Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  This was the voice of a man who had raised the torch of revolution. No wonder there was sometimes violence – and he had to escape through a window or back door.

  ‘Your slaves are beyond caring for your cries... In the midst of the riches which their labor piles up for you, their misery rises up too and stifles you. You withdraw in disgust to the other end of the town from them; you appoint special carriages on your railways and special seats in your churches and theatres for them; you set your life apart from theirs by every class barrier you can devise; and yet they swarm about you still... they poison your life as remorselessly as you have sacrificed theirs heartlessly... Then comes the terror of their revolting; the drilling and arming of bodies of them to keep down the rest; the prison, the hospital, paroxysms of frantic coercion, followed by paroxysms of frantic charity. And in the meantime, the population continues to increase!’

  Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, who heard him speak at Bath, noted in his diary that the speaker was ‘a live Socialist, redhot “from the Streets”’ who

  ‘sketched in a really brilliant address the rapid series of steps by which modern society is to pass peacefully into social democracy... It is now urban ground-rent that the municipal governments will have to seize, to meet the ever-growing necessity of providing work and wages for the unemployed... There was a peroration rhetorically effective as well as daring, in which he explained that the bliss of perfected socialism would only come by slow degrees, with lingering step and long delays, and claimed our sympathy for the noble-hearted men whose ardent philanthropy had led them to cut these delays short by immediate revolution... Altogether a noteworthy performance: – the man’s name is Bernard Shaw.’

  Shaw’s oratory was like a spur to insurrection, and if he stopped short of calling for the bombardment of the London slums by the new dynamite, it seemed only with reluctance. Gradualness might be inevitable, but it was not welcome: ‘if we feel relieved that the change is to be slow enough to avert personal risk to ourselves; if we feel anything less than acute disappointment and bitter humiliation at the discovery that there is yet between us and the promised land a wilderness in which many must perish miserably of want and despair: then I submit to you that our institutions have corrupted us to the most dastardly degree of selfishness.’

  For his thousand lectures over these years Shaw received no payment. ‘He gives up willingly time, labour, the opportunities of self-advancement,’ reported The Star. ‘To such men we can forgive much.’ At the election of 1892, while Shaw was speaking at the Town Hall in Dover, a man rose and warned his audience not to be taken in by someone whose opinions were purchased: ‘I immediately offered to sell him my emoluments for £5,’ Shaw recalled. ‘He hesitated; and I came down to £4. I offered to make it five shillings – half-a-crown – a shilling – sixpence. When he would not deal even at a penny I claimed that he must know perfectly well that I was there at my own expense. If I had not been able to do this, the meeting, which was a difficult and hostile one... would probably have broken up.’

  The art of public speaking answered his need for attention, though much of it was ‘terrible tongue work’. He never admired this need in himself. The development of his public manner had forced brashness on to a nature that was ordinarily sensitive. ‘Oratory is a vice,’ he complained to the actress Lena Ashwell. He could not delude himself: the applause that rose through his meetings was an empty sound. ‘My career as a public speaker was not only futile politically,’ he later concluded: ‘It was sometimes disgraceful and degrading... I suffered agonies of disgust at the whole business and shame for my part in it.’

  The success of Fabian Essays in 1889 soon led to a train of provincial lectures, particularly in the north of England, and Shaw’s flame-coloured beard and illuminated white face were seen in places that had never before borne witness to socialism. He worked eighteen hours a day and on the seventh day he worked. ‘My hours that make my days, my days that make my years,’ he wrote, ‘follow one another pell mell into the maw of Socialism.’

  *

  He had hoped to convert some of this lecture-work into book-work: ‘It is quite possible to get into a volume of 200 pages an adequate and bright explanation of the law of rent and the law of value, which really cover the laws of production and of exchange, and so, in a fair sense, cover the whole field of economics,’ he explained to Havelock Ellis. ‘...I could produce such a book before the middle of next year.’ But early in 1889 he wrote to Ellis: ‘I see about as much prospect of having “Production & Exchange” ready by June as of establishing the millennium... I have to keep up my lectures (five this week); and I have to keep myself alive by journalism all the time. This is not “Production & Exchange”.’

