Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  In a statement, drafted on 6 August, he set out the predicament as he saw it.

  ‘We shall have to fight and die and pay and suffer with the grim knowledge that we are sacrificing ourselves in an insane cause, and that only by putting up a particularly good fight can we bring ourselves out of it with credit... For the present time there is only one thing to be done besides fighting... And that one thing is to set to work immediately to draft the inevitable Treaty of Peace which we must all sign when we have had our bellyful of murder and destruction.’

  He accused the generals and politicians of being unable to think further ahead than the length of a bayonet, and he urged Beatrice Webb and other Fabians to cultivate ‘long range firing more than you do, or you will leave forts unreduced in your rear which will undo half your work later on’. The real enemy was not Germany, he maintained, but jingoists and junkers in all countries. Therefore, in moments of optimism, he would represent the war as an opportunity of victory for the Suffragettes, the Irish volunteers and socialists everywhere.

  Shaw judged the responsibility for war as lying almost evenly between British commercial adventurers and Germany’s militarists, and denied that violation of Belgian neutrality was a casus belli. Using his new American literary agent Paul Reynolds, he placed an ‘Open Letter to the President of the United States of America’ in The Nation and the New York Times, appealing to him as ‘the spokesman of Western Democracy’ to rally the neutral powers for the purpose of demanding both sides to withdraw from Belgium (‘the effect of our shells on Belgium is precisely the same as that of the German shells’) and fight out their quarrel on their own territories. Behind this invitation lay a warning that history would judge Germany to have been the wrong side on which to intervene, and that Washington (‘still privileged to talk common humanity to the nations’) would inevitably chair the world conference that settled the peace.

  The British press had been eager for Shaw’s war contributions. But after three months, when he had vented his disgust on England and Germany as ‘a couple of extremely quarrelsome dogs’ and advised the soldiers in both armies to ‘SHOOT THEIR OFFICERS AND GO HOME’, many newspapers blacklisted him. ‘In any ordinary time I should have been delighted to publish your letter with every word of which I agree,’ wrote the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott, ‘but at this horrible time one has to consider so many things which one would like to ignore... your letter would be highly disturbing to many minds. That of course is the object of it and a very excellent object. But I suppose one’s duty now is to encourage and unite people and not to exercise and divide.’ Shaw recognized the power of this call for suspending controversy in the face of national danger, but countered it with the argument that able-bodied soldiers in the trenches depended on able-minded civilians at home to guard their constitutional liberties. Soldiers must be protected while their backs were turned from those abuses of power – such as the suspension of by-elections – not necessary for the defeat of the enemy.

  ‘I have sat at England’s bedside during her delirium,’ Shaw was to write. He saw himself as a doctor who reluctantly admits that his horror-struck patient may need chauvinistic drugs, but believes that the quality of his recovery depends upon their withdrawal as soon as possible. ‘I do not grudge a mother the shelter of a lie any more than I grudge a soldier the shelter of a clump of briars,’ he wrote; ‘but the more thoroughly we realize that war is war, and death death, the sooner we shall get rid of it.’ After the monthly casualty figures began to arrive affecting almost every family in the country (already in November there were 89,954 British casualties), then people would need some antidote. His Common Sense about the War was a complicated prescription prepared for those emerging from these bloody fantasies. On 14 November it appeared as a monumental supplement to the New Statesman. ‘I have told the truth about the war,’ Shaw claimed; ‘and stated the democratic case for it.’

  *

  Until noon each day Shaw worked in the roof garden of the Hydro Hotel. Before lunch he would swim and after lunch continue working in his suite. Sometimes he went for rides in the car along the coast; sometimes he went and listened to Basil Cameron’s concerts at the pavilion. After dinner he read.

  It was impossible to think of anything except the war. Never can there have been a war in which the belligerents had such correct cases. Austria had the assassination of an Archduke; Germany the mobilization of Russia and the threatening articles of the Franco-Russian alliance; Britain the impeccable Treaty of 1839. All the provocations were valid according to the most accredited precedents. Academically, on all sides, the war was perfectly in order. ‘I had to slave for months getting the evidence,’ Shaw wrote to Alfred Sutro. ‘...It makes me sick to recollect the drudgery of it all.’

