Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Eventually King Edward VII came to the rescue. He died. And Frohman, his commercial and sentimental interests at last coinciding, joined the general shutting-down of theatres.

  The season had lasted ten weeks and Misalliance was performed eleven times, The Madras House ten. But Frohman grew proud of having created ‘an imperishable monument of artistic endeavour’. In a lecture called ‘The Theatre: the Next Phase’ delivered in London on 9 June, Barker argued that Frohman’s experiment had shown that, though a repertory theatre could not be made to pay in the commercial sense, ‘the practicability of modern repertory had been proved’. In concert with this speech, Shaw published a self-drafted interview three days later in the Observer. ‘The season at the Duke of York’s was well worth doing,’ he wrote, ‘...because I shall never be able to persuade English men of business to endow the National Theatre unless I am in a position to say that I have exhausted all the resources of private enterprise.’

  2

  Further Particulars on Mr Wells

  I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

  ‘Art and Public Money’, Sussex Daily News (7 March 1907)

  H. G. Wells had been one of those to whom Shaw, emerging from the rough Welsh seas off the coast of the Fabian Summer School, had reported his near death from drowning. ‘Wasted chances! You shouldn’t have come out,’ Wells returned. ‘There you were – lacking nothing but a little decent resolution to make a distinguished end... As for me I could have sailed in with one or two first class obituary articles.’

  Shaw claimed to be ‘dead against this exhibition sparring’ because ‘I do it so well that the sympathy goes to my opponent’. But on this occasion Wells had done it better. Neither of them enjoyed these knockabouts for long – they turned too deadly. But Wells found himself pressed forward into the ring by a new supporters’ club among the Fabians. His spirits rose: he felt game enough. His potent spell promised a new era for Fabianism. ‘He is a man of outstanding genius,’ wrote Edward Pease. ‘...his energy and attractive personality added radiance to the Society only equalled in the early days.’ During 1907 the membership doubled.

  There was an influx of younger women and men from the universities, many of them drawn by what Rupert Brooke called ‘the wee fantastic Wells’.

  The political climate of the country was changing. Shaw’s plays and Wells’s novels had helped to create a middle class with expectations of swift social change. The failure of Campbell-Bannerman’s Government to initiate any policy of reform soon led to middle-class discontent with Liberalism and a swelling support for the Labour Party. It was this switch of allegiance by progressive intellectuals that had given rise to the new Fabian boom.

  These new members were joining the Society of Shaw and Wells, rather than of the Webbs. This was one of the reasons why Beatrice suspected this sudden Fabian popularity. Their new recruits ‘lived the most unconventional life,’ she observed during the Fabian Summer School, ‘stealing out on moor or sand, in stable or under hayricks, without always the requisite chaperon to make it look as wholly innocent as it really is’. Could she be certain that it was innocent? Their conversation was surprisingly free. And their gym costumes gave several of the elderly Fabians some bad quarters of an hour. Beatrice felt apprehensive, too, when the economics had to stop, of where their ‘larky entertainments’ could lead. There was danger in innocence. There was danger everywhere.

  Beatrice knew the undiscriminating power of sex. She suspected Shaw and Granville Barker, no less than Wells, of letting themselves go ‘pretty considerably’ with women. But she had so curbed her ‘lower desires’ that she seemed unaware of how controlled the erotic motive was in Shaw’s Misalliance, which she described as ‘disgusting’. ‘I think probably the revelations with the H.G.W. various sexual escapades largely suggested the play,’ she wrote. She seemed to have no means of telling, as could the young Fabians, the difference in such matters between Shaw and Wells.

  Among the young Fabians, Shaw behaved benignly, his conversation mixing instruction with unflagging public entertainment. ‘He was personally the kindest, most friendly, most charming of men,’ remembered Leonard Woolf.

  ‘He would come up and greet one with what seemed to be warmth and pleasure and he would start straight away with a fountain of words scintillating with wit and humour... but if you happened to look into that slightly fishy, ice-blue eye of his, you got a shock. It was not looking at you... it was looking through you or over you into a distant world or universe.’