  In the summer of 1890, the Fabians found themselves committed to a programme of addresses under the heading ‘Socialism in Contemporary Literature’. Between May and July Shaw worked on a paper about Ibsen which he delivered on 18 July at the St James’s Restaurant. The minutes record that ‘the effect on the packed audience was overwhelming’. But not all the Fabians were happy. ‘It is very clever,’ Sidney Webb wrote, ‘and not so bad as I feared... But his glorification of the Individual Will distresses me.’

  It was probably the Parnell case that decided Shaw to expand his lecture into a book. This cause célèbre had resulted in November 1891 in Captain O’Shea being granted a decree nisi against his wife, naming Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Party in the House of Commons, as co-respondent. Both in private letters and letters to The Star, Shaw had defended Parnell against the outcry ‘Parnell Must GO!’ following this flouting of domestic ideals by a public figure. On the same day, 16 December, that he wrote to Sydney Olivier, criticizing the opposition to Parnell from within the Fabian Society, he decided to publish The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

  The book was a product of Shaw’s friendship with Archer through whom he had first got to know Ibsen’s work. Meeting Ibsen in Denmark in 1887, Archer had observed that he ‘is essentially a kindred spirit with Shaw – a paradoxist, a sort of Devil’s Advocate, who goes about picking holes in every “well-known fact”’. It was this similarity that helped to give Shaw such an instinctive insight into Ibsen’s plays. These plays had the power to move Shaw more than the work of any other living dramatist. Of a performance of The Wild Duck, he was to write:

  ‘To sit there getting deeper and deeper in that Ekdal home, and getting deeper and deeper into your own life all the time, until you forget you are in a theatre; to look on with horror and pity at a profound tragedy, shaking with laughter all the time at an irresistible comedy; to go out, not from a diversion, but from an experience deeper than real life ever brings to most men, or often brings to any man: that is what The Wild Duck was like last Monday at the Globe.’

  The joy of his Quintessence is that of feeling Shaw’s agile and ingenious mind working with such vitality on material so sympathetic to him. He prefaced the book with the warning that he is not concerned here with Ibsen as a dramatist, but as a teacher; that this is not literary criticism but analysis of the philosophy of which Ibsen was an exponent. In seeking a symbolic leader who would unite the contradictory impulses within himself, Shaw leads him into battle against those conventional ideals that he felt formed the chief obstacle to progress.

  By the early 1890s, following productions of A Doll’s House and Ghosts, the name of Ibsen (who was sixty-three when the Quintessence appeared) had emerged from obscurity into huge contention in Britain as the playwright who was forcing a whole generation to re-evaluate its ideas. Shaw assumed the generalship of the British campaign.

  As a model for his argument Shaw had adapted Matthew Arnold and used a threefold division of mankind into philistine, idealist and (pending the word superman) realist. He proposes a hypothetical community of one thousand people in which seven hundred are easygoing philistines, two hundred and ninety-nine dangerous idealists (‘the idealist is a more dangerous animal than the phil
istine just as a man is a more dangerous animal than a sheep’), and there is one realistic pioneer essential to the evolution of the species. The philistine, substituting ‘custom for conscience’, is satisfied with the social system as it is. The irony of his position is that, though he sees any interference with the social machinery as highly dangerous, the real danger comes from allowing that machinery to grow outdated. The philistine employs the idealist to think for him and to ‘idealize’ his lack of thought. The idealist, though higher in the ascent of human evolution than the philistine, is a moral coward coerced by the majority into conformity. Ideals, in Shavian terminology, are therefore illusions which have their origin in fear; idealism is life by the rule of precedent, and the idealist a pedlar of fancy pictures which advertise this rule. Shaw likens these pictures to beautiful masks which the idealist puts for us on the unbearable faces of truth: the poetic mask of immortality on that king of terrors, death; the mask of romantic happiness, within the prison-house of marriage, on the sex instinct.

