Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  This statement was made four months after The Times carried two articles on the verification of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. ‘Enough has been done to overthrow the certainty of ages,’ Times readers were told, ‘and to require a new philosophy of the universe, a philosophy that will sweep away nearly all that has hitherto been accepted as the axiomatic basis of physical thought.’

  This was immensely exciting to Shaw. In Back to Methuselah, which was completed in May 1920, he made the scientist Pygmalion speak of children in the future possessing an innate ‘sense of space time and quantity’ and of knowing by instinct many things that the greatest physicists of the twentieth century ‘could hardly arrive at by forty years of strenuous study’. For the first time in this play Shaw ‘used mathematical speculation to characterize advanced intelligence,’ observed the critic Desmond McRory. McRory argues that Shaw began writing futuristic plays after the Great War out of ‘despair over the failure of his contemporaries and a desire to deal with a time distant enough to be hopeful’.

  Shaw and Einstein first met at a dinner party early in June 1921 when Einstein was visiting London. In the nine years that passed before their second meeting in the autumn of 1930, their knowledge of each other had been advanced by Shaw’s mathematical biographer Archibald Henderson. In 1923 Henderson had gone to the Institute of Physics at the University of Berlin to work with Einstein on relativity and atomic theory, and to instruct him on Shavian drama and politics in the evenings. On his return he resumed his schooling of Shaw on the latest advances in physics. By 1925 Shaw was speaking of Einstein as the great destroyer of scientific infallibility: ‘he has upset the velocity of light, upset the ether, upset gravitation, and generally lit... a fire among the gods of the physicists.’

  Shaw and Einstein’s second meeting, in October 1930, took place at a public dinner at the Savoy Hotel. Shaw’s speech proposing Einstein’s health, and Einstein’s reply, were recorded by the BBC and broadcast to the United States. It was a singular moment for G.B.S. He could say exactly what he felt since his feelings, the polite occasion, and his ideological commitment to progress came naturally together. ‘Suppose that I had to rise here tonight to propose the toast of Napoleon,’ he said: ‘undoubtedly I could say many flattering things about Napoleon, but the one thing which I should not be able to say about him would be... that perhaps it would have been better for the human race if he had never been born!’

  Shaw classed Einstein as belonging to a different order of great men whose ‘hands are unstained by the blood of any human being on earth’. He explained, too, the affinity he felt for this man who had recently spoken of his need for solitude. ‘...My friend Mr Wells has spoken to us sometimes of the secret places of the heart. There are also the lonely places of the mind... our little solitude gives us something of a key to his solitude... his great and august solitude.

  ‘...I rejoice at the new universe to which he has introduced us. I rejoice in the fact that he has destroyed all the old sermons, all the old absolutes, all the old cut and dried conceptions, even of time and space, which were so discouraging... I want to get further and further. I always want more and more problems, and our visitor has raised endless and wonderful problems and has begun solving them.’

  Shaw’s toast was a salute to the ultimate realist of the twentieth century. In the plays and books of Shaw’s last twenty years, Einstein was to become a symbol of human possibility. ‘You are the only sort of man in whose existence I can see much hope for this deplorable world,’ Shaw wrote to him.

  In his reply at the Savoy, Einstein described what he believed Shaw’s achievement to have been as a dramatist. ‘From your box of tricks you have taken countless puppets which, whilst resembling men, are not of flesh and bone, but consist entirely of spirit, wit, and grace...

  ‘You make these gracious puppets dance in a little world guarded by the Graces who allow no resentment to enter in. Whoever has glanced into this little world, sees the world of our reality in a new light; he sees your puppets blending into real people... you have been able, as no other contemporary, to effect in us a liberation, and to take from us something of the heaviness of life.’

  SEVENTEEN

  1

  Elopement to Russia

  After exhausting the possible, he [Napoleon] had to attempt the impossible and go to Moscow... his failure made him the enemy of the human race.

  What I Really Wrote about the War (1930)

  ‘Good news from Russia, eh?’ Shaw had written to Frank Harris on learning the news of Kerensky’s revolution in February 1917. ‘Not quite what any of the belligerents intended... but the Lord fulfils himself in many ways.’