  Wells’s eyes were more penetrating and when they looked at you they looked at no one else. As if to make up for early emotional loss, he was hungry for sex. He seemed vulnerable; but even his uncertainties were endearing – so often they were your own. He appeared ‘nearer and more sympathetic than other men,’ wrote Dorothy Richardson.

  Wells was happy among the young Fabians. They were mostly women. There was a good-looking flirtatious writer, Violet Hunt, whom he entreated to ‘be nice to a very melancholy man’. There was Hubert Bland’s plump and beautiful illegitimate daughter Rosamund, who was said to enjoy the admiration of men. ‘I have a pure flame for Rosamund,’ Wells admitted. There was Amber Reeves, sweet, pretty, coaxing, who loved visiting the Wellses at Spade House. ‘She adores you both,’ her mother confided to Jane Wells. Lucy Masterman too remembered her holiday at Sandgate as an ‘impression of perpetual sunshine, health and ease’. ‘I am ready to go on working for [socialism],’ Wells wrote, ‘...in the meantime having just as good a time and just as many pleasant things as I can.’

  Women now numbered more than a quarter of the Fabian membership and they wanted the Society to turn its attention to supporting votes for women. Shaw was appointed to discuss the matter with the Fabian spokeswoman, Amber Reeves’s mother Maud Pember Reeves. There were few differences between them: Shaw supported women’s suffrage and believed that women themselves should have the principal place in the suffrage campaign. He therefore returned to the executive with a recommendation that it agree to the women’s wishes. As a result, ‘the establishment of equal citizenship between men and women’ was added to the Objects of the Society. A Women’s Group (with Jane Wells on its executive) was formed – also a Biology Group and a Socialist Medical League – and the Fabian women arranged themselves into a useful platoon in the fight for enfranchisement.

  The backbone of Shaw’s feminism was financial self-respect: he spoke in particular of equal pay for actresses and the economic independence of wives. He wanted the Fabian Society to stand for political equality as the universal relation between citizens without distinction of sex, colour, occupation, age, talent or hereditary factors; and he advocated ‘the explicit recognition by legally secured rights or payments of the value of their domestic partners and to the State as housekeepers, child bearers, nurses and matrons’. He wanted to see them, in equal numbers with men, on all political organizations, including the House of Commons.

  It was his political ‘discovery’ that ‘a woman is just like a man’, that enabled Shaw to replace the Victorian stereotype of the womanly woman with Woman the Huntress. But ‘the pursuit has about as much sex appeal as a timetable,’ complained Frank Harris. Though the sexual ‘syringeing’ of women by men had ‘compensations which, when experienced, overwhelm all the objections to it,’ Shaw admitted to St John Ervine, ‘...I always feel obliged, as a gentleman, to apologise for my disgraceful behaviour’. This ‘apology’ infiltrated his writing, against which some women reacted even when admiring the moral elegance of his argument.

  ‘I am a woman,’ says the man in one of Shaw’s plays to the girl; ‘and you are a man, with a slight difference that doesnt matter except on special occasions.’ Wells did not feel this difference to be slight, and the occasions were frequent. Like Shaw, Wells defended the rights of women,
condemning conventional sexual morality and the marriage laws founded on it. But he dared to do what he advocated. Several rebellious young women, oppressed by Edwardian conventionality, sought him out. He was not simply on the side of the young, he was in many ways one of them.

  Although no scandal about his affairs had yet broken into public view, Wells had been accused in the press of having manufactured through his books a paramour’s Utopia. Shaw and the Webbs feared that ‘Fabian Free Love’ might set socialism back a decade – Wells was not at liberty to throw his emotional match-ends about in powder-magazines. There had almost been an explosion over his relationship with Rosamund Bland. The Society had hummed with rumours of how Hubert Bland had intercepted the pair at Paddington Station. But these rumours were confined within the Society and did not reach the public. Shaw had circled round emitting advice but, knowing few of the facts, he was not well employed. ‘What an unmitigated moral Victorian ass you are,’ Wells accused him. ‘You play about with ideas like a daring garrulous maiden aunt but when it comes to an affair like the Bland affair you show the instincts of conscious gentility and the judgement of a hen...

