Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  With the support of Hubert Bland, Annie Besant urged the Fabians to advance boldly into front-line politics. But Shaw resisted this appeal and persuaded her that society must be reformed ‘by a slow process of evolution, not by revolution and bloodshed’. This was a preliminary to Webb’s famous phrase, first uttered in 1923: ‘the Inevitability of Gradualness’ – a philosophy that, by emphasizing the practical nature of their socialism, surrounded the Fabians with the glow of constitutional power and postponed for many years Shaw’s disillusion with parliamentary politics in Britain.

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  Shaw calculated that if the Fabian Society was to become the centre of British socialism then its independence from other groups must be established not only in tone and tactics, but also in the dismal matter of economic theory.

  The job of shifting the Fabians out of the shadow of Marx had begun late in 1884. Marx’s value theory defined the value of a commodity as being determined by the labour involved in producing it. But Philip Wicksteed, a Unitarian minister devoted to the works of Ibsen and the study of economics, had argued that Marxist economists failed to account for the obvious dependence of prices on supply and demand and concluded that value depended on the utility of the commodity to the consumer. From 1885 to 1889, Shaw went to the meetings of a group which, under Wicksteed’s leadership, later grew into the British Economic Association. It was composed mainly of professional economists and members of the faculty of University College, London, and ‘was the closest Shaw had ever come to a university education’. A controversy with Wicksteed ‘ended in my education and conversion by my opponent,’ Shaw later concluded, ‘and the disappearance of the Marxian theory of value from the articles of faith of British Socialism’.

  This was the first step for Shaw in getting rid of Marx’s inevitable class war. Marx, he insisted, had been a foreigner who, though he could analyse capitalist policy like a god, did not understand the British social system. As someone outside that system, he had lusted after its violent destruction. Those who swallowed Marxism whole were possessed by a need for war. Shaw’s need was for peace – to an extent where he made war (in Arms and the Man, for example, or in his journalism on boxing) unreal by mockery. Instead of a Marxist class war, he saw a conflict of interest between producers and the privileged unemployed – those who earned money and those who lived off rent. Such lines of battle did not run neatly between social classes, he pointed out, but through them. A continual civil war (as to some extent envisaged by Marx) could only come about if the Trade Unions and Employers’ Federations were determined to play the capitalist game of labourer versus employer, particularly through free collective bargaining.

  On alternate weeks, Shaw attended another group, later known as the Hampstead Historic Society, that met at Wildwood Farm, a house on the northern edge of Hampstead Heath belonging to a stockbroker, Arthur Wilson. At the centre of this group was his wife Charlotte Wilson, a firebrand bluestocking from Merton Hall, Cambridge.

  The Hampstead Historic Society became the chief policy-making forum of the Fabian cabinet. They would stride up to Hampstead and argue between themselves so forcefully that other socialists could not believe they would remain friends. For Shaw, the elimination of the traditional class war took the political initiative from the socialist body and gave it to the socialist head – a transference from the proletariat to the intellectual. If Shaw’s and Webb’s analyses of capitalism were right, then such men as they were to have the power in the twentieth century. The sense of this power gives Shaw’s Fabian writings their tone of authority, and Webb’s social investigations their extraordinary persistence.

  But as Shaw admitted: ‘The fact is, 1886 and 1887 were not favorable years for drawing-room Socialism and scientific politics.’ These were the years in which the Tories, under Lord Salisbury, swept back to power, replacing Gladstone’s promise of Home Rule with the continuation of British dominance over Ireland, and replacing Chamberlain’s programme of land and housing reform financed by higher taxes on the rich with a policy of expanding the Empire abroad and protecting property at home. The new order was without authority in Parliament. The trade depression of these years had thrown many out of work. ‘They were years of great distress among the working-classes,’ Shaw wrote. In many large towns throughout the country stones were thrown, railings uprooted, windows smashed, shops looted. The times seemed to belong to the militants – in particular to Hyndman, who had created in the SDF ‘a machine that could mobilize up to twenty thousand demonstrators’. Compared with that, what was this stage army of Fabians – sixty-seven strong in 1886 and with an income of £35 19s.? The Fabian voice, insisting that true socialism was a matter of justice to the poor and not envy of the rich, was drowned. For the unemployed had begun to march and the Fabians, protesting their respectability, had no choice but to tag along behind them.