  The mood of the country was beginning to infiltrate Torquay. When a depressed Granville Barker came down for a few days, he and Shaw were threatened with shooting by a panicky coastguard as they walked along the beach. The hotel porter, a German who had registered as an enemy alien, was suddenly handcuffed and ‘deported to the innermost centre of Britain – to Exeter, in fact’ – so that he could not signal to German submarines.

  Shaw needed to feel up to his chin in what was going on. Neither Asquith nor Grey, he believed, were the real spokesmen of their times. He hated Grey – ‘a Junker from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes... [with] a personal taste for mendacity’ – for his part in the sensational horror at the Egyptian village of Denshawai in 1906, when the British colonial power administered floggings, hangings and penal servitude for life after a rumpus arising from some pigeon shooting. This governing class was above listening to him. Shaw wanted his own class of men, Chesterton and Wells, Bennett and Bertrand Russell, to rise at the head of a popular movement and replace Asquith with someone such as Winston Churchill. He recognized that Churchill’s anti-German pugnacity was enormously more popular in the country than the moral babble of Asquith. So he kept his eye on Churchill. Meanwhile ‘our job is to make people serious about the war,’ he wrote to Bertrand Russell. ‘It is the monstrous triviality of the damned thing, and the vulgar frivolity of what we imagine to be patriotism, that gets at my temper.’

  Shaw’s position in Common Sense about the War was that of the Irishman who, when asked for directions, replies that he wouldn’t start from here. It was given the Shavian dimension by the fact that England had not asked for directions. He was therefore obliged to step out dangerously into the traffic and transmit unsolicited signals.

  He attempted to answer the question: what is the war about? It had erupted from a prodigious evil: that of mounting wealth throughout Europe untapped by any corresponding equitable distribution of this wealth. Borne on the soils and sighs of monstrous inequality this war had become a crude method of advancing social organization. Politicians still believed it was a question of Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles – but ‘there are only two real flags in the world henceforth,’ Shaw wrote: ‘the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism.’ The militarists of Europe had used this energy of dissatisfaction for their sport of war, and all the adventurous young men joined in. Shaw reasoned that the militaristic case led to what the militarists themselves most dreaded – a dramatic example was to be the collapse of tsardom and the rise of communism in Russia. ‘The Democratic case, the Socialist one, the International case is worth all it threatens to cost,’ he predicted. ‘Democracy without equality is a delusion more dangerous than frank oligarchy and autocracy.’

  Shaw’s long-term aim was straight. He foresaw that the enormous demand for coal, cloth, boots, army rations, weapons, ammunition, transport vehicles, ships and all other accessories of war, would arrest the huge exports of capital and transform them into wages – besides doubling taxation on unearned incomes. He pointed out how the Government had already taken control of railways, bought up all the raw sugar, regulated prices, guaranteed the banks and achieved many of ‘the things it had been dec
laring utterly and eternally Utopian and impossible when Socialists advocated them’.

  During war we live in a political truce; in peacetime the political war begins again. Shaw wanted socialists to prepare for this struggle by ensuring that on enlistment labourers found themselves better fed, paid, clothed than before. He recommended the appointment of working-class representatives to the War Office, and the reform of the ‘tyrannical slave code called military law’ so that the soldier could serve as a citizen with all his rights intact.

  This was Shaw’s case for open diplomacy, full civil rights, a fair livelihood for the soldier and his dependants, and genuine working-class democracy in place of Asquith’s Mutiny Acts which, even in time of peace, ‘imprison Labour leaders and muzzle the Labour Press’. In his thirty years of public work Shaw had seen ‘man after man in the Labour movement sell out because he could not trust his future to the loyalty of the workers,’ he wrote, ‘and I should perhaps have had to sell out myself long ago if I had not possessed certain powers as a writer which made me a little more independent than others’. Armed with this independence, ‘I have put my best brains and skill at the service of the Labour cause’.