  But the realist, bolder than the rest, believing in the ‘unflinching recognition of facts, and the abandonment of the conspiracy to ignore such of them as do not bolster up the ideals’, lays hold of a mask that we have not dared to discard and reveals the disagreeable truth. So he helps to relieve us from sacrifice to the tyranny of ideals: for ‘the destroyer of ideals, though denounced as an enemy to society, is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies’. This was the Ibsen-impulse: ‘to get away from idolatry and get to the truth regardless of shattered ideals’; and it became Shaw’s philosophy of democratic élitism.

  In a number of passages added to the 1913 edition Shaw makes clear that he is enshrining individual will only when it works in harmony with the world-will (or Life Force as it would become known). Although society needs to be shocked pretty often, he argues that the ‘need for freedom of evolution is the sole basis of toleration, the valid argument against Inquisitions and Censorships, the sole reason for not burning heretics and sending every eccentric person to the madhouse’. So the heretic of today (Galileo, Darwin, Marx and perhaps Shaw himself), striving to realize future possibilities, becomes the pillar of the community tomorrow. But pillars of the community are idealists. So realism has constantly to be kept up to date.

  Some of the confusion surrounding the Quintessence arose from Shaw’s choice of one word. In the same way as ‘superman’, with its Nietzschean associations, was to suggest not a symbol of synthesis but an immature dictatorship, so the word ‘Will’, with its Schopenhauerian associations, indicated not ‘our old friend the soul or spirit’ but an assertion of power. In neither case did Shaw originally intend this, but the ambiguity of these words points to an impulse that was gradually to gain possession of him.

  ‘Life is an adventure, not the compounding of a prescription.’ Human conduct must ‘justify itself by its effect on happiness’. By ‘happiness’ Shaw meant human welfare and for the 1913 edition he changed ‘happiness’ to ‘life’. In the interval between the first publication and his preparation of the 1913 edition, though he maintained the same apparatus of argument, Shaw’s attitude shifted. In 1891 he had used the word ‘idealist’ pejoratively to cover all those who inhabited too exclusively the world of ideas, whether they were blinded by illusions or held a fixed vision of a better life. Such people, by preferring fantasy to the actual world, risked being made prisoners of abstractions, he argued, since morality was relative and must be continually tested by experience. But his experience as a Fabian would drive him, as a source for optimism, to a metaphysical creed depending on the ideal formula of equality of income.

  The 1891 Quintessence, which aims its ingenious attack at the man he was to become, is a paradoxically prophetic work – and nowhere more so than in the pages about Emperor and Galilean, where Shaw begins to explore the synthesis of relations that Ibsen’s Maximus called ‘the third empire’ – ‘the empire of Man asserting the eternal validity of his own will,’ Shaw wrote.

  ‘He who can see that not on Olympus, not nailed to the cross, but in himself is God: he is the man to build Brand’s bridge between the flesh and the spirit, establishing this third empire in which the spirit shall not be unknown, nor the flesh starved, nor the will tortured and baffled.’

  Within Emperor and Galilean Shaw was to find the theme and dialectical pattern of his middle plays. Yet the habit of segregation persisted like a hereditary trait, and finally established itself in the flesh-starved Ancients at the end of Back to Methuselah. In these almost bodiless fantasies the author of the original Quintessence might have seen a dramatic example of the failure of an idealist to accept man as he is.

  2

  A Crust for the Critics

  Some time in the eighties... the New Journalism was introduced. Lawless young men began to write and print the living English language of their own day... Musical critics, instead of reading books about their business and elegantly regurgitating their erudition, began to listen to music and distinguish between sounds... The interview, the illustration and the cross-heading, hitherto looked on as American vulgarities impossible to English literary gentlemen, invaded all our papers.

  ‘Van Amburgh Revived’, Saturday Review (7 May 1898)

  The Quintessence of lbsenism was the most sustained and sophisticated work Shaw wrote before the age of thirty-five. His care in guarding the book against being ‘swept into an eddy of mere literary criticism’ reflects his own experience of criticism up to this time. It was ‘literary criticism’ in the form of readers’ reports that had put a stop to his novels; it was ‘literary criticism’ – over a hundred anonymous notices for the Pall Mall Gazette – on which he had become financially dependent from the spring of 1885 to Christmas 1888.