  In the autumn of 1885 a police attempt to shut down a traditional ‘speakers’ corner’ had led to a socialist demonstration in which Shaw, as one of the volunteer speakers, had pledged himself to be imprisoned. ‘The prospect is anything but agreeable.’ But no arrests were made and the battle for free speech was won. The following February, the SDF paraded in Trafalgar Square and there was a ‘monstrous riot,’ as Queen Victoria described it, ‘...a momentary triumph for socialism and a disgrace to the capital’. London seemed open to a ‘French Revolution’.

  The SDF planned the largest demonstration of all to take place once more in Trafalgar Square, on Sunday 13 November 1887 – a week after Sir Charles Warren, the new chief of the Metropolitan Police, had closed it for further meetings. Originally a protest against the Government’s Irish policy, it became another trial of strength over free speech. Every radical, socialist and anarchist body united to confront the forces of public order.

  That day groups from all over London attempted to force their way into the square and were met by 1,500 police, 200 mounted Life Guards and a detachment of Grenadier Guards. Shaw, having studied the Act under which Warren had closed Trafalgar Square and decided that it was being illegally applied, joined the group at Clerkenwell Green. After speeches from William Morris, Annie Besant and Shaw himself, exhorting the people to be orderly and to press on in their irresistible numbers if attacked, the drums rattled, banners nodded, and they set off.

  Shaw’s various descriptions of what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ are exultant. In every avenue leading to Trafalgar Square, the forces of Labour were broken up by squads of police. At High Holborn, Shaw and Annie Besant were swept aside by the front ranks of their own procession in counter-revolutionary retreat. ‘Running hardly expresses our collective action,’ he reported. ‘We skedaddled... On the whole, I think it was the most abjectly disgraceful defeat ever suffered by a band of heroes outnumbering their foes a thousand to one.’

  The scene at Trafalgar Square was a débâcle. The red-haired adventurer Cunninghame Graham, rising like a Scottish Mephistopheles from the sulphurous smoke of Charing Cross Underground, was truncheoned to the ground and, along with the engineer John Burns, arrested and imprisoned. Annie Besant rushed everywhere trying to organize a defence line of carts and wagons against the Foot Guards. The mild-mannered Edward Carpenter was manhandled, he furiously wrote, ‘by that crawling thing a policeman’. Stuart Glennie, a Scottish philosophic historian whose special period was 6000 BC, charged the thin red line of Grenadiers with his raised umbrella as they were fixing bayonets. Shaw arrived unostentatiously with his vegetarian friend Henry Salt who, discovering his watch had been stolen, realized he could not complain to the police since he was there to complain against them. Shaw consulted his own watch and, deciding it was tea-time, walked home. After tea, he went with Annie Besant to Farringdon Hall where she chaired his evening lecture on ‘Practical Socialism’.

  There were many lessons to be derived from Bloody Sunday. William Morris withdrew from outdoor militancy to the converted stable of his house on the Thames and the gatherings of his Hammersmith Socialist Society.
For Hyndman it was the beginning of the end, as popular support hesitated, and veered elsewhere. To Shaw and Webb the retreat seemed a victory, not for capitalism over socialism, but for Fabian tactics over those of their socialist rivals. Once the Local Government Act of 1888 was passed, they set about turning defeat into success by working in municipal politics – a programme Hyndman called ‘gas and water socialism’. But two people, Annie Besant and John Burns, learnt another lesson for the twentieth century.

  Amid all the vengeful growlings over their rout it was Annie Besant who acted most constructively, collecting funds, organizing newspaper support, arranging for the bail and legal defence of prisoners, storming the courts, contradicting witnesses, browbeating the police and overawing magistrates. She was all for returning the following Sunday to the Square, and made an impassioned appeal to the Fabians to do so. But Shaw, speaking in opposition, carried a reluctant meeting with him. ‘I object to a defiant policy altogether at present,’ he explained to William Morris. ‘If we persist in it, we shall be eaten bit by bit like an artichoke. They will provoke; we will defy; they will punish. I do not see the wisdom of that.’