  ‘You don’t know, as I do, in blood & substance, lust, failure, shame, hate, love & creative passion. You don’t understand & you can’t understand the rights & wrongs of the case into which you stick your maidenly judgment any more than you can understand the aims of the Fabian Society that your vanity has wrecked. Now go on being amusing.’

  Only Shaw among the Fabian elders had really wished Wells to stay on the executive. Webb and Bland plainly wanted him to leave – and Wells too was eager to go: all they differed on was the manner of his going. At a by-election in the spring of 1908, Wells supported the Liberal candidate, Winston Churchill, whose ‘rapidly developing and broadening mind... [was] entirely in accordance with the spirit of our movement’. His motives for this action seem to have been mixed between a natural preference for Churchill over a dull socialist candidate incapable of winning the contest, and a wish to strengthen opposition to the Tory candidate, William Joynson-Hicks, who had accused him of being ‘a nasty-minded advocate of promiscuous copulation’. At the annual meeting of the Fabian Society on 22 April 1908, Wells was accused of betraying socialism and took the opportunity to resign. ‘It is to other media and other methods,’ he wrote, ‘that we must now look for the spread and elaboration of those collectivist ideas which all of us have at heart.’ He would go back to writing novels.

  This resignation, which the executive accepted ten days later, was an act of mercy. During the winter of 1908–9 what Beatrice called ‘a somewhat dangerous friendship’ developed between Wells and Amber Reeves. Amber graduated with a double first in moral sciences and conceived Wells’s child at about the same time. What made it worse for Beatrice to contemplate was that they had enjoyed sexual intercourse, so she heard, in the girl’s rooms ‘within the very walls’ of Newnham College. The events, as they emerged over the year 1909, began to unsettle Beatrice. First she was irritated that Wells could intermittently go on living with his wife as if nothing were wrong; she was also affronted when Amber ran for the cover of a marriage of convenience to a chivalrous barrister with the tautologous name of Blanco White, giving Wells’s daughter a ‘legitimate’ birth; then she felt exasperated on hearing that they were persisting with the liaison following that marriage; finally the publication of Ann Veronica, Wells’s novel advertising the affair, drove her frantic.

  Amber’s father was Director of the London School of Economics; her mother was prominent among the Fabian Women’s Group; her lover was a Fabian; her husband was a Fabian; and she herself had been treasurer of the Cambridge University Fabians. Even Jane Wells, the complaisant wife, was on the Fabian executive. Worse still, it was the Webbs who had introduced Wells to the Reeves family. ‘I wish we had never known them,’ Beatrice exclaimed. Something would have to be done. Pulpits were shaking with denunciations of Ann Veronica, and the National Social Purity Crusade brandished the novel at the head of its campaign for formal censorship in circulating libraries. Reviewers who knew something of Wells’s biography took the opportunity to treat Ann as if she were Amber. The criticism overflowed from the book and cascaded into Wells’s life. ‘I can’t stand this persecution,’ he cried out. ‘He will disappear,’ Beatrice predicted, ‘for good, from reputable society.’ He did resign from the Savile Club; and Jane was asked to quit the Fabian executive.

  Beatrice felt intensely involved. She insisted that Wells would be permanently wretched. ‘I doubt whether he will keep his health – and he may lose his talent’; and she believed that Amber was ‘a ruined woman, doomed to sink deeper into the mire’. Once Beatrice had been anxious lest Wells, after his resignation from the executive, became a Fabian enemy like Ramsay MacDonald. ‘Don’t shake us off altogether,’ she had appealed. ‘It won’t be good for either the Webbs or the Wells and will be very bad for the common cause.’ But now he was a danger, an abomination. ‘The end of our friendship with H. G. Wells,’ she noted in her diary in the summer of 1909.

  Beatrice had done what she could. She had written letters to Fabians with teenage daughters; she had spoken to Blanco White and counselled Amber. She had also been in touch with Shaw. But Shaw took a different view. Now that Wells was only a subscriber to the Fabian Society, it was permissible to view the affair as part of that fine art of private life which consisted in taking liberties. Wells excelled at this kind of social experiment. ‘The situation can be saved by letting it alone,’ he instructed Beatrice. ‘...I aim at the minimum of mischief.’

