George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

by Archibald Henderson

CHAPTER VI

I once heard a Socialist of world-wide renown accuse Bernard Shaw of an inconsistency which, to him, was little short of inexplicable. To every charge of inconsistency, Shaw is always ready with the effective rejoinder: “l'homme absurde est celui qui ne change jamais.” To Shaw, the stationary is the stagnant, evolution is progress. That rare literary phenomenon, a master of the comic spirit, Shaw is not only willing to admit for the nonce the inconsistencies in his own make-up: he is positively eager to make thereof genuine comic capital.

To the public, Shaw is his own greatest paradox. What defence, they ask, can be devised for a man rooted in Nietzscheism, who champions the Socialism which Nietzsche mocked? Reconcile the ardent apostle of the levelling democracy of a Social-Democratic Republic with the avowed advocate of the doctrines of Ibsen and Nietzsche, the intellectual aristocrats of this distinctly social era? Identify the agitation for international disarmament, for universal peace, with one who sings of arms and the superman? The Irish Nietzsche, the daring pilgrim in search of a moral Ultima Thule, with one who has forcibly declared the impossibility of anarchism? The evangelist preaching the brotherhood of man with one who repudiates the pacifying sedative: “Sirs, ye are brothers,” in the statement that he has no brothers, and if he had, he would in all probability not agree with them? What faith is to be put in the economic grounding of one who, in the course of two or three years, turned from vigorous defence of Marx's value theory to its “absolute demolition, on Jevonian lines, with his own hand”?

It is very difficult to understand Shaw's fundamental philosophy of Socialism without a thorough knowledge of the evolutionary course of his thought. The particular brand of Socialism denominated Shavian is not a bundle of prejudices of an immature youth, but the integration of years of day-by-day observations of life and character, as well as of political and economic science. The diversities of Socialistic faith have been wittily exhibited by Shaw in the opening scenes of the third act of Man and Superman. Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of Socialists: theoretical, Utopian and practical. Lassalle and Marx, Liebknecht and Bebel, Guèsde and Jaurès, Hyndman and Kropotkin, Shelley and Morris, George and Bellamy, Shaw and Webb, carry the stamp of the cobweb-spinner, the dreamer, or of the man of affairs. It is Shaw's supreme distinction that, beginning as doctrinaire, he has ended as practical opportunist. He has sought to traverse the chasm between democracy and social-democracy, by the aid of a solid economic structure, rather than by the rainbow bridge of sentimentality and Utopism. No scheme finds favour in his eyes which does not irresistibly commend itself to his intelligence. He has found the “true” doctrine of Socialism in repudiation of the follies of Impossibilism.

Shaw has unhesitatingly given credit to Henry George for the great impetus he gave to Socialism in England, and, in particular, for the important part George played in his own career. In speaking of the memorable evening in 1882, when, under the inspiration of George's stirring and eloquent words, he first began to realize the importance of the economic basis, Shaw recently wrote:[66]

“One evening in the early eighties I found myself—I forget how and cannot imagine why—in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, listening to an American finishing a speech on the Land Question. I knew he was an American, because he pronounced 'necessarily'—a favourite word of his—with the accent on the third syllable instead of the first; because he was deliberately and intentionally oratorical, which is not customary among shy people like the English; because he spoke of Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law, and other strange eighteenth-century superstitions; and because he explained with great simplicity and sincerity the views of the Creator, who had gone completely out of fashion in London in the previous decade and had not been heard of there since. I noticed, also, that he was a born orator, and that he had small, plump, pretty hands.

“Now at that time I was a young man not much past twenty-five, of a very revolutionary and contradictory temperament, full of Darwin and Tyndall, of Shelley and De Quincey, of Michelangelo and Beethoven, and never having in my life studied social questions from the economic point of view, except that I had once, in my boyhood, read a pamphlet by John Stuart Mill on the Irish Land Question. The result of my hearing the speech, and buying from one of the stewards of the meeting a copy of 'Progress and Poverty' for sixpence (Heaven only knows where I got that sixpence!), was that I plunged into a course of economic study, and at a very early stage of it became a Socialist and spoke from that very platform on the same great subject, and from hundreds of others as well, sometimes addressing distinguished assemblies in a formal manner, sometimes standing on a borrowed chair at a street corner, or simply on the kerbstone. And I, too, had my oratorical successes; for I can still recall with some vanity a wet afternoon (Sunday, of course) on Clapham Common, when I collected as much as sixteen and sixpence in my hat after my lecture, for the Cause. And that all the work was not mere gas, let the feats and pamphlets of the Fabian Society attest!

“When I was thus swept into the great Socialist revival of 1883, I found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with me had been converted by Henry George. This fact would have been far more widely acknowledged had it not been that it was not possible for us to stop where Henry George stopped.... He saw only the monstrous absurdity of the private appropriation of rent, and he believed that if you took that burden off the poor man's back, he could help himself out as easily as a pioneer on a pre-empted clearing. But the moment he took an Englishman to that point, the Englishman saw at once that the remedy was not so simple as that, and that the argument carried us much further, even to the point of total industrial reconstruction. Thus George actually felt bound to attack the Socialism he had created; and the moment the antagonism was declared, and to be a Henry Georgeite meant to be an anti-Socialist, some of the Socialists whom he had converted became ashamed of their origin and concealed it; whilst others, including myself, had to fight hard against the Single Tax propaganda.”

However carefully other English Socialists have endeavoured to minimize or deny outright the momentous influence of Henry George, certainly Shaw has neither denied nor belittled their debt. “If we outgrew 'Progress and Poverty' in many ways, so did he himself too; and it is perhaps just as well that he did not know too much when he made his great campaign here; for the complexity of the problem would have overwhelmed him if he had realized it; or, if it had not, it would have rendered him unintelligible. Nobody has ever got away, or ever will get away, from the truths that were the centre of his propaganda: his errors anybody can get away from.” And yet Shaw's insularity and sense of British superiority sticks out in the statement that certain of the English Socialists, including himself, regretted that George was an American, and, therefore, necessarily about fifty years out of date in his economics and sociology from the point of view of an older country! The absurdity of such a contention is glaringly patent on comparison of Progress and Poverty with the tracts of the Fabian Society during its early period: George was at least fifty years ahead of the English Socialists, instead of the reverse. With that grandiose conceit which is an essential item of his “stock in trade,” Shaw has expressed his eagerness to play the part of Henry George to America. “What George did not teach you, you are being taught now by your great Trusts and Combines, as to which I need only say that if you would take them over as national property as cheerfully as you took over the copyrights of all my early books, you would find them excellent institutions, quite in the path of progressive evolution, and by no means to be discouraged or left unregulated as if they were nobody's business but their own. It is a great pity that you all take America for granted because you were born in it. I, who have never crossed the Atlantic, and have taken nothing American for granted, find I know ten times as much about your country as you do yourselves; and my ambition is to repay my debt to Henry George by coming over some day and trying to do for your young men what Henry George did nearly a quarter of a century ago for me.”