  The language Shaw and others had used to describe tsardom was to become familiar ten and twenty years later in Western reports of Stalinism. With its Siberian exiles, its pogroms, terrors, massacres, the Tsar’s regime, ‘under which women spent years in dungeons for teaching children to read... laborers lived in cellars and... the dear princesses could hire a droschky to take them to the Opera for four pence’, was the most inequitable society in Europe. It should, Shaw recommended in 1915, be excommunicated from international society as ‘the open enemy of every liberty we boast of. He made what efforts he could to find out what was happening during 1917, writing that spring in the New York Times of ‘the enormous relief, triumph, and delight with which the news of the revolution in Russia was received in England’. ‘It not only at last justifies the Franco-Anglo-Russian alliance (which in the days of the tsardom was a disgrace to western democracy), but justifies the whole war,’ he wrote to Gorki in May 1917.

  For most of this year Shaw found himself in unusual accord with liberal opinion in Britain. ‘Hail! The Russian Revolution,’ proclaimed Ramsay MacDonald. At the Albert Hall in London 20,000 people had to be refused tickets for the celebration. ‘Every person there was wanting a real absolute change in everything,’ Bertrand Russell affirmed, ‘not the sort of piecemeal niggling reforms that one is used to, but the sort of thing the Russians have done... The Russians have really put a new spirit into the world, & it is going to be worth while to be alive.’ Many felt as if they were living at the time of the French Revolution. It was ‘a tremendous event for me,’ acknowledged Leonard Woolf, ‘and for all those whose beliefs and hopes had been moulded in the revolutionary fires of liberty, equality, fraternity’. People were filled with a sense of liberation. This ‘giant stride from autocracy to republic-democracy astounded Western Europe,’ wrote H. G. Wells. ‘...Today Russia stands a gigantic challenge to every vestige of the dynastic system that has darkened, betrayed, and tormented Europe for unnumbered years.’

  By the end of the year, however, what Wells called ‘this banner of fiery hope’ had been extinguished for many by Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution. There had been much in Kerensky’s administration that was naturally appealing to Shaw. Kerensky’s status as a lawyer and the presence in the provisional government of princes and historians gave these moderates a Fabian respectability. They had come to power by revolution, but it had been ‘bloodless’.

  Lenin described Kerensky as ‘the boy braggart’, which was exactly the sort of contemptuous dismissal people had flung at G.B.S. But everyone who saw him knew that Kerensky was a luminous orator: his ‘words rose and fell in an inexhaustible, almost visible fountain of emotional sound,’ one of his audience wrote; and another, who heard him deliver an impassioned address from the stage at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petrograd, observed that the ‘theatrical setting’ had ‘spurred him on in his acting, a role that was natural to him’.

  Kerensky’s overthrow by Lenin represented a defeat for the sort of political activity Shaw had so long been conducting. In his study of fellow-travellers, David Caute was to question when Shaw had ‘ever torn up paving stones, hidden in the marshes, carried a gun, plotted a coup?’ He concluded that the neighbours at Ayot who knew him as a ‘gentle old man’ were ‘closer to the truth’ than Lenin who described him as a figure ‘
far to the left of those around him’ who would never be mistaken for a clown in revolutionary conditions. But Shaw had made it plain that by the word revolutionist he did not mean ‘a bloodstained man in shirt sleeves and a red cap of liberty’ chopping aristocrats to pieces ‘with an axe’.

  After Kerensky’s fall and Lenin’s rise to power, Shaw began to reassess his own political function. Engels had praised him as ‘a most talented and witty writer’; Gorki acclaimed him as ‘one of the most courageous thinkers in Europe’. But what were witty writing and courageous thinking worth in the historical process? Was he ‘absolutely worthless as an economist and politician’, as Trotsky seemed to think?

