‘You have learnt something,’ Undershaft tells Barbara at a genuinely touching moment. ‘That always feels at first as if you have lost something.’
Shaw himself seems to have felt this sensation of loss. ‘But oh! Eleanor between ourselves, the play, especially in the last act, is a mere ghost, at least so it seems to me... It was a fearful job... Brainwork comes natural to me; but this time I knew I was working – and now nobody understands.’
This lack of understanding proceeds from the complexity of what Shaw was questioning. Is socialism at odds with human nature? Are the self-destructive impulses of human beings ineradicable? Are there ways of disarming oppressive power that do not betray the cause that uses them? Though the affirmation comes out strongly, getting through to it had been the hardest work the playwright had done. And the chance that he is wrong remains. The Devil’s Force of Death speech in Man and Superman, with its more efficient engines of destruction (‘of sword and gun and poison gas’) leads straight to Undershaft’s weapons factory with its ‘aerial battleships’ that eventually will fly over Captain Shotover’s villa at the climax of Heartbreak House, threatening with its ‘terrific explosion’ the end of humankind.
Shaw’s optimism was a perilous act of faith focused on the future. He had looked in John Bull’s Other Island for a country where the ‘facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal’. In Perivale St Andrews nothing is achieved ‘by words and dreams’: killing is ‘the final test of conviction’. It is the nightmare of a man with ‘honour and humanity on my side, wit in my head, skill in my hand, and a higher life for my aim’, who has a vision of world war to come. In the aftermath of this war, through the fantasy of Back to Methuselah, he will refashion humankind in the image of his heart’s desire.
*
The Salvation Army lent uniforms for the production at the Court Theatre. The audience for the first performance on 28 November 1905 included a box full of uniformed Salvation Army Commissioners who for the first time in their lives had entered a theatre. Among ‘the intelligentsia of London’ sat the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, in the last week of his Government, with Beatrice Webb, whom five days before he had appointed to the new Royal Commission on the Poor Law. The foyer of the Court was crowded to bursting – hundreds of people had to be turned away – and above the excitement floated a rumour that the play was blasphemous. The curtain rose.
TEN
1
Fabian Bedfellows
What a transformation scene from those first years I knew him: the scathing bitter opponent of wealth and leisure, and now! the adored one of the smartest and most cynical set of English Society... our good sense preserve us!
The Diary of Beatrice Webb (14 October 1905)
‘Politics are very topsy-turvy just now,’ Beatrice Webb wrote at the end of December 1903, ‘and one never knows who may be one’s bedfellow!’ Many of the Fabians were suspicious of the social glamour with which the Webbs surrounded themselves. Sidney himself warned Beatrice that they should not be ‘seen in the houses of great people’. But the Fabian policy of permeation made it obligatory for them to enter the drawing-rooms of Edwardian polite society.
This permeation was taking the Webbs away from the evolution of the Labour Party. They took little notice of the attempts to bring socialism and the trade unions together as a parliamentary Labour Party. As Shaw warned Pease, ‘any sort of amalgamation means, for us, extinction’. Power, they believed, still resided with the traditional parties in Parliament and access to power must still lie through persuading them.
Among the Liberals, they had chosen Lord Rosebery, an enigmatic figure who had left the leadership of the party in 1896. The speech he made in Chesterfield at the end of 1901 owed much to ‘Lord Rosebery’s Escape from Houndsditch’, the article that Sidney Webb had written, and Shaw toned up, the previous September. Using this as his brief, Rosebery attacked the record of party politics and called for a ‘clean slate’ on which to draft a programme of national efficiency.
At the top of this clean slate, the Webbs hoped to chalk up housing and education. But what did Rosebery himself intend? He was grateful to Sidney Webb for giving him something to say, but he had taken off his ‘Gladstonian old clothes’ and, instead of putting on the new collectivist garments that Sidney Webb handed him, he simply put himself to bed and switched out the light. ‘Why are we in this galley?’ Beatrice wondered. And Shaw himself was driven to concede the emptiness of their Rosebery campaign.