While Henry George and his Progress and Poverty were the prime motors in directing Shaw to Socialism, it was Karl Marx and his Capital that first shunted Shaw on to the economic tack. In 1884, the Unitarian minister, Mr. Philip H. Wicksteed, contributed to To-Day a criticism of Marx from the point of view of the school of mathematician-economists founded in England on the treatise on Political Economy published by the late Stanley Jevons in 1871.[67] Mr. Wicksteed, whose writings on Dante and Scandinavian literature are well known, was a remarkable linguist, a popular preacher, and an excellent man. To the fact, however, that he was a mathematician is largely attributable his deep interest in Jevons' theory of value, which scientifically demolished the classical theory of Adam Smith, Ricardo and Cairnes, with its adaptation to Socialism by Hodgskin and Marx. To his mathematical training, also, may be ascribed the lucidity and logical clarity of his application of the Jevonian machinery to Marxian theory. So abject was the deification of Marx by English Socialists at that time that Hyndman, whom Shaw thought should answer the article, pooh-poohed Wicksteed as beneath his notice. But the Omniscience and Infallibility of Marx were rudely shaken: Mr. Wicksteed's article had to be answered. Some years later Hyndman accused Shaw of having “rushed in” to defend Marx; but the question here is not of what Mr. Hyndman thinks: it is a question of fact. Shaw was earnestly requested by the proprietors of To-Day to answer Mr. Wicksteed; but he replied at once that though he had read Das Kapital he was not an economist, and that the reply should come from someone with a real mastery of the subject. At last, after a discussion one day in St. Paul's Churchyard, Frost disconsolately remarked to Shaw that if he wouldn't do it, he supposed he, Frost, must. Suddenly Shaw realized, as he very recently told me, that none of the others, so far as he could see, knew any more about the subject than he himself did; and he consented on the solemn condition that Wicksteed was to be allowed space for a rejoinder. Shaw was not so blind as not to be deeply impressed by his own ignorance of what Carlyle called the “dismal science”; he realized the importance to himself of getting a sound theoretic basis. “I read Jevons,” he afterwards wrote, “and made a fearful struggle to guess what his confounded differentials meant; for I knew as little of the calculus as a pig does of a holiday.” In his article entitled The Jevonian Criticism of Marx, which was more of a counterblast than a thorough analysis and discussion of Mr. Wicksteed's epoch-making article, Shaw had not a word to say in defence of Marx's oversight of “abstract utility.”[68] Quite clever in its Shavian way, Shaw's article did not get at the root of the matter at all, which was not unnatural, considering that he was a novice, and, as he afterwards freely admitted, completely wrong in the bargain. After the appearance of Mr. Wicksteed's brief rejoinder on pages 177-179 of the same volume, the incident was, for some time, closed.

The discussion only whetted Shaw's interest and left him determined to get to the bottom of the economic question. He had been tremendously impressed by the first volume of Das Kapital, “the real European book,” as he called it, which he had read in the French translation. Even when he was under this first tremendous impression, his misgivings found expression in a published letter, in which he jocularly pointed out that what Marx had proved was that we were all robbing each other, and not that one class was robbing another. A joke, founded on clever ignorance, may be a poor beginning for a career; yet in this way was Shaw's career as an economist begun. Shaw never doubted, so green was he, that Hyndman or some other leader would at once expose the fallacy in his letter, and teach him something thereby. The fact that nobody did probably started the misgiving that led him to devote so much time and thought to economics.

It was not without many struggles, however, that Shaw was eventually persuaded to see the fallacies in Marx's economics. In the Hampstead Historic Society, that mutual aid association, and in long private discussions with Sidney Webb, Shaw kept at the subject of Marx, defending him by every shift he could think of. All the time, at bottom, Shaw was satisfied neither with his own position nor with Webb's, which was that of John Stuart Mill. He had always mistrusted mathematical symbols since the time of his school days, when a plausible schoolboy used to prove to him by algebra that one equals two—presumably by one of the inadmissible division-by-zero proofs. The boy always began by saying: “Let x = a.” Shaw saw no harm in admitting that, and the proof followed with apparently rigorous exactness. “The effect was not to make me proceed habitually on the assumption that one equals two,” I once heard him say with a boyish laugh; “but to impress upon me that there was a screw loose somewhere in the algebraic art, and a chance for me to set it right some day when I had time to look into the subject.” And so, when he saw Jevons' x's, his differentials and his infinitesimals, Shaw at once thought of the plausible boy, and was fired to find that loose screw in Jevonian economics. The difficulty he felt most was that he could not, among Socialists, get into a sufficiently abstract atmosphere to arrive at the pure theory of the thing. It was essential to divorce the discussion absolutely from the social question. Fortunately, yet oddly enough, it was Wicksteed himself who helped Shaw to what he wanted. One of Wicksteed's friends, a prosperous stockbroker named Beeton, began inviting a circle of friends interested in economics to his house. The To-Day discussion had established friendly relations between Shaw and Wicksteed; and Shaw secured an entry to this circle and “held on to it like grim death” until after some years it blossomed out into The Royal Economic Society, founded the Economic Journal, and outgrew Beeton's drawing-room. Mr. Shaw once remarked to me that his great difficulty was to see through Marx's fallacy in assuming that abstract labour was the unique factor by which the celebrated equation of Value was divisible. “I couldn't, for the life of me,” said Mr. Shaw, “see any sense in the equation 2a + 3b = 8c. I actually bought an Algebra and tried to recapture any early knowledge I might have had, but it was all gone.” And only the other day I ran across this book, The Scholar's Algebra, by Lewis Hensley, at a second-hand book-shop in London. Under date “22-8-87” appears the following, written in Shaw's remarkably neat stenography: “What sudden freak induced me to purchase this book? I saw it offered at a second-hand book-shop in Holborn for one and sixpence. For a time I was puzzled by a notion that the symbols referred to things instead of to numbers. For instance, 2a + 3b appeared to me as absurd as 2 wrens + 3 apples.”

In a letter to me Mr. Shaw once related the following story of his economic education—a story which gives the lie to his own strictures on University education. And in conversation he recently admitted to me that this economic training corresponded closely to the highest form of University instruction.[69] “During those years Wicksteed expounded 'final utility' to us with a blackboard except when we got hold of some man from the 'Baltic' (The London Wheat Exchange), or the like, to explain the markets to us and afterwards have his information reduced to Jevonian theory. Among university professors of economics Edgeworth and Foxwell stuck to us pretty constantly, and W. Cunningham turned up occasionally. Of course, the atmosphere was by no means Shavian; but that was exactly what I wanted. The Socialist platform and my journalistic pulpits involved a constant and most provocative forcing of people to face the practical consequences of theories and beliefs, and to draw mordant contrasts between what they professed or what their theories involved and their life and conduct. This made dispassionate discussion of abstract theory impossible. At Beeton's the conditions were practically university conditions. There was a tacit understanding that the calculus of utilities and the theory of exchange must be completely isolated from the fact that we lived, as Morris's mediæval captain put it, by 'robbing the poor.'”