  Annie Besant was left with a conviction that success would have to depend on efficient planning and precisely calculated aims, on influencing public opinion through newspapers and the power of organization through the unions. Her leadership of the match-girls’ strike in 1888, which ended with improvements in working conditions and pay and led to the formation of a Matchworkers’ Union, was recognized as a triumph for these new orderly tactics.

  Of the many strikes of 1889, the greatest, beginning on 14 August, was the London Dock Strike led by John Burns, which was won with the aid of funds from Australian unions and London demonstrations planned in consultation with the police. Burns emerged from the Dock Strike victory as a potential leader of British socialism. The future belonged to such people – a working-class man who represented Battersea on the London County Council, went into Parliament in 1892 and became the ‘first artisan to reach cabinet rank’.

  The great Fabian success of these years was the publication, in December 1889, of Fabian Essays in Socialism. Shaw had been appointed editor and given the job of preparing the book from a number of Fabian lectures. Having been told by the publishers that the book was ‘commercially unproducible’, the Fabians decided to bring out a subscription edition themselves – a thousand copies at six shillings. It had decorations in dark green by Walter Crane on the front and by May Morris on the spine, and was distributed from Pease’s flat. The preface and two of the eight essays were supplied by Shaw, who also compiled the index, chose the paper and type, and drafted a handbill announcement. Within a month the entire edition was sold out – ‘it went off like smoke’. A year later, over 20,000 had gone and it was still selling at the rate of 400 copies a week. By becoming a best-seller, socialism was made respectable in capitalist terms.

  Fabian Essays became a socialist bible. Suddenly Fabianism was famous. In 1891, 335,000 tracts were distributed; by 1893, the membership, which included many influential figures (Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Emmeline Pankhurst), rose to over five hundred and, in addition to the metropolitan groups, seventy local societies had sprung up.

  One of the reviewers of Fabian Essays was William Morris. He regretted that such lucid economic analysis and exposition of socialist principles was no longer at the service of the revolutionary movement. Instead the Fabians advocated ‘the fantastic and unreal tactic’ of permeation which ‘could not be carried out in practice; and which, if it could be, would still leave us in a position from which we should have to begin our attack on capitalism over again’. Morris blamed Webb for this ‘somewhat disastrous move’. Webb had falsified the class struggle, substituted pieties about state regulation and reduced socialism to the mechanism of a system of property-holding. For Morris himself, socialism remained a ‘complete theory of human life, founded indeed on the visible necessities of animal life [which]... will not indeed enable us to get rid of the tragedy of life... but will enable us to meet it without fear and without shame’. He wrote warmly, if regretfully, of Shaw. ‘If he could only forget the Sidney-Webbian permeation tactic... what an advantage it would be to us all!’

  Morris and Webb were Shaw’s political mentors. Morris was a great man and Webb a great brain; Morris a hero for all time and Webb a man of the times. Shaw wanted to unite the applied arts with the social sciences and use Webb’s logic to circumvent Morris’s sense of history. But they remained two heralds beckoning Shaw in different directions. So he continued speaking of the Fabians with two voices. His most persistent voice aggrandized the Fabian achievement. The other voice sounded his despair that they had not achieved more. He insisted that ‘Webb made no mistake’. But he was also to acknowledge by the 1930s the possibility that ‘Morris was right after all’. He turned to one and then to the other: and eventually he turned to Soviet Russia.

  FOUR

  1

  The Perfect Ibsenite

  I attack the current morality because it has come to mean a system of strict observance of certain fixed rules of conduct... intensified by the addition to the ten commandments of sentimental obligations to act up to ideal standards of heroism. Now what Ibsen has done is to call attention to the fact that the moment we begin to worship these commandments and ideals for their own sakes, we actually place them in opposition to the very purpose they were instituted to serve, i.e. human happiness.