  *

  Shaw had modelled his Common Sense about the War on Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, and it blew up a similar dust-storm of abuse. Libraries and bookshops removed his works from their shelves; newspapers instructed their readers to boycott his plays. The editor of The Clarion, Robert Blatchford, described his manifesto as ‘the meanest act of treachery ever perpetrated by an alien enemy residing in generous and long-suffering England’. At the Royal Naval Division the Prime Minister’s son, ‘Beb’ Asquith, announced that he ‘ought to be shot’. And former President Theodore Roosevelt called him a ‘blue rumped ape’ and lumped him with ‘the unhung traitor Keir Hardie’ among a ‘venomous’ herd of socialists, all ‘physically timid creatures’. ‘You are not so loved here as you were,’ Granville Barker reported from New York. ‘The “Common Sense about the War” raised you up many enemies and turned some of your friends very sour.’

  Feeling themselves implicated, some writers reacted dramatically. The best-selling novelist W. J. Locke suddenly sprang up screaming: ‘I will not sit in the same room with Bernard Shaw!’ J. C. Squire put it to his readers that G.B.S. should be tarred and feathered. In an open letter, subtitled ‘A Manual for the Haters of England’, Henry Arthur Jones blasted him with an enormous vituperative sentence:

  ‘The hag Sedition was your mother, and Perversity begot you. Mischief was your midwife and Misrule your nurse, and Unreason brought you up at her feet – no other ancestry and rearing had you, you freakish homunculus, germinated outside of lawful procreation...’

  More painful to Shaw was the response of those he loved. Archer’s son, whom from childhood Shaw had known as ‘Tomarcher’, sailed home from New York on the first available steamer to rejoin his volunteer corps and was sent to Flanders. ‘It is a sickening business this sending lambs to the slaughter,’ Shaw commiserated. But Archer, fiercely patriotic, felt differently.

  Shaw had also hoped to get support from G. K. Chesterton. But Chesterton, who had been ill during late 1914 and early 1915, was ‘hungry for hostilities’. The war excited the dark side of his nature. ‘I have always thought there was in Prussia an evil will,’ he wrote to Shaw. ‘Of course there is an evil will in Prussia,’ Shaw agreed. ‘Prussia isn’t Paradise. I have been fighting that evil will, in myself and others, all my life.’ Chesterton’s hatred seemed to Shaw the product of a mind in which the war had lodged as medieval fantasy. And to Chesterton, Shaw appeared equally unreal. ‘I think you are a great man; and I think your first great misfortune was that you were born in a small epoch,’ he wrote. ‘But I think it is your last and worst misfortune that now at last the epoch is growing greater: but you are not.’

  Wells too chimed in with the public outcry, describing G.B.S. as ‘one of those perpetual children who live in a dream of make-believe... that he is a person of incredible wisdom and subtlety running the world.

  ‘...It is almost as if there was nothing happening in Flanders. It is almost as if there was no pain in all the world... [he] flings himself upon his typewriter and rattles out his broadsides. And nothing will stop him. All through the war we shall have this Shavian accompaniment going on, like an idiot child screaming in a hospital... He is at present... an almost unendurable nuisance.’

  ‘If I were a German, I should criticize the Berlin Government with equal fierceness for having made the war,’ Shaw wrote to Trebitsch. In fact he did write ‘The German Case Against Germany’ in May 1916, but by that time he was widely regarded as a German sympathizer. ‘I am not what is called pro-German,’ he wrote, ‘...neither am I an anti-German.’ He insisted that a gentleman refused to hate his enemy in wartime. But this attitude had no comfortable place in a country exulting in the announcement that all German music was to be banned at concerts. People reminded one another how he had championed Wagner. Even ‘his Fabian ideas of social reconstruction,’ claimed the Daily Chronicle, ‘are inspired by Berlinese notions of symmetry’.