In the heated discussions over Marx's economic theories which followed during the next few years, Shaw enjoyed an immense advantage in that nobody else in the Socialist movement had gone through this discipline, which required considerable perseverance and deep scientific conviction. It ended, as Shaw maintains, in his finding out Marx and Hyndman completely as economists. In Shaw's present view Marx was less an economist than a revolutionary Socialist, employing political economy as a weapon against his adversaries: to Marx, the economic theory of Ricardo was simply a “stick to beat the capitalist dog.” To Hyndman, doubt of any part of the “Bible of the working classes” was Socialist heresy: the whole issue resolved itself into the question whether Jevons was a Socialist or an anti-Socialist.[70] No doubt the influence which moved Shaw to devote himself to economic studies was his need of a weapon; but he did not stop to ask whether the steel came from a Socialist foundry or not. “The Marxian steel was always snapping in my hand,” he once remarked to me. “The Jevonian steel held and kept its edge, and fitted itself to every emergency. And then, just as one loves a good sword for its own sake, so one loves a sound theory for its own sake.” As a literary artist also, accustomed to express himself in terse and pointed phrase, Shaw was fired with determination to extricate the theory from its “damned shorthand” of mathematical symbols, and put it into human language.[71]

On the appearance of the English translation from the third German edition of Das Kapital, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, in 1887, Shaw reviewed it in three consecutive articles.[72] These articles of Shaw's show that in 1887 his conversion by Wicksteed was complete. In Shaw's article, Stanley Jevons: His Letters and Journal, a review of the Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, May 29th, 1886, he says: “He (Jevons) was far too orthodox in his practical conclusions for those materialists of the science—the revolutionary Socialists—who saw in him a mere 'bourgeois economist,' as their phrase goes. He does not seem to have had any suspicion that Mr. Hyndman and his friends made any economic pretensions at all; but it is remarkable that the most successful attack so far on the value theory of Karl Marx has come from Mr. Philip Wicksteed, a well-known Unitarian minister, who is an able follower of Jevons in economics.” Shaw was now the complete Jevonian, had thrown the Marxian theory completely over, and exactly located the step Marx missed. Shaw himself readily admits that Marx came within one step of the real solution. Whilst Marx left Shaw unconvinced as to Marxian economics, he left him profoundly imbued with Marxian convictions. In Marx, Shaw discerned one who “wrote of the nineteenth century as if it were a cloud passing down the wind, changing its shape and fading as it goes; whilst Ricardo the stockbroker and De Quincey the high Tory, sat comfortably down before it in their office and study chairs as if it were the Great Wall of China, safe to last until the Day of Judgment with an occasional coat of whitewash.” While refusing to deify Marx as a god, Shaw lauds him with what is, for him, the rarest of panegyrics. “He (Marx) never condescends to cast a glance of useless longing at the past: his cry to the present is always, 'Pass by: we are waiting for the future.' Nor is the future at all mysterious, uncertain, or dreadful to him. There is not a word of hope or fear, nor appeal to chance or providence, nor vain remonstrance with Nature, nor optimism, nor enthusiasm, nor pessimism, nor cynicism, nor any other familiar sign of the giddiness which seizes men when they climb to heights which command a view of the past, present and future of human society. Marx keeps his head like a god. He has discovered the law of social development, and knows what must come. The thread of history is in his hand.”

The point to be grasped, however, is contained in Shaw's admonition: “Read Jevons and the rest for your economics, and read Marx for the history of their working in the past, and the conditions of their application in the present. And never mind the metaphysics.” Shaw stood upon the shoulders of giants, for Jevons had laid the foundations, and Wicksteed it was who first pointed out to English Socialists the flaw in Marx's analysis of wares.[73] But in that remarkably succinct and lucid style for which he is justly famous, Shaw elaborately analyzed the questionable points in the Marxian structure and explained the latent errors involved, for the comprehension, not simply of the economist, but of the man-in-the-street. It is neither possible, nor even desirable, here to give the steps by which Shaw controverted Marx; reference to Shaw's numerous articles on the subject will give these to the curious. But the conclusions he reached are worthy of enumeration.[74] In the first place, Shaw objected to Marx's dogmatic assertion of the generally accepted Ricardian theory that “wares in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value”; and for the simple reason that the Jevonian theory called this dogma into question. In the second place, following Wicksteed, Shaw takes Marx to task for first insisting that the abstract labour used in the production of wares does not count unless it is useful, and then contradicting himself by stripping the wares of the abstract utility conferred upon them by abstractly useful work. The logical consequence of admitting abstract utility as a quality of wares produced by abstract human labour is conclusively to disconnect value from mere abstract human labour. Marx thus adroitly begs the question: as Shaw says: “It is as if he (Marx) had proved by an elaborate series of abstractions that liquids were fatal to human life, and had finished by remarking: 'Of course, the liquids must be poisonous.'” Armed with the fact of abstract utility, and the Jevonian weapons of “the law of indifference” and “the law of the variation of utility,” Shaw was enabled to prove with mathematical rigour that value does not represent the specific utility of the article, but its abstract utility; and not its total abstract utility, but its final abstract utility—at the “margin of supply,” in Wicksteed's phrase—i.e., the utility of the final increment that is worth producing. Translated into terms of labour, this means that the value of the ware represents, not the quantity of human labour embodied in it, but the “final utility,” in Jevonian phrase, of the abstract human labour socially necessary to produce it. As Shaw puts it: “Instead of wares being equal in value because equal quantities of labour have been expended on them, equal quantities of labour will have been expended on them because they are of equal value (or equally desirable), which is quite another thing. That slip in the analysis of wares whereby Marx was led to believe that he had got rid of the abstract utility when he had really only got rid of the specific utility, was the first of his mistakes.” Under certain ideal conditions, there is a coincidence between “exchange value” and “amount of labour contained”; but as these ideal conditions seldom, if ever, occur in practice, no scientific validity attaches to the Marxian statement that “commodities in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value.” Lastly, Shaw insists that if Marx's theory of value were correct, it would refute, not confirm, Marx's theory of “surplus value.” The proprietor's monopoly completely upsets those ideal conditions on which Marx's theory of value is based. It can be demonstrated by Jevonian principles that Marx's assumption, that the subsistence wage is the value of the labour force, is untenable, even on Marxian principles. Marx did not see that it is impossible, according to the “law of indifference,” for one part of the stock of a commodity available at any given time to have value whilst another part has none, since no man will give a price for that which he can obtain for nothing. Moreover, when he attempts to differentiate labour power from steam power, Marx's logic breaks down. As Shaw says: “Marx's whole theory of the origin of surplus value depends on the accuracy of his demonstration that steam power, machinery, etc., cannot possibly produce surplus value. If Marx were right then a capital of ten thousand pounds, invested in a business requiring nine thousand pounds for machinery and plant, and one thousand pounds for wages (or human labour power), would only return one-ninth of the surplus value returned by an equal capital of which one thousand pounds was in the form of plant and nine thousand pounds in wage capital. As a matter of fact, the 'surplus value' from both is found to be equal.”[75]

A Study of Six Socialists.

From a drawing by H. G. Wells, here reproduced by his permission.

Shaw saw plainly enough that the theory of value did not matter in the least so far as the soundness of Socialism was concerned. For, as he once expressed it in a letter to me, “if you steal a turnip the theory of the turnip's value does not affect the social and political aspect of the transaction.” But, of course, Hyndman and the few Socialists who had read Marx and nothing else, were furious over Shaw's iconoclastic articles in the National Reformer. In view of the fact that the opponents of Socialism continually damaged the cause of the Socialists by alleging that the Socialists' economic basis was Marx's theory and was untenable, with the result that the Socialists persisted in accepting the allegation and defending Marx, Shaw resolutely forced the quarrel into publicity as far as he could. His prime object was to make it clear that the Fabians were quite independent of the Marxian value theory. A heated controversy on the subject in the Pall Mall Gazette of May, 1887, engaged in by Shaw, Hyndman, and Mrs. Besant, did not down the ghost of the value theory; for the controversy was reopened in To-Day two years later. An Economic Eirenicon, by Graham Wallas, was followed by Marx's Theory of Value, contributed by H. M. Hyndman, in which, it seems, he merely repeated the old Marxian demonstration without making any attempt to meet the Jevonian attack. Whereupon Shaw “went for” Hyndman in his most aggravating style in an article entitled Bluffing the Value Theory, which finished the campaign except for a series of letters in Justice by various hands, the tenth of which, in July, 1889, was written by Shaw. There were other letters by Shaw on the same subject, written at different times, which appeared in the Daily Chronicle. William Morris never made any pretence of having followed the controversy on its abstract technical side; and perhaps the most amusing feature of the entire campaign was a sort of manifesto which Belfort Bax induced Morris to sign, in which Hyndman, Bax, Aveling and Morris declared that all good Socialists were Marxites! Shaw was once denounced in public meeting by a Marxian Socialist for pooh-poohing Marx as an idiot. His own position, as he himself once remarked to me, lay somewhere between this and that of worshipping Marx as a god. In one of the most remarkable essays ever written by Shaw, entitled The Illusions of Socialism, Shaw pointed out why it was that a difficult and subtle theory like that of Jevons could never be as acceptable as a crude and simple labour theory like that of Marx, which seemed to imply that wealth rightly belonged to the labourer.[76]