  Shaw’s confidence in men of ‘iron nerve and fanatical conviction’ expanded and darkened as his own sense of political achievement shrank. ‘I am tired of seeing Labor and Socialism rolling the stone up the hill with frightful labor only to have it rolled down again,’ he complained in 1920. After forty years of political playwriting, speech-making, pamphleteering, permeation, he looked round Britain and saw little to be admired. The House of Commons was full of what Stanley Baldwin described as ‘hard-faced men who look as if they have done very well out of the war’. ‘The higher ranks of the learned professions,’ noted the Conservative Member of Parliament J. C. C. Davidson, ‘are scarcely represented at all.’ How could change be effected through such a philistine legislative body? It seemed to Shaw that a democratic system designed to prevent tyranny had been exploited so that it arrested progress.

  Until now, with some dramatic hesitations, Shaw had clung to a belief in ‘gradual modifications of existing systems’ rather than revolution from which ‘all humane men recoil with intense repugnance and dread’. He had dedicated himself to creating a socialist conscience in the country. But ‘there is no use in waiting,’ he declared in 1920. They would wait for ever to get the majority of votes from people who ‘knew a little about football and very much less about politics’, and whom the newspapers were continually ‘bemusing and bewildering and bedevilling’. Legislation must create rather than succumb to public opinion because, if no political measure could be passed until everyone understood and demanded it, then nothing could be passed at all. Lenin, the man of action, was a realist; Kerensky, the man of speeches, had been another theatrical romantic, like Ramsay MacDonald. ‘People who really want to have something done, like Lenin, do not wait.’

  Shaw felt he really wanted to have something done: this was the only source of optimism available to him. Socialists in the West had lost too many of their propaganda battles because capitalism had been promoted as the ‘glorification and idolization of the rich,’ he wrote in 1921. ‘...it gives to every poor man a gambling chance, at odds of a million to one or thereabouts, of becoming a rich one... no one is condemned by it to utter despair.’ But in Shavian terms, capitalism remained the last refuge of the idealist and ‘the most unreal product of wishful thinking of all the Utopias’. Under assaults from the left the system had let in so much apparent change ‘that superficial thinkers easily persuade themselves that it will finally progress into Socialism,’ he argued; ‘but it can never do so without making a complete volte face. Slavery is always improving itself as a system.’

  Shaw made his own volte-face, switching his allegiance from Kerensky to Lenin, with the alacrity of one eager to abandon long-held lost causes and put himself in the vanguard of victory. ‘Consistency is the enemy of enterprise,’ he acknowledged, ‘just as symmetry is the enemy of art.’

  By the beginning of 1920 Shaw had settled on Lenin as the ‘one really interesting statesman in Europe’. The following year he admitted Trotsky as a second world leader. ‘They have had a terrific job to do,’ he wrote; ‘and the fact that after four years they are still holding Russia together shows that they are men of extraordinary quality.’ He could point to only one potential leader in Britain: Lloyd George’s Minister for War and Air, Winston Churchill. But Churchill ‘has lost his head over Bolshevism completely,’ he told a Russian journalist in 1920.

  Shaw considered Churchill to be a politician without an ideology. Such a man, whose popularity was enhanced by big cigars, genial romantic oratory and an adventurous sense of patriotism, should have been the perfect vehicle for Shavian permeation. Churchill liked literature too, believing Shaw himself to be ‘the greatest living master of letters in the English-speaking world’. But from his mid-forties onwards (‘Every man over forty is a scoundrel’), Churchill moved to the right in politics, pursuing a policy of repression in Ireland, severing his connection with the Liberal Party and joining Baldwin’s Conservative Cabinet in 1924. Nevertheless Shaw found it difficult to give Churchill up. ‘You have never been a real Tory,’ he informed him after he had been Conservative Prime Minister in the Second World War. The ‘Blimps and Philistines and Stick-in-the-Muds’ of the Conservative Establishment ‘never understood and always dreaded’ him.