  His reasoning was impeccable; his offence emotional. ‘In the right key one can say anything,’ he wrote to Bertrand Russell, ‘in the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part of the job is the establishment of the key.’ But many writers felt he had gone off-key. Henry James, who was soon to become a British citizen, claimed that he had not been able to read Shaw’s Common Sense at all because ‘his horrible flippancy revolts me’. Arnold Bennett, too, described as a ‘disastrous pity’ Shaw’s ‘perverseness, waywardness, and harlequinading’.

  Shaw’s jokes, such as his tip to those who wanted unconditionally to smash Germany that they should go about killing all her women, were his natural method of expression. ‘If we did not die of laughter at the humours of war we should of horror,’ he admitted to Robert Loraine; and to his sister Lucy he confessed: ‘one has to learn to laugh at such things in war or else go mad.’ He asked those who objected that his jokes did not fit the hour to ignore the ‘imbecilities’ of his style and fix on the content. But this was impossible. ‘Shaw is often ten minutes ahead of the truth,’ wrote Woodrow Wilson’s brother-in-law Stockton Axson, ‘which is almost as fatal as being behind the time.’

  He felt his isolation. ‘Thanks for your friendly hail,’ he wrote acknowledging a letter from Bertrand Russell. ‘It really is necessary for people who can keep their heads to pass the time of day occasionally lest they should begin to fear that they, and not the others, are the madmen.’ Most members of the Dramatists Club refused to meet him at their lunches; and when James F. Muirhead, editor of Baedeker, resigned from the Society of Authors, because ‘I cannot consent that any part of my affairs should be in any way under the control of a man of whom I think as I do of you’, Shaw stepped down himself from the two committees at the Society of Authors where for the past ten years he had been the chief source of energy and initiative. Muirhead was an admirer of Shaw, counting the shocks he had given Britain over the past thirty years ‘among the most salutary influences brought to bear on that country’. But by 1915 he was writing of his ‘myopia of genius... you really do not understand why you are at present a cause of offence to 99 out of every 100 people that I meet.’

  It had needed courage to go on writing as he did. ‘It was not easy,’ Shaw admitted. ‘I know of no other literary man of anything like his eminence who would have taken such treatment so good-naturedly,’ wrote Desmond MacCarthy. Almost he seemed unperturbed. ‘I am not afraid of unpopularity,’ he told Beatrice Webb. He could not get angry with people he met – ‘it breaks my back completely,’ he explained in a letter begging not to be introduced to Lloyd George. But he was long-lastingly affected. Below the surface of his forbearance, layers of disillusion were forming. He would take imaginative revenge against this society by threatening it with his Zeppelin raid at the end of Heartbreak House, and by scoring victories over the ‘Goddams’ in the person of St Joan. H
e would recharge his optimism, too, by gazing through the heartbreaking facts into a haze of Shavian hypotheses. ‘I don’t expect anybody but myself to see as far as I do,’ he told the Webbs – an expectation amply to be justified by the public’s blindness over Back to Methuselah. Meanwhile, he kept his spirits whirring with colossal swanking. ‘The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything,’ he admitted to Wells.

  He protected himself too with brighter paradoxes. The war, he complained, ‘has made me excessively popular’. He became expert at converting every rebuff into another victory. ‘All the forts opened fire on me,’ he had reported to Stella Campbell who was touring Pygmalion in the United States; ‘and they have capitulated one after the other... my enemies are my footstool.’

  About those matters that might have stirred approval – his cheque for £200 to the Belgian refugees; his £20,000 (equivalent to £700,000 in 1997) contribution to the British War Loan – he kept uncharacteristically quiet. Partly it was a matter of self-respect, partly of outmanoeuvring those who wished to surround him with obloquy. ‘Unless you make a reputation at once for being utterly impossible, implacable, inexorable, you are lost,’ he was to advise his French translator, Augustin Hamon. But by making such a reputation, Shaw was becoming a lost man in politics.

  ‘When war comes the time for arguing is passed.’ But Shaw could not keep from arguing. He argued as other people in another war were to dig: for victory. Whenever he was criticized, he counter-attacked. When accused of giving propaganda ammunition to Germany he retorted that it was his accusers themselves who had done that, Germany having attacked him bitterly until it noticed similar attacks in England.