From the standpoint of the Marxian religionist, the second heresy of which Shaw is guilty consists in his recognition of the Class War doctrine as a delusion and a suicidal political policy. To Shaw, the form of organization deduced from the Class War doctrine is always the same. “All you have to do is to form a working-class association, declare war on property, explain the economic situation from the platform and at the street corner, and wait until the entire proletariat (made 'class-conscious' by your lucid lectures) joins you. This being done simultaneously in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, etc., etc., nothing remains but a simultaneous movement of the proletarians of all countries, and the sweeping of capitalism into the sea because 'ye are many: they are few.' What can be easier or more scientific?” But a study of the history of Socialism led Shaw to the discovery that the Class War theory had gone to pieces every time it had been invoked. Lassalle attempted to organize the imaginary class-conscious proletariat, only to be disillusioned before the end of the first year by the “damned wantlessness” of the real proletariat. Owen before him likewise had failed, after apparently converting all Trade-Unionism to his New Moral World. When Marx planned the Socialist side of “The International” in the sixties, he showed his contempt for the trade-union side, with the result: “On the trade-union side a great success.... On the Socialist side, futility and disastrous failure, culminating, in 1871, in one of the most appalling massacres known to history.” Marx can scarcely be said to have tried to organize the class-conscious proletariat; but the moment his useless vituperation of Thiers, “brilliant as a sample of literary invective, but useless for the buttering of parsnips,” made known to English workmen his real opinion of bourgeois civilization, they abandoned him in horror and left the International memberless. In Germany, “Liebknecht made no serious headway until he became a parliamentarian, playing the parliamentary game more pliably than Parnell did, though always 'old-soldiering' his way with the greenhorns by prefacing each compromise with the declaration that Social Democracy never compromised.” In France, Jaurès and Millerand have not so much abandoned the Class War doctrine as wholly neglected and ignored it, thus reducing the old Guèsdist Marxism to absurdity. In England, “the once revolutionary Social-Democratic Federation has been forced by the competition of the quite constitutional Independent Labour Party to give up all its ancient Maccabean poetry, and, after a period of uselessness and surpassing unpopularity as an anti-Fabian Society with a speciality for abusing Mr. John Burns, to settle down into a sort of Ultra-Independent Labour Party, ready to amalgamate with its rival if only an agreement can be arrived at as to which is to be considered as swallowing the other.”

Not merely a study of the Class War doctrine from the historical standpoint, but also an examination into the assumptions upon which it rests, have thoroughly convinced Shaw that Socialists have for long been making overdrafts upon their Capital. Shaw has never sought to shirk the real point at issue by the quibble of substituting the sort of class-consciousness called snobbery, mighty as is that social force, for the economic class-consciousness of the German formula. In Shaw's interpretation, Hyndman and the Marxists use the term “Class War” to denote a war between all the proletarians on one side and all the property-holders on the other—in Schaeffle's phrase “a definite confrontation of classes”—which will be produced when the workers become conscious that their economic interests are opposed to those of the property-holders. Shaw's position is effectively summed up in his words:

“The people understand their own affairs much better than Marx did, and the simple stratification of society into two classes ... has as little relation to actual social facts as Marx's value theory has to actual market prices. If the crude Marxian melodrama of 'The Class War; or, the Virtuous Worker and the Brutal Capitalist,' were even approximately true to life, the whole capitalist structure would have tumbled to pieces long ago, as the 'scientific Socialists' were always expecting it to do, instead of consolidating itself on a scale which has already made Marx and Engels as obsolete as the Gracchi had become in the time of Augustus. By throwing up fabulous masses of 'surplus value,' and doubling and trebling the incomes of the well-to-do middle classes, who all imitate the imperial luxury and extravagance of the millionaires, Capitalism has created, as it formerly did in Rome, an irresistible proletarian bodyguard of labourers whose immediate interests are bound up with those of the capitalists, and who are, like their Roman prototypes, more rapacious, more rancorous in their Primrose partisanship, and more hardened against all the larger social considerations, than their masters, simply because they are more needy, ignorant and irresponsible. Touch the income of the rich, and the Conservative proletarians are the first to suffer.”[77]

In Shaw's opinion, the social struggle does not follow class lines at all, because the people who really hate the capitalist system are, like Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy, Hyndman, Marx and Lassalle, themselves capitalists, whereas the fiercest defenders of it are the masses of labourers, artisans, and employees whose trade is at its best when the rich have most money to spend. Socialists like Shaw, who “do not accept the class war,” are simply expressing “first, a very natural impatience of crying 'War, War!' where there is no war; and, second, their despair at seeing Socialism, like Liberalism, perishing because it is trying to live on the crop of home-made generalizations so plentifully put forth during the great Liberal boom of 1832-80 by middle-class paper theorists like Malthus, Cobden, Marx, Comte and Herbert Spencer—fine fellows, all of them, but stupendously ignorant of the industrial world.” The basic divergence between the Fabian and the “S. D. F.” policy is epitomized in Shaw's words: “There is a conflict of interests between those who pay wages and those who receive them; and this is organized by the trade unions. There is another conflict of interests between those workers and proprietors whose customers live on rent (in its widest economic sense), and those whose customers live on wages; but the lines of this conflict run, not between the classes, but right through them, and do not coincide with the lines of the trade union conflict. And any form of Socialist organization, or any tactics toward the trade union movement, based on the theory that the lines of battle do run between the classes and not through them, or do coincide with the trade union lines of battle, will prove, and always has proved, disastrously impracticable.” Shaw exasperatingly said in a recent article[78] that he refused to agree with anybody on any subject whatsoever. “Let them agree with me if my arguments convince them. If not, let them plank down their own views. I will not have my mouth stopped and my mind stifled.” And those mystic forces—historical development and Progress with a large P—in which the Marxists rest their firmest hope, Shaw regards in the spirit of Ingoldsby's sacristan:

“The sacristan he said no word to indicate a doubt;
But he put his thumb unto his nose, and he spread his fingers out.”

There are two factors which strongly militate against the progress of Socialism; the resolute adherence of Socialists to those theories and policies of Marx which time, experience, and modern economic science have combined to discredit; and the tendency of the popular mind to confuse Socialism with Anarchism.[79] Shaw's most important negative and destructive achievements consist in those amazingly clever and interesting papers in which he attempts to expose Marx's theory of value as an exploded fallacy, to show that the Class War will never come, and to demonstrate the impossibilities of Anarchism. In the technical sense of Socialist economics, Shaw occupies the opposite pole to Individualism and Anarchism. And yet in a very definite and general sense, Shaw is a thorough-paced individualist and anarchist. If individualist means a believer in the Shakespearean injunction “To thine own self be true!”, in the Ibsenic doctrine “Live thine own life!”, then Shaw is an individualist heart and soul. If anarchist means an enemy of convention, of tradition, of current modes of administering justice, of prevailing moral standards, then Shaw is the most revolutionary anarchist now at large. If, on the other hand, Individualist means one who distrusts State action and is jealous of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, then Shaw is most certainly not an Individualist. If Anarchist means dynamitard, incendiary, assassin, thief; champion of the absolute liberty of the individual and the removal of all governmental restraint; or even a believer, as Communist, in a profound and universal sense of high moral responsibility present in all humanity, then Shaw is a living contradiction of Anarchism.

