But by the time Wells and Shaw met almost a decade later, this revolution seemed to have become a cultural event. Wells, at the beginning of 1895, was suddenly given the post of theatre critic for the Pall Mall Gazette. On 5 January he turned up at the St James’s Theatre to see Guy Domville, ‘an extremely weak drama’ by Henry James. There were two audiences in the theatre that night. When the curtain came down ‘jeers, hisses, catcalls were followed by great waves of applause... The two audiences declared war.’
Wells, in his new evening clothes, had noticed how Shaw ‘broke the ranks of the boiled shirts and black and white ties in the stalls, with a modest brown jacket suit, a very white face and very red whiskers’. The new drama critic of the Pall Mall Gazette accosted the new drama critic of the Saturday Review as a colleague and, as Wells had to pass Fitzroy Square to reach his home near Euston, the two writers walked back together, a lean spring-heeled marcher and a valiant sparrow hopping beside him.
‘Fires and civil commotions loosen tongues,’ commented Wells, who described Shaw as talking ‘like an elder brother to me’. His conversation was a ‘contribution to my education,’ Wells recalled. But Wells felt out of place in the theatre, whereas Shaw understood that the pandemonium at the St James’s, likened by Henry James to a set of savages pouncing on a gold watch, had been a warning of what might happen in Britain if Fabian tactics failed.
After four months on the Pall Mall Gazette Wells decided to throw over theatre reviewing. During the next half-dozen years, he created a new genre of scientific fairy-tale with his vivid fantasies, allegories, fables and adventures – The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon. He wrote one book, then another, and then half a dozen more. They came like magic. ‘It did not take us long to recognise that here was Genius,’ wrote Ford Madox Ford. ‘...And all great London lay prostrate at his feet.’
Shaw too had been impressed. A natural story-teller, with a fertile imagination, Wells spoke directly to the people and was ‘our nearest to a twentieth century Dickens’. His romances of time and space stimulated Shaw’s optimism. Dickens’s world ‘becomes a world of great expectations cruelly disappointed,’ he wrote. ‘The Wells world is a world of greater and greater expectations continually being fulfilled.’
Wells was the modern man who accepted nothing of the past and could hardly wait to experiment with the future. He wanted to write history before it happened. It was after his next book, a ‘prospectus’ called Anticipations, that Shaw asked Graham Wallas (whose sister-in-law was Wells’s neighbour at Sandgate) formally to introduce them. ‘He [Wells] interests me considerably.’
Wells had also begun to interest the Webbs. Beatrice Webb confided in her diary that Anticipations was the ‘most remarkable book of the year... full of luminous hypotheses and worth careful study by those who are trying to look forward’. She gave the book to Sidney. Wells had imagined a technocratic élite called ‘the New Republicans’ that could regenerate the nation. I ‘find myself in sympathy with many of your feelings and criticisms and suggestions,’ Sidney wrote.
The Webbs seemed to stand for the more disciplined, better-informed expression of all that Wells was eager to achieve. ‘We discovered each other immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and co-operation,’ he wrote. This was the beginning of a pincer movement by the Webbs and the Shaws to recruit him to the Fabian Society. Wells is ‘a good instrument for popularising ideas,’ Beatrice noted in her diary, ‘...it is refreshing to talk to a man who has shaken himself loose from so many of the current assumptions, and is looking at life as an explorer of a new world.’
Wells was nervous of the Webbs. Sidney was so excessively devoted to the public service; and the handsome figure of Beatrice alarmed him. But he liked the notion of meeting influential people – Members of Parliament such as Asquith, Haldane and Grey, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, and Pember Reeves, soon to be made High Commissioner for New Zealand – at their political dinners.
In February 1903 Wells joined the Fabians. The Society ‘is always open to new ideas,’ Charlotte innocently encouraged him, ‘& to criticism of its past action.’ Sidney Webb had listed Wells’s Anticipations as one of his favourite books of 1901. Wells had chosen Three Plays for Puritans. ‘You are, now that Wilde is dead, the one living playwright in my esteem,’ he wrote to Shaw. He went to see John Bull’s Other Island at the Court Theatre, pretended that the figure of Broadbent had been a ‘disgusting caricature’ of himself (‘even my slight tendency to embonpoint was brought in’), and concluded: ‘The play has some really gorgeous rhetoric, beautiful effects, much more serious Shaw than ever before & I’d rather see it again than see anyone else’s new play.’