But permeation did seem to work with the Conservatives. Their Tory bedfellow was Arthur Balfour who succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister in the summer of 1902 and ‘will I think,’ Beatrice predicted, ‘make no ripple of change’. Quietly scintillating at the dinner table, he was well-spoken and precise-sounding in the House of Commons, and as a political thinker elegantly indecisive. Like Beatrice, he sometimes felt he would have preferred a contemplative to a public life – in fact it struck Beatrice as ‘the oddest fact’ that he should be ‘mixed up... with democratic politics’. Really he had gone into politics to please his mother and then developed the knack of pleasing all sorts of people. He was at home on the golf course, in the concert hall and among the ‘gallants and graces’ of the fashionable world; popular too with the finer minds of the universities, the pick of the clergy, the flower of the bench: and also with the Webbs.
It seemed to them incredible that a Prime Minister in his mid-fifties should have preserved an open mind on so many political questions. His opinions shifted uneasily between the need for action and the futility of taking it. Unlike Rosebery he was not to be persuaded by what might be popular but by whether he was bored or not. He was easily bored – so much politics was without refinement of thought or sensibility. It was here that the Webbs saw their opportunity. Between 1902 and 1905 they ‘slipped into’ friendship with him. ‘He comes in to dinner whenever we ask him, and talks most agreeably,’ Beatrice noted. Balfour responded to these Fabians as a connoisseur might respond to an unusual wine. He believed Shaw to be ‘the finest man of letters of to-day’ – though he would not read his Plays Unpleasant because ‘I never read unpleasant things’. He counted on the Fabians painlessly fitting such unpleasant things into the perfect equilibrium of his life, and the Webbs endeavoured to oblige. ‘I set myself to amuse and interest him,’ Beatrice wrote. And he was so responsive intellectually, so courteous, that ‘we found ourselves in accord on most questions’.
But Beatrice distrusted her attraction to Balfour. She had with difficulty walked away from the social world to which her family belonged and dedicated herself to disinterested public service – and now found that this service was leading her back into the milieu she had abandoned. For Balfour belonged to ‘the Souls’, that exquisite group of intellectuals with artistic and aristocratic tastes who were to find an obituary in Heartbreak House.
This immersion in party-giving-and-going seemed justified by what the Fabians achieved over the Education Acts of 1902 and 1903. Sidney’s Fabian Tract No. 106, The Education Muddle and the Way Out, recommended the abolition of School Boards and the passing of control for education to the local government bodies. The Education Act of 1902 (which did not apply to London) ‘followed almost precisely the lines laid down in our tract,’ wrote Edward Pease. ‘Our support of the Conservative Government in their education policy caused much surprise.’
It caused more than surprise: it caused misgivings at the invasion of education by party politics, and Webb’s proposal to give assistance out of public funds to reactionary Church schools fomented outright opposition. It was far from being the ‘clean slate’ other socialists wanted. Over the Education Act of 1903, which transferred the School Boards’ powers to the London County Council, Webb experienced still greater difficulties. To Ramsay MacDonald it seemed that Sidney was collaborating with Balfour in order to get a Government post.
The Fabian success had been achieved at a dismaying price. There was, as Beatrice put it, ‘a slump in
Webbs’ on the political market. After the local elections of 1904 Sidney was voted off the Progressive Party Committee and denied all positions of authority on the London County Council. He had hoped to be brought back into communication with the trade union world through his appointment by Balfour to a new Royal Commission on trade union law. But this became a ‘fiasco’ when the trade unions boycotted the Commission. Suddenly the Fabians seemed isolated. Through their educational reforms they had lost much of the interest they had spent years nurturing among the Liberals; and by their pronouncements on tariff reform they were to assist in the downfall of their one political ally, Balfour.