Shaw opposes Individualist Anarchism since, under such a social arrangement, the prime economic goal of Socialism: the just distribution of the premiums given to certain portions of the general product by the action of demand, would never be attained. As this system not only fails to distribute these premiums justly, but deliberately permits their private appropriation, Individualist Anarchism is, in Shaw's view, “the negation of Socialism, and is, in fact, Unsocialism carried as near to its logical completeness as any sane man dare carry it.” The Communist Anarchism of Kropotkin, Shaw also opposes because of his own lack of faith in humanity at large, in the present state of development of the social conscience. If bread were communized, the common bread store obviously would become bankrupt unless every consumer of the bread contributed to its support as much labour as the bread he consumed cost to produce. Were the consumer to refuse thus to contribute, there would be two ways to compel him: physical force and the moral force of public opinion. If physical force is resorted to, then the Anarchist ideal remains unattained. If moral force, what will be the event? The answer reveals Shaw as a confirmed sceptic in regard to the value of public opinion as a moral agent. “It is useless,” he avers, “to think of man as a fallen angel. If the fallacies of absolute morality are to be admitted into the discussion at all, he must be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil who is being slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize that in disregarding his neighbours' happiness, he is taking the surest way to sacrifice his own.” Under Anarchistic Communism, public opinion would no doubt operate as powerfully as now. But, in Shaw's opinion, public opinion cannot for a moment be relied upon as a force which operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men to act morally. Keen, incisive, pitiless, his words descriptive of public opinion show how little he is tinged with the poetry, the passion, and the religion which are the very life blood of Socialism.

“Its operation is for all practical purposes quite arbitrary, and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile to the reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and worships Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall hat and going to church, on his marrying the woman he lives with, and on his pretending to believe whatever the rest pretend to believe.... But there is no sincere public opinion that a man should work for his daily bread if he can get it for nothing. Indeed, it is just the other way; public opinion has been educated to regard the performance of daily manual labour as the lot of the despised classes. The common aspiration is to acquire property and leave off working. Even members of the professions rank below the independent gentry, so-called because they are independent of their own labour. These prejudices are not confined to the middle and upper classes: they are rampant also among the workers.... One is almost tempted in this country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the snob, until you get down to those who are so oppressed that they have not enough self-respect even for snobbery, and thus are able to pluck out of the heart of their misery a certain irresponsibility which it would be a mockery to describe as genuine frankness and freedom. The moment you rise into the higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy, ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty titles, precedence and dignities, and all the detestable fruits of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly among those who lose as among those who gain by it. In fact, the notion that poverty favours virtue was clearly invented to persuade the poor that what they lost in this world they would gain in the next.”[80]

When Shaw attended the International Socialist Congresses in Zurich and in London, he reported them in the Star as unsparingly as he would have reported a sitting of Parliament. The Socialists, amazed and indignant at their first taste of real criticism, concluded that Shaw was going over to the enemy. This Fabian policy of unsparing criticism, inaugurated and carried out ruthlessly by Shaw, ended in freeing the Fabians, in great measure, from the illusions of Socialism, and in imparting to their Society its rigidly constitutional character. An incident, which Mr. Shaw once described in a letter to me, gives one some insight into the causes of his reaction against the German Socialists' policy of playing to the galleries by spouting revolutionary rant and hinting catastrophically of impending revolutions.

“At the Zurich Congress I first became acquainted with the leaders of the movement on the Continent. Chief among them was the German leader Liebknecht, a '48 veteran who, having become completely parliamentarized, still thought it necessary to dupe his younger followers with the rhetoric of the barricade. After a division in which an attempt to secure unanimity by the primitive method of presenting the resolution before the Congress to the delegates of the different nations in their various languages in several versions adapted to their views, so that whilst they believed they were all saying 'Yes' to the same proposition, the wording was really very different in the different translations, and sometimes highly contradictory, it turned out that the stupidity of the English section had baffled the cleverness of the German-Swiss bureau, because the English voted 'No' when they meant 'Yes,' and upset the apple-cart. Happening to be close to Liebknecht on the platform at the luncheon adjournment, I said a few words to him in explanation of the apparently senseless action of the English. He looked wearily round at me; saw a comparatively young Socialist whom he did not know; and immediately treated me to a long assurance that the German Social Democrats did not shrink from a conflict with the police on Labour Day (the 1st of May); that they were as ready as ever, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. I turned away as soon and as shortly as I could without being rude; and from that time I discounted the German leaders as being forty years out of date, and totally negligible except as very ordinary republican Radicals with a Socialist formula which was simply a convenient excuse for doing nothing new.

“When the German leaders visited London in the eighties they treated the Fabian Society as a foolish joke. Later on they found their error; and Liebknecht was entertained at a great Fabian meeting; but to this day the German Socialist press does not dare to publish the very articles it asks me to write, because of my ruthless criticism of Bebel, Singer, and the old tradition of the 'old gang' generally. My heresy as to Marx is, of course, another horror to the Germans who got their ideas of political economy in the '48-'71 period.”

After 1875, let us recall, the old pressure and discontent of the eighteen-thirties descended upon England with renewed force. In 1881, “as if Chartism and Fergus O'Connor had risen from the dead,” the Democratic Federation, with H. M. Hyndman at its head, inaugurated the revival of Socialist organization in England. Like those other haters of the capitalist system—the capitalists Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy, Marx and Lassalle—Hyndman “had had his turn at the tall hat and was tired of it.” Shortly after the formation of the Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, a revolting sect from the Fellowship of the New Life, founded by Professor Thomas Davidson, came into being. Hyndman and his Marxists, Kropotkin and his Anarchists, did not realize, with Shaw, that the proletariat, instead of being the revolutionary, is in reality the conservative element of society. They refused to accept this situation, not realizing that they were confronted by a condition, not a theory. “They persisted in believing that the proletariat was an irresistible mass of Felix Pyats and Ouidas.” On the point of joining the Democratic Federation, Shaw decided to join the Fabian Society instead. He did accept the situation, helped, perhaps, as he once said, by his inherited instinct for anti-climax. “I threw Hyndman over, and got to work with Sidney Webb and the rest to place Socialism on a respectable bourgeois footing; hence Fabianism. Burns did the same thing in Battersea by organizing the working classes there on a genuine self-respecting working-class basis, instead of on the old romantic middle-class assumptions. Hyndman wasted years in vain denunciation of the Fabian Society and of Burns; and though facts became too strong for him at last, he is still at heart the revolted bourgeois.” Prior to the year 1886, there had been no formal crystallization of the Fabian Society into a strictly economic association, avowedly opportunist in its political policy; after September 17th of that year the thin edge of the wedge went in. The Manifesto of the Fabian Parliamentary League contains the nucleus of the Fabian policy of to-day.[81] The Fabian Society was a dead letter until Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas joined it; from that moment, it became a force to be reckoned with in English life. Almost from the very first, as Mr. Sidney Webb once wrote me, the Society took the colour of Shaw's mordantly critical temperament, and bore the stamp of his personality. The promise of the Fabians lay in their open-mindedness, their diligence in the study of advanced economics, and their resolute refusal of adherence to any formula, however dear to Socialist enthusiasts, which did not commend itself unreservedly to their intelligence. By 1885, it had only forty members; and in 1886, it was still unable to bring its roll of members to a hundred names. In 1900, it boasted a membership of eight hundred, and at present about twenty-six hundred names are found upon its rolls.[82] It is neither possible nor advisable for me to record the history of the Fabian Society—that may be found in the numerous publications of the Society. But I cannot refrain from stating that the membership increased by forty-three per cent, in the year 1906-7, that this was a year of unprecedented activity; and that the Society has recently been greatly strengthened by the accession of many well-known men in English public life. There were then eight Fabians in the London County Council; and in Parliament, Labour and Socialism have in the last five years been better represented, I believe, than ever before in the history of that body. I have recently talked at length with many of the ablest Socialists in England. The remarkable growth of the Fabian Society and the Socialist representation in English literature, I was told again and again, is not due to any sudden and untrustworthy inflation of Socialist values, but is largely due to the fact that Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland, and their coterie have been planting the seeds for twenty years. Such ideas as are embodied in Mr. Lloyd George's budget and the Old Age Pension Bill are unmistakable marks of that gradual Socialist leavening of English political thought upon which the Fabians have been engaged ever since 1884. “The recent steady influx into the Fabian Society,” Mr. Bland said to me energetically, “is a clear proof to my mind that the ideas which have been lurking in the air for a long, long time are at last taking definite shape simultaneously in the minds of a great many people. Such men as Bernard Shaw have brought this thing to pass.”[83]