  Churchill compared G.B.S. to a ‘continually erupting volcano’ amid whose smoke and ashes there occasionally appeared ‘a piece of pure gold smelted from the central fires of truth’. But the gold was literary, not political. In Churchill’s view, literature existed as a great verbal firework display above the artistic fairground which kept everyone’s spirits up in those lulls following chivalrous wars and during the intervals between the gladiatorial contests of politics. At such peaceful moments ‘we are all the better for having had the Jester in our midst,’ he acknowledged. So G.B.S. continued to live in Churchill’s imagination as a ‘bright, nimble, fierce, and comprehending being, Jack Frost dancing bespangled in the sunshine, which I should be very sorry to lose’. But there were other times, serious times, when such an ‘irresponsible Chatterbox’ was well lost.

  ‘When nations are fighting for life, when the Palace in which the Jester dwells not uncomfortably, is itself assailed, and everyone from Prince to groom is fighting on the battlements, the Jester’s jokes echo only through deserted halls, and his witticisms and commendations, distributed evenly between friend and foe, jar the ears of hurrying messengers, of mourning women and wounded men.’

  Churchill paid lip-service to Shaw as a ‘saint, sage’ and ‘thinker, original, suggestive, profound’; but after the curtain came down on his plays ‘everything goes on the same as before’. It puzzled Churchill that he should try to struggle off the stage into a political world where he did not belong. ‘The world has long watched with tolerance and amusement the nimble antics and gyrations of this unique and double-headed chameleon,’ he wrote, ‘while all the time the creature was eager to be taken seriously.’

  This touched with lively contempt on the relationship between literature and politics that had been troubling Shaw. Politicians in Britain were like magistrates who reached the Bench through their superior social connections rather than by qualifications, and who appealed to the public simply as sportsmen might appeal to it. At his worst, Churchill exploited his popularity ‘by telling people with sufficient bombast just what they think themselves and therefore want to hear’. He would have been better employed, according to Wells, as ‘a brilliant painter’ or, according to Shaw, ‘as a soldier’. As a politician he was a century out of date, representing what was most ludicrous in British foreign policy. The failure to support Kerensky had let in Lenin; the Allied intervention had unintentionally provided the Red Army with British equipment and established Trotsky’s credentials as a military campaigner; and the continuing refusal to trade with the Soviet Union helped to dig a deep moat of national paranoia round the country and establish it as another empire of conservatism.

  Much of what Shaw wrote about the Soviet Union was designed to discredit Churchill’s fearful picture of Bolshevism. He grew adept at taming the Soviet leaders’ revolutionary language. What was totalitarianism after all but the State co-ordination of public welfare? The proletariat became a ‘vast body of persons who have no other means of living except their labor’, in contrast to the ‘proprietariat’ who lived ‘by owning instead of by
working’ and were ‘politically called the Capitalists’. He wanted Soviet Communism, like a good wine, to travel well. He told the Fabians that Democratic Socialism now spelt Communism. ‘There is now nothing but Communism, and in future it is quite futile to go about calling yourselves Fabians.’

  Shaw let his imagination play round Lenin’s revolution until it flowered into a thoroughgoing Fabian event. For if words did not have the power to initiate political change as simply as he had once believed, they could still encircle events and change them mythologically. He remembered the shock of reading Das Kapital: it had been like lifting the lid off hell. But, in their obedience to Marxist principles, the worker-revolutionaries in Russia disenfranchised the educated classes and denied their children common schooling; they criminalized the intelligentsia; abolished private trading for commercial profit; expelled all managers without replacement by qualified directors; handed over the farms from the landlords to the peasants and generally ‘went through a hellgate of mistakes’. The result was near starvation. ‘Hordes of lost and deserted children, the aftermath of the war, wandered about Russia in little gangs, begging and stealing, following the seasons like migrating birds,’ Shaw wrote in a chapter on Sovietism he added to The Intelligent Woman’s Guide. Made desperate by the country’s lack of government, Lenin was forced, under the title New Economic Policy, to introduce gas-and-water Fabianism. For what else was the electrification of Russia? He had adopted the Fabian device of allowing private enterprise to run the factories until their productive work could be taken over by public enterprise. ‘That is to say,’ Shaw concluded, ‘Lenin was by the pressure of practical and immediate and imperative experience converted to what we call gradualism.’