But underlying Wells’s admiration of Shaw boiled a vast irritation. In the mid-1890s he had been prepared to learn from the older writer as from an elder brother: he was not content to do so ten years later – especially on subjects about which he was educated and G.B.S. was not. ‘I was a biologist first and foremost, and Shaw had a physiological disgust at vital activities,’ he was to write. ‘...He detected an element of cruelty, to which I am blind, in sexual matters.’ Shaw’s main impulse towards other human beings was to establish a dominant relationship over them – something which Wells fiercely resisted. He regretted having fallen in with these Fabians.
A year after joining the Society, Wells attempted to resign. He was working so hard at his new books – A Modern Utopia and Kipps – he did not have time to attend the Fabian meetings. At once the prevailing influences of the Fabians, the Webbs and the Shaws closed in on him. And Wells capitulated.
He now felt trapped. For he was an escapologist, and this need to escape lay at the centre of his politics, Utopias and love affairs. The claustrophobia of marriage was to become endurable for him only after he had set up an alternative household with a mistress and could oscillate between two homes. ‘He is a romancer spoilt by romancing,’ Beatrice decided in her diary, ‘ – but in the present stage of sociology he is useful.’
Of the two romances he published in 1905, Kipps was an affectionate glance backwards at what had moved him in the past, and A Modern Utopia a blue book vision of the future disinfected of pain. His anxiety to escape from the present fitted perfectly with the mood of a country travelling from Victorian traditions into the complex territory of the twentieth century. He had made converts to socialism by translating the Fabian creed of national efficiency into popular fiction. In A Modern Utopia he reinvented the ‘New Republicans’ as a benevolent dictatorship of noblemen called ‘the Samurai’ who preside as social engineers over the ideal state. ‘The chapters on the Samurai will pander to all your worst instincts,’ he assured Beatrice Webb. But he had done what the Webbs had wanted. ‘He is full of intellectual courage and initiative,’ Beatrice observed. A Modern Utopia made Wells a hero among the more radical Fabians. ‘I’m going to turn the Fabian Society inside out,’ he promised Ford Madox Ford, ‘and then throw it into the dustbin.’
*
Wells’s campaign opened on 6 January 1906 with a Fabian lecture, ‘This Misery of Boots’, using the shoe trade to satirize the condition of England. It was both an illustration of what he wanted from the new Fabians, and an indictment of Shaw and the Webbs, ‘who will assure you that some odd little jobbing about municipal gas and water is Socialism, and backstairs intervention between Conservative and Liberal is the way to the millennium’.
He launched his main attack in a second lecture a month later on 9 February. ‘Faults of the Fabian’ was Wells at his most comic-destructive. Almost everything in the sphere of thought had changed in the last twenty years – unless it was the Fabian Society. ‘I am here to-night to ask it to change.’ A great deal of work, ‘with a certain lack of charm perhaps’, had been invested in permeation. Some of it was gratuitous, some of it unfortunate; and almost all of it was removed from socialism. Their indirect methods were a senile conceit of cunning: ‘something like
a belief that the world may be manoeuvred into socialism without knowing it; that... we shall presently be able to confront the world with a delighted, “But you are socialists! We chalked it on your back when you weren’t looking...”
‘The mouse decided to adopt indirect and inconspicuous methods, not to complicate its proceedings by too many associates, to win over and attract the cat by friendly advances rather than frighten her by a sudden attack. It is believed that in the end the mouse did succeed in permeating the cat, but the cat is still living – and the mouse can’t be found.’
Wells’s next criticism of the Society was its size. It had an air of arrested growth, as if by the effort of taking an office in a cellar in Clement’s Inn, it had exhausted its energy. From this cellar, through the burrowings of one secretary and his assistant, the Fabian Society was to shift the industrial basis of civilization. Amid the jungle of politics it looked to Wells like ‘a pot-bound plant’.