During the years from 1887 to 1889, the years we are especially concerned with at present, compensation for its paucity of numbers was found not only in the intellectual capacity, but also in the economic inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness of the leaders in the Fabian Society. This is best revealed in Shaw's sketch of this period:

“By far our most important work at this period was our renewal of that historic and economic equipment of Social-Democracy of which Ferdinand Lassalle boasted, and which has been getting rustier and more obsolete ever since his time and that of his contemporary, Karl Marx.... In 1885 we used to prate about Marx's theory of value and Lassalle's Iron Law of Wages as if it were still 1870. In spite of Henry George, no Socialist seemed to have any working knowledge of the theory of economic rent: its application to skilled labour was so unheard of that the expression 'rent of ability' was received with laughter when the Fabians first introduced it into their lectures and discussions; and as for the modern theory of value, it was scouted as a blasphemy against Marx.... As to history, we had a convenient stock of imposing generalizations about the evolution from slavery to serfdom and from serfdom to free wage labour. We drew our pictures of society with one broad line dividing the bourgeoisie from the proletariat, and declared that there were only two classes really in the country. We gave lightning sketches of the development of the mediæval craftsman into the manufacturer and finally into the factory hand. We denounced Malthusianism quite as crudely as the Malthusians advocated it, which is saying a great deal; and we raged against emigration, national insurance, co-operation, trade-unionism, old-fashioned Radicalism, and everything else that was not Socialism; and that, too, without knowing at all clearly what we meant by Socialism. The mischief was, not that our generalizations were unsound, but that we had no detailed knowledge of the content of them: we had borrowed them ready-made as articles of faith; and when opponents like Charles Bradlaugh asked us for details we sneered at the demand without being in the least able to comply with it. The real reason why Anarchist and Socialist worked then shoulder to shoulder as comrades and brothers was that neither one nor the other had any definite idea of what he wanted, or how it was to be got. All this is true to this day of the raw recruits of the movement, and of some older hands who may be absolved on the ground of invincible ignorance; but it is no longer true of the leaders of the movement in general. In 1887 even the British Association burst out laughing as one man when an elderly representative of Philosophic Radicalism, with the air of one who was uttering the safest of platitudes, accused us of ignorance of political economy; and now not even a Philosophical Radical is to be found to make himself ridiculous in this way. The exemplary eye-opening of Mr. Leonard Courtney by Mr. Sidney Webb lately in the leading English economic review surprised nobody, except perhaps Mr. Courtney himself. The cotton lords of the north would never dream to-day of engaging an economist to confute us with learned pamphlets as their predecessors engaged Nassau Senior in the days of the Ten Hours' Bill, because they know that we should be only too glad to advertise our Eight Hours' Bill by flattening out any such champion. From 1887 to 1889 we were the recognized bullies and swashbucklers of advanced economics.”[84]

Not without reason have the Fabians been called the Jesuits of the Socialist evangel in England. The “waiting” of the Fabian motto is synonymous, not with inaction, but with unflagging energy.[85] The Fabians eschewed pleasures and recreations of every kind in favour of public speaking and public instruction; their policy has always been one of education and permeation. In the year ending April, 1889, to take a single example, the number of lectures delivered by members of the Fabian Society alone was upwards of seven hundred. In addition to writing or editing many publications of the Fabian Society, Shaw has delivered, in the last twenty-odd years, considerably more than a thousand public lectures and addresses. Until the close of 1889, the Fabians had confined their propagandist campaign to three directions: publication of manifestos and pamphlets; delivery of public addresses and holding of conferences, and exciting efforts towards the permeation of the Liberal party. In December, 1889, the Fabian Society published the well-known book, Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw, and containing, in addition to two essays of his own, essays by Sidney Olivier, William Clarke, Hubert Bland, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant and Graham Wallas.[86] The authors, constituting the Executive Council of the Fabian Society, made no claim to be more than communicative learners: the book was the outcome of their realization of the lack of anything like authoritative, and at the same time popular, presentations of the political, economic, and moral aspects of contemporary Socialism.

Facsimile of Cover Design of Fabian Essays (1890).

In general, it may be said that the Fabians, while strenuously avowing themselves strict evolutionists, are in reality highly revolutionary. The boast of the Fabian Society is freedom from the illusions and millennial aspirations of the great mass of Socialists. It is a society of irreverence and scientific iconoclasm, bowing to the fetishism neither of George nor of Marx. Towards Marx and Lassalle, some of whose views must now be discarded as erroneous or obsolete, the Fabian Society insists on the necessity of maintaining as critical an attitude as these eminent Socialists themselves maintained towards their predecessors St. Simon and Robert Owen. In origin anarchistic and revolutionary as could be desired, in spirit the Fabians remain anarchistic and revolutionary. In principle avowedly orderly and constitutional, in policy frankly opportunist, in practice strictly scientific and economic, the Fabians may be called the realists of the Socialist movement. They have ruthlessly snatched the masks from the faces of the Utopian dreamers and romancers.[87] While the rank and file of the “S. D. F.” have been the very good friends of the Fabians, the radical differences in their respective policies have precluded all possibility of amalgamation. As succinctly stated by Shaw: “The Fabian Society is a society for helping to bring about the socialization of the industrial resources of the country. The Social-Democratic Federation is a society for enlisting the whole proletariat of the country in its own ranks and itself socializing the national industry.” The policy of the one is fundamentally opportunist; of the other, implacably sectarian. The Federation counts no man a Socialist until he has joined it, and supports no man who is not a member; the Fabians advise concentration of strength to elect that candidate, be he Socialist or not, who gives the greatest promise of advancing, in greater or less degree, the general cause of Socialism. The Federation persistently claims to be the only genuine representative of working-class interests in England; the Fabians have never advanced the smallest pretensions in that direction. Its policy finds ample justification in the recent history of Continental Socialism. The tactics of the German Socialist Party, in the last few years, have been “Fabianized” by sheer force of circumstances; to-day, this party is, in great measure, both opportunist and constitutional, the two essential features of Fabian policy. Sharpened in wit by rigorous persecution, Liebknecht and his successor Bebel have learned the art of politics through experience and exigency. In contemporary France is witnessed the signal triumph of Fabian Socialism. The policy of Jaurès, although under the frown of the “International,” will be continued in France; and Guèsde, despite his barren victory at the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam in 1904, will remain only vox clamantis in deserto. The history of the Fabian Society, which is the history of Shaw, in the last twenty years, bears evidence that the Fabians have stood in the very forefront of the battle for collectivist measures, municipal reforms, civic virtue and social progress. As Shaw wrote in 1900:

“In 1885 we agreed to give up the delightful ease of revolutionary heroics and take to the hard work of practical reform on ordinary parliamentary lines. In 1889 we published 'Fabian Essays' without a word in them about the value theory of Marx. In 1893 we made the first real attack made by Socialists on Liberalism, on which occasion the Social-Democratic Federation promptly joined in the Liberal outcry against us. In 1896 we affirmed that the object of Socialism was not to destroy private enterprise, but only to make the livelihood of the people independent of it by socializing the common industries of life, and driving private enterprise into its proper sphere of art, invention and new departures. This year we have led the way in getting rid of the traditional association of our movement with that romantic nationalism which is to the Pole and the Irishman what Jingoism is to the Englishman.... In short, the whole history of Socialism during the past fifteen years in England, France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and America, has been its disentanglement from the Liberal tradition stamped on Marx, Engels and Liebknecht in 1848, and its emergence in a characteristic and original form of its own, modified by national character, and, in England, calling itself Fabianism when it is self-conscious enough to call itself anything at all.”[88]

Strangely enough, in view of all the facts, it is customary to regard Shaw as a purely destructive and negative spirit. The truth is that Shaw stands for certain definite beliefs, certain undoubted principles. His is the belief of the unbeliever, the principle of the unprincipled, the faith of the sceptic.

Not less important than his destructive achievements has been his constructive work in practical affairs as Vestryman and Borough Councillor. Prior to 1895, roughly speaking, the vestries were ignorantly boasted of as the truest products of a representative democratic government. “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “is that the vestry, as it was actually elected in those days—a few people getting together when nobody knew of it and at some place of which the public was not notified, and electing themselves members—could scarcely be called a representative democratic body. We Socialists finally began to realize that the way to get at the vestry was to put a programme into their hands. So we sent them all a pamphlet, requesting replies—a pamphlet entitled, 'Questions for Vestrymen,' or something of the sort. The vestrymen were thus forced to the wall and driven to decide upon issues. They actually began to make up their minds on many subjects of which hitherto they had had no conception. Slowly the vestries, under this discipline, began to take on a truly representative character. The personnel of the vestry was now permanently altered for the better. Men were elected who not only took an interest in municipal affairs, but likewise were willing to do any amount of hard work. I was 'co-opted'—i.e., chosen by the committee, by agreement with the opposite party, obviously beaten if a vote were taken. So that I was fortunate enough to escape the terrors of a popular election.”

It is quite beyond the scope of this book to enter into the details of Shaw's work as Vestryman, afterwards Borough Councillor. Suffice it to say, that he was chosen in 1897, entered at once upon the performance of his duties, and prosecuted them for several terms with great zeal and tireless energy. His various letters to the Press during that period, and occasional reminiscences, show that he was always outspoken and vehement in behalf of all reforms which tended to the betterment of the poorer classes, equalization of public privileges of men and women, better sanitary conditions, and the municipalization of such industries as promise to give the people at large better service and greater value for their money than privately operated concerns. The most tangible result of his work as Vestryman and Borough Councillor is his book, Municipal Trading, which he once told me he regarded as one of the best and most useful things he had ever done.[89]

At the expiration of his career as Borough Councillor, he stood as the candidate for the Borough of St. Pancras in the London County Council—the seat afterwards occupied by the well-known actor, Mr. George Alexander. “I was beaten,” Mr. Shaw recently told me, “because I alienated the Nonconformist element by favouring the improvement of the Church schools. I was convinced that such improvement would lead to the betterment of the education of the children. The Nonconformists were enraged beyond measure by the proposal, looking with the utmost horror upon any measure which tended to strengthen the Church. I remember one rabid Nonconformist coming to me one day, almost foaming at the mouth, and protesting with violent indignation that he would not pay a single cent towards the maintenance of the schools of the Established Church. 'Why, my dear fellow,' I replied, 'don't you know that you pay taxes now for the support of the Roman Catholic Church in the Island of Malta?' Although this staggered the irate Nonconformist for the moment, it did not reconcile his element to the extension of the principle to London. My contention was that under the conditions prevailing at the time, the children were poorly taught and poorly housed, the schools badly ventilated, and the conditions generally unsatisfactory. 'Improve all the conditions,' I said; 'appoint your own inspectors, and in the course of time you will control the situation. Pay the piper and you can call the tune.' But I could not override the tremendous prejudice against the Church, and I was badly beaten.” One of Shaw's intimate friends told me not long ago that what lost the seat in the L. C. C. for Shaw was his intrepid assertion, repeated throughout the campaign, that he and Voltaire were the only two truly religious people who had ever lived! Shaw's own account of this, when I taxed him with it, was that he had often pointed out that the religious opinions of the Free Churches (the Nonconformist sects) in England to-day were exactly those of Voltaire, and that what I had been told was quite as near his meaning as most people contrived to get without reading him. And only the other day a well-known politician and a friend of Shaw's made the remark to me that Shaw was an “impossible political candidate,” too rash and individualistic in his assertions to avoid alienating many people—even some of the very men who under ordinary circumstances might confidently be relied upon to support a progressive and energetic reformer.

And yet it is noteworthy that as far back as the year 1889 Shaw was asked to stand as a Member of Parliament. Below is given the text of a letter, from Shaw, at 29, Fitzroy Square, W., London, dated March 23rd, 1889, to Mr. W. Sanders, then Secretary of the Election Committee of the Battersea branch of the S. D. F., now a prominent Fabian and recently member of the London County Council. This letter, a copy of which was most kindly given me by Mr. Sanders, was sent in reply to a letter from him to Mr. Shaw asking him to allow his name to be put forward as a candidate for the parliamentary representation of Battersea subsequent to a conference between the Battersea L. and R. Association and the Battersea branch of the S. D. F. Mr. Shaw was mistaken in addressing Mr. Sanders as the Secretary of the Election Committee of the Battersea L. and R. Association.

“Dear Sir,—

“I wish it were possible for me to thank the Battersea L. and R. Association for their invitation, and accept it without further words. But there is the old difficulty which makes genuine democracy impossible at present—I mean the money difficulty. For the last year I have had to neglect my professional duties so much, and to be so outrageously unpunctual and uncertain in the execution of work entrusted to me by employers of literary labour, that my pecuniary position is worse than it was; and I am at present almost wholly dependent on critical work which requires my presence during several evenings in the week at public performances. Badly as I do this at present, I could not do it at all if I had parliamentary duties to discharge; and as to getting back any of the old work that could be done in the morning, I rather think the action I should be bound to take in Parliament would lead to closer and closer boycotting. As to the serious literary work that is independent of editors and politics, I have never succeeded in making it support me; and in any case it is not compatible with energetic work in another direction carried on simultaneously. You must excuse my troubling you with these details; but the Association, consisting of men who know what getting a living means, will understand the importance of them. As a political worker outside Parliament I can just manage to pay my way and so keep myself straight and independent. But you know, and the Association will know, how a man goes to pieces when he has to let his work go, and then to run into debt, to borrow in order to get out of debt by getting into it again, to beg in order to pay off the loans, and finally either to sell himself or to give up, beaten.