  Shaw had already written sympathetically to Wells. ‘Occasionally,’ Wells responded, ‘you don’t simply rise to a difficult situation but soar above it & I withdraw anything you would like withdrawn from our correspondence in the last two years or so.’ For despite everything, there was part of Shaw that warmed to Wells’s escapading. Some writers had to act foolishly in order to write well. ‘Mr Wells does not shirk facts because they are considered scandalous, especially when the conventional foundation of that view of them is becoming more and more questionable,’ Shaw was to write a dozen years later; ‘but I cannot find in his books a trace of that morbidezza which... is very largely produced by the fact that the writers have no real experience of what they are writing about, and are the victims of a baffled libido rather than a Casanovesque excess of gallantry.’ The mixed vocabulary of this tribute indicates the changing culture through which these Fabians were passing. In this shifting landscape it was difficult finding one’s way. ‘All this arises because we none of us know what exactly is the sexual code we believe in,’ observed Beatrice, ‘approving of many things on paper which we violently object to when they are practised by those we care about.’

  *

  Wells’s place as Fabian activist was almost immediately occupied by Beatrice herself. Until recently she had not acted as much more than an aide to Sidney. Her deeper involvement arose in part from a changed attitude to the role of women in politics. Some twenty years before she had signed an anti-suffrage manifesto drafted by Mrs Humphry Ward. It ‘is the spiritual function of a woman to be the passive agent bearing a man’s life!’ she had emphatically instructed Sidney before their marriage. Her impatience with some of the militant pioneers of women’s suffrage was overtaken by a feeling of distaste over the ‘coarse-grained things’ being said by men opposed to emancipation. Towards the end of 1906 she sent Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage, her formal recantation.

  Nothing did more to alter Beatrice’s views than her experiences as a member of the Royal Commission on Poor Law. She had been appointed by Arthur Balfour during the last days of his Government at the end of 1905. Before that, as she admitted, ‘I have never myself suffered the disabilities assumed to arise from my sex’. Three years’ work on this largely man-dominated Commission left her wondering: ‘Are all men quite so imbecile as that lot are?... It makes me feel intolerably superior.’

  ‘Certa
inly the work of the Commission will be an education in manners as well as in Poor Law,’ she wrote. She trained like an athlete for this work, rising for her cold bath and quick walk at six-thirty, feasting off bread and cheese and drawing on Sidney’s ‘blessed strength and capacity’. Yet her manners did deteriorate. ‘From first to last she has declined whilst in the Commission to merge her individuality in it, but claims the right of unrestricted free action outside,’ wrote the mild-mannered chairman. Her Minority Report, completed early in 1909, was signed by three other Commissioners.

  Everyone had been dissatisfied with the ramshackle Poor Law of 1834. Some saw it as expensive and inefficient; others as inadequate and demoralizing. Beatrice wanted to break up the Poor Law altogether and replace it with a comprehensive scheme of welfare that allocated responsibilities for assisting those below a national minimum to a series of Government departments dealing with specific causes of poverty, such as chronic sickness, old age and unemployment. She was contemptuous of the Majority Report which sought by simple unemployment insurance to alleviate the circumstances only of the destitute and necessitous. Shaw sensed that the Minority Report was a more important document than most people realized. ‘It may make as great a difference in sociology and political science as Darwin’s “Origin of Species” did in philosophy and natural history,’ he predicted. ‘...It is big and revolutionary and sensible and practicable at the same time, which is just what is wanted to inspire and attract the new generation.’

  The Report lies somewhere between Bentham and Beveridge. Beatrice’s collectivist scheme was to be a blueprint for the Welfare State, but it also retained something of the puritanism of Bentham who had believed in the utilitarian device of the workhouse to ‘grind rogues into honest men’. Beatrice was haunted by this problem of the able-bodied unemployed. ‘I dream of it at night,’ she wrote, ‘I pray for light in the early morning.’ For those who lacked capacity she recommended compulsory training; and for those who lacked will, disciplinary supervision. Believing that a grant from the community should be conditional on reasonable conduct from the individual, she was later to express criticism of Beveridge’s proposed extension of unconditional unemployment doles on the grounds that this would encourage malingering.