*
Webb had conducted the Fabian policy on education; it was Shaw who stage-managed their fiscal policy. The rightfulness of Free Trade had been taken for granted. But following Chamberlain’s speech in May 1903, ‘Free Trade versus Fair Trade’, tariff reform suddenly became a controversial electioneering issue. ‘I think we are clearly called upon to oraculate on the present crisis,’ Shaw wrote to Pease: and Webb reluctantly agreed. At a Fabian meeting in June 1903 he had given a tentative analysis of the situation, on balance against tariffs, but in effect recommending more Fabian research into the subject.
Shaw’s attitude was more dramatic. Following instinct rather than research, he had come out as ‘a Protectionist right down to my boots’, at one with Ruskin and Carlyle in his belief that ‘Free Trade is heartbreaking nonsense’.
Over the last six months of 1903, Fabian opinion had come to lodge halfway between tariff and Free Trade. To give commanding expression to such mixed opinion needed unusual dexterity. Shaw was convinced that the Fabian Society ‘must say something that nobody else is saying’. He had wanted to demonstrate that sensible tariff reform involved, as a preliminary step, the introduction of socialism. He proposed an agreement where, in exchange for their support of Chamberlain’s protectionist scheme, the workers were guaranteed a minimum wage. He also proposed that Chamberlain be invited to give a pledge that any extra revenue arising from tariffs would be applied to ‘public purposes’ and not ‘to still further reduce the existing shamefully inadequate taxation of unearned incomes’. Shaw argued that, in principle, there was no objection from a socialist point of view to ‘State interference with trade, both to suppress sweating at home and to guide and assist our exporters abroad’. Socialists were therefore necessarily anti-Free Trade as they were anti-Laissez-faire, both systems being historical counterparts of each other and idealizing the exploitation of market forces.
At a Fabian meeting on 22 January 1904 the draft of Shaw’s Tract No. 116, Fabianism and the Fiscal Question, was fought over page by page. With numerous amendments, it was published on 31 March. ‘Though I am the pen man of this Tract, its authorship is genuinely collective,’ Shaw explained in a Preface. It was as adept a performance as Fabianism and the Empire. Both tracts submerge immediate election questions and extreme Fabian differences in the creed of international collectivism and a lucid exposition of the practical benefits of domestic socialism that might be wrung out of an imperial policy.
Shaw did not believe that the Labour Party would win seats at the next election. He expected Chamberlain to become Prime Minister, and if Chamberlain could be persuaded to accept a minimum wage for workers, the Fabian work on tariff reform would not be in vain.
But in the election following Balfour’s resignation on 4 December, the Liberals won an unprecedented majority. Their leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, that ‘weak, vain man’ whom ‘nobody will follow’, became Prime Minister and various Liberal friends of the Webbs (Asquith, Grey and Haldane), making their peace, accepted office under him. Balfour was never again to lead the party in office; and Joseph Chamberlain (who suffered a stroke not long afterwards) never again held political office.
There was one further surprise at the election: fifty-three seats were captured by Labour men. Of these, twenty-four were trade unionists (mostly textile and mining men) who owed their primary allegiance not to Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie, but to the Liberal Party which had pledged to restore protection of union funds from liability for loss caused through industrial disputes. The complexion of British politics was changing. A successful pact had been made between socialism and trade unionism that gave the Labour movement a parliamentary base in national politics. In The Clarion Shaw laid down some ‘Fabian Notes’ on the election. The Labour members had provided nothing more than ‘a nominally independent Trade Unionist and Radical group,’ he wrote. ‘...I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a party.’
2
Wells Joins the Cast
We have always been misunderstood, mistrusted, and from time to time roundly denounced and vilified not only by the other Socialist Societies but even by a minority of the Fabian Society... From William Morris in 1890 to H. G. Wells in 1906, all the able, energetic and impatient spirits have begun by demanding an abandonment of the Fabian policy, and have ended by perceiving that it is the only possible policy under the circumstances.