  The Pall Mall Gazette was the centre of what Matthew Arnold called ‘the New Journalism’. It was edited by W. T. Stead who altered the character of daily journalism in Britain during the mid-1880s. Papers became simpler – as he wished the world to be. He popularized interviews, added illustrations, invented picturesque headlines, pursued virtuous crusades.

  Shaw was a contributor to the Pall Mall under Stead’s editorship, ‘but as my department was literature and art, and he was an utter Philistine, no contacts between us were possible’. Yet the paper had Oscar Wilde, George Moore and William Archer writing on the arts pages, and it was a sign of Stead’s journalistic flair that he should also employ there this ‘satirical contributor with a turn for prophecy’.

  Shaw insisted that literature and the arts must not be segregated from politics. He deplored the editorial habit of the literary department of giving ‘a page and a half of vapid comment to a book destined to be forgotten without having influenced the conduct or opinions of a single human being; whilst pamphlets that circulate by thousands, dealing with vital questions of national economy and private morals, are tossed aside into the waste-paper basket...’ But the publication of the truth about anything or anyone ‘is attended with considerable risk in English society,’ Shaw explained.

  ‘We have agreed to keep up a national pretence that the black spots in human nature are white; and we enforce the convention by treating any person who even betrays his consciousness of them... as a prurient person and an enemy of public morals... the convention rigorously exacts – under pretence of not speaking evilly of the dead – that biographers should exhibit great men, not as they were, but as ideal figures... That the very worst sort of evil speaking, whether of the living or the dead, is the telling of lies about them... is not taken into account in judging biography... The censors will tolerate no offence against hypocrisy, because... an offence against hypocrisy is an offence against decency, and is punishable as such.’

  Shaw’s prescription for biography looks forward to the biographical revolution of Lytton Strachey thirty-five years later, and is most ironically expressed in his review of a Jubilee chronicle of Queen Victoria:

  ‘With her merits we are familiar... We know that she has been of all wives the best
, of all mothers the fondest, of all widows the most faithful. We have often seen her, despite her lofty station, moved by famines, colliery explosions, shipwrecks, and railway accidents; thereby teaching us that a heart beats in her Royal breast as in the humblest of her subjects. She has proved that she can, when she chooses, put off her state and play the pianoforte, write books, and illustrate them like any common lady novelist. We all remember how she repealed the corn laws, invented the steam locomotive, and introduced railways; devised the penny post, developed telegraphy, and laid the Atlantic cable... in short, went through such a programme as no previous potentate ever dreamed of. What we need now is a book entitled “Queen Victoria: by a Personal Acquaintance who dislikes her”.’

  But it was through the world of the Victorian novel that his route mainly lay. ‘The most dangerous public house in London is at the corner of Oxford St,’ Shaw told one of his audiences, ‘and is kept by a gentleman named Mudie.’ The books in Mudie’s Library were uniform, and by recommending any novel as ‘very popular at Mudie’s’ Shaw meant that it was another mammoth romance. ‘Such books,’ he concluded, ‘are not fair game for the reviewer: they are addressed to children of all ages who are willing to shut their eyes and open their mouths.’ Second-rate fiction, he concluded, might be good enough for some adults but ‘first rate fiction is needed for children themselves’.

  ‘Many of our worst habits are acquired in an imaginary world,’ Shaw warned.

  ‘...we have got the nation corrupting fiction, and fiction reacting on the nation to make it more corrupt... Hence springs up a false morality which seeks to establish dignity, refinement, education, social importance, wealth, power and magnificence, on a hidden foundation of idleness, dishonesty, sensuality, hypocrisy, tyranny, rapacity, cruelty, and scorn. When the novelist comes to build his imaginary castle, he builds on the same foundation, but adds heroism, beauty, romance, and above all, possibility of exquisite happiness to the superstructure, thereby making it more beautiful to the ignorant, and more monstrous to the initiated.’