They were also poor, the Fabians, always in debt. ‘You have it from Mr Bernard Shaw that poverty is a crime, and if so, then by the evidence of your balance-sheet ours is a criminal organization.’
Wells spoke on, adding to his catalogue of defects and accusations. The Fabians had evolved into a conservative society, and were collectivist only by definition of their collective inactivity. ‘We don’t advertise, thank you; it’s not quite our style. We cry socialism as the reduced gentlewoman cried “oranges”: “I do so hope nobody will hear me.”’
After an hour and a half Wells had nearly concluded his Fabian indictment. He had just one more vice to nail. ‘Our society is small; and in relation to its great mission small minded; it is poor; it is collectively, as a society, inactive; it is suspicious of help, and exclusive,’ he summarized. And, he added: ‘it is afflicted with a giggle.’
Of all the faults of the Fabians, he declared, this juvenile joking was probably the worst. No wonder they were never taken seriously by politicians. The giggling excitement that ran through their meetings ‘flows over and obscures all sorts of grave issues, it chills and kills enthusiasm,’ he said. ‘Its particular victim in this society is Mr Bernard Shaw.
‘It pursues him with unrelenting delight, simply because he is not like everybody else, as he rises, before he opens his mouth to speak it begins. Shaw has a habit of vivid statement... and he has a natural inclination to paradox. Our accursed giggle lives on these things. Now Bernard Shaw is at bottom an intensely serious man, whatever momentary effect this instant dissolution of sober discussion into mirth may produce on him, he does in the long run, hate this pursuit of laughter... you will not suppose that in attacking laughter I am assailing Bernard Shaw. But I do assail the strained attempts to play up to Shaw, the constant endeavour of members devoid of any natural wit or wildness to catch his manner, to ape his egotism, to fall in with an assumed pretence that this grave high business of Socialism, to which it would be a small offering for us to give all our lives, is an idiotic middle-class joke.’
The timing of this attack on the political insidiousness of Shavianism, and the humorous requiem over permeation, was perfect and during the discussion afterwards, and in the weeks that followed, Wells was engulfed by support. ‘People in the provinces think H. G. Wells is a great man,’ the secretary of a Socialist League branch in a Yorkshire mill town wrote to him, ‘and I can assure you they pay great attention to anything you say. Your audience is assured already, let the prophet appear.’
The prophet’s chariot took the form of a Special Committee – a squadron of Wells-picked men and women whose mission was to increase the ‘scope, influence, income and activity of the Society’. Wells had wanted them to move fast, finishing their work before he left at the end of March for a lecture tour in the United States. But Shaw and the Webbs, word-perfect in gradualism, entangled him with their assistance. The Webbs believed that, lacking the capacity for co-operation, he would not have the stamina to carry through his revisionist programme.
‘The more I think of Mr Wells’s Fabian Reforms the more do I welcome them & if only everyone will be sensible & broadminded I foresee a new era for Fabianism,’ wrote Marjorie Pease. Shaw too believed Wells was vitally important to the future of Fabians. But below his admiration lay resentment, almost envy. He saw Wells as attractive, gifted with intimacy and lovable while he was fated to be unloved. Wells had succeeded at once and (so it seemed to Shaw) without effort. ‘He was born cleverer than anybody within hail of him,’ Shaw wrote, using his own upbringing as an invisible comparison. ‘You can see from his pleasant figure that he was never awkward or uncouth or clumsy-footed or heavy-handed...
‘He was probably stuffed with sweets and smothered with kisses... He won scholarships... The world that other men of genius had to struggle with, and which sometimes starved them dead, came to him and licked his boots. He did what he liked; and when he did not like what he had done, he threw it aside and tried something else.’
Shaw knew nothing of the illnesses and insecurities of Wells’s early years. He simply saw, in contrast to himself, someone who had ‘never missed a meal, never wandered through the streets without a penny in his pocket, never had to wear seedy clothes, never was unemployed’. And now he was being fussed over by the whole family of Fabians.