Discarded section of Shaw’s leaflet, Election of Executive Committee 1907–8 (8 February 1907)
The unease felt by growing numbers of Fabians swelled after the General Election of January 1906 into a tumour of discontent. Their policy of permeation looked like a series of little interferences and minor activities that had wasted resources and produced dubious results. What was the point of Sidney Webb ingratiating himself with Tories and Liberals at the dinner table while Shaw drastically insulted both parties in his tracts? ‘I quite understand that you can so define permeation as to cover all forms of Socialist activity,’ S. G. Hobson wrote to Shaw. ‘But that won’t help us.’
Hobson and others felt that the Fabian Society was in danger of counting for very little in politics. During its first twelve years, it had lined up what was potentially a great following in the country. Then it had ‘ossified’. The last ten years seemed to be a history of lost opportunities. They had been supplanted by Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie, by the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee.
Like Fabius, the Fabians had waited. But when the new century arrived they had not struck hard – they had gone on waiting. Rising numbers of them however were insisting that the waiting game must end. ‘Webb has repeatedly told me that he does not believe in the possibility of a Socialist Party,’ Hobson told Shaw. ‘On the contrary, I think that an organized Socialist Party which shall include the LRC and the ILP is quite feasible and in every sense desirable.’
Shaw was not unsympathetic to this argument. The Fabian tracts gave the new Labour Party a programme for a decade of electioneering. Shaw argued that the Fabian Society must nevertheless continue with the policy of placing its work at the disposal of ‘anybody and everybody, including the established capitalist governments, who can and will carry out any instalment of it’. If, however, socialism precipitated itself into a genuine political party, then the Fabian Society must back it for all it was worth. But if trade unionism and traditional radicalism prevailed, then the next job for the Fabians would be to detach socialists from the Labour Party and ‘form a Socialist party in parliament independent of all other parties, but leading the advanced elements in all of them by its ideas and its political science’.
He envisaged the bulk of this new party coming from the middle-class proletariat, and substituting middle-class methods of business and conceptions of democracy for trade union methods – representative government in place of bodies of delegates. Their socialism (what Shaw would later call communism) would work to reverse the policy of capitalism by transferring private property into common wealth. The question was whether such a revolutionary programme could be carried out by Parliament, the municipalities and parish councils.
‘Do not let us delude ourselves with any dreams of a peaceful evolution of Capitalism into Socialism, of automatic Liberal Progress... The man who is not a Socialist is quite prepared to fight for his private property... We must clear ou
r minds from cant and cowardice on this subject. It is true that the old barricade revolutionists were childishly and romantically wrong in their methods; and the Fabians were right in making an end of them and formulating constitutional Socialism. But nothing is so constitutional as fighting.’
Once a true socialist party was born in Britain, the Fabian Society ‘would shrink into a little academic body’. Shaw had been on the Fabian executive now for twenty years. He felt loyalty; he felt weariness. He wanted freedom as well as ownership – his child must grow up, become independent and powerful: his child. ‘We cannot sit there any longer making a mere habit of the thing,’ he advised Webb.
He dreamt sometimes of a Fabian party in Parliament. If the thing caught on it would prove the ‘right climax of the whole Fabian adventure’ – and if it failed what was there to lose? ‘This is the psychological moment,’ Shaw told Webb late in 1906. He had been convinced of this by a new leader that the Fabians had thrown up – a brilliant intellectual prospector on whom he might unload his political burden, as he hoped one day to hand over the theatrical future to Harley Granville Barker.
*
H. G. Wells was ten years younger than Shaw. He had seen the aggressive Dubliner with his ‘thin flame-coloured beard beneath his white illumined face’ at Kelmscott House. Like other students, Wells had been converted to socialism under the aesthetic influence of Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin. Late at night, walking back from Hammersmith through the gas-lit streets, or travelling by the sulphurous underground railway, their red ties giving zest to frayed and shabby costumes, he and his fellow-students would speak enthusiastically of Morris and Shaw – how fierce they were in spirit, how sage in method. A revolution seemed to be breaking out around them.
Bernard Shaw Page 46