  Shaw to Jules Magny (16 December 1890)

  On 7 February 1887, their landlord having gone bankrupt, the Shaws had received notice to leave their flat at 36 Osnaburgh Street. ‘Looking for lodgings in Marylebone and Gray’s Inn,’ Shaw noted in his diary on 26 February, ‘where my feelings were somewhat hurt by the brusqueness with which the steward received my question as to whether ladies were permitted to reside within the precincts.’

  Towards the end of March he joined his mother on the third and fourth floors of 29 Fitzroy Square. A big room overlooking the square became his bedroom, and he turned one of the rooms on the top floor into a study. Here, in grand disorder he was to write his first seven plays, his literary, music and theatre criticism, and carry on his most active political campaigning.

  Number 29 Fitzroy Square had a handsome façade, but was in poor condition. Shaw, who later bought the lease for his mother, described it as ‘a most repulsive house’. There was no bathroom and ‘the sanitary arrangements had had no place in the original plans,’ he discovered. ‘In impressive architecture it is the outside that matters most; and the servants do not matter at all.’ It was a fine place for the flowering of his socialism. After a series of humiliating interviews, he established himself as being not his mother’s lodger but head of the household, so that in November 1888 he was able to register ‘the first vote I ever gave in my life at an election, though I am over 32 years of age’.

  Wherever he spoke his words were ‘straight as a ray of light,’ wrote H. M. Tomlinson, ‘such as we get once or twice in a few centuries, as the result of a passionate morality that happens to be gifted with the complete control of full expression’. Many who heard this ‘tall, thin man with a very pale and gentle face’ speaking with deadly playfulness, and denouncing as robbers those usually regarded as the ornaments of society, were convinced that here was the leader of ‘a revolutionary rising which would upset many of our conventions and bring a new dispensation, political and economic, into the London world’.

  In 1887 he delivered sixty-six public lectures; by the end of ten years he had given nearly a thousand. Every Sunday he spoke, sometimes against the blaring of brass bands, often at workmen’s clubs and coffee houses, arguing from squalid platforms in dens full of tobacco smoke, to a little knot of members whom he had pulled away from their beer and billiards. The ‘ubiquitous Mr Shaw’, as The Star called him, was soon well known: ‘a strange and rather startling figure’, erect and agile in his serviceable suit of tweed, red scarf, wide-brimmed felt hat and jaunt
ily swinging umbrella – ‘a tall, lean, icy man,’ reported the Workman’s Times, ‘white-faced, with a hard, clear, fleshless voice, restless grey-blue eyes, neatly-parted fair hair, big feet, and a reddish, untamed beard’.

  He preferred speaking in the open air – under lamp-posts, at dock gates, in parks, squares, market places – and in all sorts of weather. He never wrote or read his speeches. By the late 1880s he had laboriously perfected his technique ‘until I could put a candle out with a consonant’.

  Whether it was ‘Capitalism’ at the Wolverhampton Trades and Labour Council, ‘Communism’ at the Dulwich Working Men’s Club, ‘Socialism’ at Plumstead, or ‘Food, Death and Civilization’ at the headquarters of the London Vegetarian League, he spoke, stretching his long fingers to reach out to his audience, as if all their lives depended upon it. He packed the halls with crowds of people; he made them listen, made them laugh. It is clear from the text of those lectures he later wrote up for publication that Shaw was passionately serious.

  ‘Your authorised system of medicine is nothing but a debased survival of witchcraft. Your schools are machines for forcing a spurious literary culture on children in order that your universities may stamp them as educated men when they have fairly got hold of the wrong end of every stick in the faggot of knowledge. The tall silk hats and starched linen fronts which you force me to wear, and without which I cannot successfully practise as a physician, clergyman, schoolmaster, lawyer or merchant, are inconvenient, insanitary, ugly, pompous and offensive... your popular forms of worship are... only redeemed from gross superstition by their obvious insincerity... Under color of protecting my person you forcibly take my money to support an armed force for the execution of barbarous and detestable laws; for the urging of wars I abhor... Your tyranny makes my very individuality a hindrance tome: I am outdone and outbred by the mediocre, the docile, the time-serving. Evolution under such conditions means degeneracy.’