghost-writing days with Lee on The Hornet. It was as if Shaw was being given an opportunity to scrub away that tainted year when he had submitted to polite fraud. It was particularly ingenious that he should be tempted by his closest and most honourable friend, and from the worthiest motives. As an admirer of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Shaw would not have had it differently. It was a soft and amiable corruption to which he was being beckoned, and the first major test of whether his socialism was making a new man of him. Archer, the innocent implement of this trial, is a siren voice: everything he says is reasonable, well-intentioned and brimful of sense. But Shaw steadfastly refuses. He is impoverished and free.
Bernard Shaw Page 12