Wells arrived back from the United States still eager to put ‘woosh’ into the Fabians. The contrast between the go-ahead Americans and recalcitrant Englishmen had stimulated his radical energies. He wanted to change permeation into propaganda: to make the Society into a bigger, richer, simpler, less centralized organization. He wanted to obliterate Shaw’s influence, to fade him out of its past by rewriting the Fabian tracts himself, and by realigning Fabian loyalties with the Labour Party and Keir Hardie who had fought the battle for socialism while Shaw had been making jokes elsewhere. He proposed changing the name of the Society to the British Socialist Party – but this was unanimously rejected by the executive which also rejected (by six votes to five) Wells’s redefinition of the purpose of the Society as forwarding the progress of socialism ‘by all available means’.
His report was published in November together with a Counter Report and Resolutions on behalf of the executive which had been written by Shaw. To Wells it seemed the most ‘mischievous piece of writing I have read for a long time’, destined, with its preposterous fables of Fabian foresight, to become ‘a classic in the humorous literature of Socialism’.
Most of the issues which divided these two teeming documents were matters of internal reorganization and not difficult to reconcile. But beneath this administrative business lay a hidden agenda. The Fabians were a family, with Wells their rebel son. They had prevented him leaving and he now turned murderously back on them. He wanted to kill off the parents and, in his own image, father a new breed of this family. His fantasy of omnipotence, with its current of sexual energy, attracted crowds of excited Fabians for his dramatic confrontation with G.B.S.
Their first crossing of swords took place on 7 December at Essex Hall. Shaw moved the executive’s resolution. His tone was friendly, his argument ominously reasonable.
Then Wells rushed up and began to address the meeting. Until then it had seemed as if, like the magical hero in his story ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’, he might perform anything he wished. But he spoke badly. His proposals for reorganizing the Society degenerated into a list of accusations against Shaw and the Webbs. He moved an amendment calling for the abolition of the executive and its replacement by a larger representative body that would endorse the ‘spirit and purport’ of his Special Committee’s proposals. There had been a swell in favour of his amendment at the start; by the time he ended it had sunk. A second-reading debate was arranged one week later.
During the interval both parties prepared. Wells had described as ‘shabby and unwise’ the Fabian failure to co-operate with Keir Hardie. What he did not reveal was that he had written to Keir Hardie and been advised by him not to waste time bullying these steady-going Fabians ‘who would cont
inue to do their own useful work’. It was ‘not quite fair’ to the Society. ‘Why not leave it to pursue its own way by its own methods,’ Keir Hardie suggested, ‘and come in and take your part in the political side of the movement as represented by the ILP?’
The answer to this was that Wells wanted to capture the Fabian army from Shaw, lead it over to Keir Hardie, and then go off to do something else. But Keir Hardie had been critical of Shaw too. Had his report been ‘more accurate historically and less bombastic,’ he wrote to G.B.S., ‘the task of averting a menace to the movement wd have been easier.
‘That apart what I wd like to see passed wd be a declaration of loyalty to the Labour Party which wd be binding on the Society and on its officials [who]... shall not support the candidates of other political parties... in this respect members of the Fabian Society are sad sinners.’
Neither Wells nor Shaw mentioned their letters from Keir Hardie when Wells turned up at Adelphi Terrace the day after the Essex Hall encounter. He came with an offer of compromise. ‘Why dont you see how entirely I am expressing you in all these things?’ he had asked G.B.S. But Shaw had scented victory. He proposed leading this second debate. It would be a peculiarly Shavian exercise – a ‘terrific’ verbal victory achieved without ‘saying anything unkind’. He retreated into the country to gather his superiority. ‘All I dread is being in bad form,’ he wrote; ‘for I am overworked.’
The crowd was even larger for this second contest. At nine o’clock Shaw rose to speak. If Wells’s amendment abolishing the executive were passed, he said, the executive would obey it ‘by not offering themselves for re-election’. It would be dismissal with dishonour: they would be drummed out. But this amendment, he reminded the audience, had nothing to do with the two reports. Over the serious business of the proposals in these reports, the executive would never resign, even if defeated on every resolution, but would faithfully carry out the decisions of the Society. Above the uproar Wells was heard pledging himself not to resign. ‘That is a great relief to my mind,’ continued Shaw. ‘I can now pitch into Mr Wells without fear of consequences.’
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