“If the constituency wants a candidate, I see nothing for it but paying him. If Battersea makes up its mind to that, it can pick and choose among men many of whom are stronger than I. And since it is well to get so much good value for the money as can be had, I think poor constituencies (and all real democratic constituencies are poor) will for some time be compelled to kill two birds with one stone, and put the same man into both County Council and Parliament. This, however, is a matter which you are sure to know your own minds about, and it is not for me to meddle in it.

“Some day, perhaps, I may be better able to take an extra duty; for, after all, I am not a bad workman when I have time and opportunity to show what I can do; and I need scarcely say that if the literary employers find that there is money to be made out of me, they will swallow my opinions fast enough,

“I am, dear Sir,
“Yours faithfully,
“G. Bernard Shaw.

“Mr. W. Sanders.”

In many quarters, even among his Socialist confrères, Bernard Shaw is regarded as primarily destructive in his proposals. And yet, at different times and in various places, he has constructively outlined his programme of complete Socialism. In essential agreement with such Collectivists as Émile Vandervelde, Jean Jaurès and August Bebel, Shaw differs from them only in regard to the successive mutations in the process of Socialist evolution. The gradual extension of the principle of the income tax—e.g., a “forcible transfer of rent, interest, and even rent of ability from private holders to the State, without compensation,” is the scheme of capitalistic expropriation the Collectivists have in mind. By a gradual process of development, the imposition of gradually increased taxes, the State will secure the means for investment in industrial enterprises of all sorts. Instead of forcibly extinguishing private enterprises, the State would extinguish them by successfully competing against them. Thus, as Proudhon said, competition would kill competition; in America, Mr. Gaylord Wilshire never tires of exclaiming: “Let the Nation own the Trusts.” If, as Shaw claims, the highest exceptional talent could be had, in the open market, for eight hundred pounds, say, nearly half the existing wages of ability and the entire profits of capital would be diverted from the pockets of the able men and the present possessors of capital, and would find its way into the pockets of the State. The vast sum thus accruing to the State would swell the existing wages fund, and would be employed in raising the wages of the entire community. After the means of production have been Socialized, and the State has become the employer, products or riches will be distributed roughly, “according to the labour done by each man in the collective search for them.” In his celebrated tilt with Shaw, Mr. W. H. Mallock attacked the validity of the economics which furnish the substructure of Fabian Essays.[90] Mr. Mallock's contention resolves itself into the assertion that exceptional personal ability, and not labour, is the main factor in the production of wealth. Far from repudiating this assertion, Shaw embraced it, he said, in the spirit of Mrs. Prig: “Who deniges of it, Betsy?” We support and encourage ability, Shaw contends, in order that we may get as much as possible out of it, not in order that it may get as much as possible out of us. Give men of ability and their heirs the entire product of their ability, so that they shall be enormously rich whilst the rest of us remain as poor as if they had never existed, and “it will become a public duty to kill them, since nobody but themselves will be any the worse, and we shall be much the better for having no further daily provocation to the sin of envy.” Accordingly, the business of Society is “to get the use of ability as cheaply as it can for the benefit of the community, giving the able man just enough advantage to keep his ability active and efficient. From the Unsocialist point of view this is simply saying that it is the business of Society to find out exactly how far it can rob the able man of the product of his ability without injuring itself, which is precisely true (from that point of view),” though whether it is a “reduction of Socialism to dishonesty or of Unsocialism to absurdity” may be left an open question. “If Mr. Mallock will take his grand total of the earnings of Ability,” Shaw asserts, “and strike off from it, first, all rent of land and interest on capital, then all normal profits, then all non-competitive emoluments attached to a definite status in the public service, civil or military, from royalty downwards, then all payments for the advantages of secondary or technical education and social opportunities, then all fancy payments made to artists and other professional men by very rich commonplace people competing for their services, and then all exceptional payments made to men whose pre-eminence exists only in the imaginative ignorance of the public, the remainder may with some plausibility stand as genuine rent of ability.” And to Mr. Mallock's assertion that “men of ability will not exert themselves to produce income when they know that the State is an organized conspiracy to rob them of it,” Shaw characteristically retorts, “Mr. Mallock might as well deny the existence of the Pyramids on the general ground that men will not build pyramids when they know that Pharaoh is at the head of an organized conspiracy to take away the Pyramids from them as soon as they are made.”

Shaw holds the fundamentally sound view that “as to the entire assimilation of Socialism by the world, the world has never yet assimilated the whole of any ism, and never will.” In that most subtle and distinguished of all his contributions to the Socialist literature of our time, The Illusions of Socialism, Shaw has expressed his firm conviction that it is not essential for the welfare of the world to carry out Socialism in its entirety. Unfettered by the dogmas of a political creed, unhampered by the bonds of a narrow partisanship, Bernard Shaw stands forth as a great and free spirit in his prophetic declaration that, long before it has penetrated to all corners of the political and social organization, Socialism will have relieved the pressure to which it owes its elasticity, and will recede before the next great social movement, leaving everywhere intact the best survivals of individualistic liberalism. And far from agreeing with Ibsen in his impossibilist declaration that the State must go, Shaw not only asserts that we must put up with the State, but also expresses no doubt whatsoever that under Social-Democracy the few will still govern. It is a mark of Shaw's British practicality and clear-sightedness that he recognizes in the State a practical instrumentality for effecting and directing social reform. The State is indispensable as a means for making possible one great consummation: the development of the strong, sound, creative personality. The unsocial man he regards as a “hopelessly private person.” The opportunity for the free development of the individual he regards as the fundamental prerequisite and condition for the individual's social and material well-being.[91] “That great joint-stock company of the future, the Social-Democratic State, will have its chairman and directors as surely as its ships will have captains.” But this admission involves no endorsement, on Shaw's part, of the State as at present constituted, “Bakounine's comprehensive aspiration to destroy all States and Established Churches, with their religious, political, judicial, financial, criminal, academic, economic and social laws and institutions, seems to me perfectly justifiable and intelligible from the point of view of the ordinary 'educated man,' who believes that institutions make men instead of men making institutions.” The State, as at present constituted, Shaw views as simply a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving the poor by brute force. While he laughs at the Individualism expressed in Herbert Spencer's The Coming Slavery, at the Anarchy expressed in the word Liberty, and in those “silly words” of John Hay on the title-page of Benjamin Tucker's paper, Shaw is, nevertheless, both an individualist and an intellectual anarchist. The alleged opposition between Socialism and Individualism, Shaw has always strenuously maintained, is false and question-begging. “The true issue lies between Socialism and Unsocialism, and not between Socialism and that instinct in us that leads us to Socialism by its rebellion against the squalid levelling down, the brutal repression, the regimenting and drilling and conventionalizing of the great mass of us to-day, in order that a lucky handful may bore themselves to death for want of anything to do, and be afraid to walk down Bond Street without a regulation hat and coat on.” Like Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkin, Shaw sees the whole imposture through and through, “in spite of its familiarity, and of the illusions created by its temporal power, its riches, its splendour, its prestige, its intense respectability, its unremitting piety, and its high moral pretension.”

At bottom, it was a deeply religious, a fundamentally humanitarian motive, which drew Shaw into Socialism. The birth of the social passion in his soul finds its origin in the individual desire to compass the salvation of his fellow man. A burning sense of social injustice, a great passion for social reform, directed his steps. In his inmost being he felt his complicity in the social ills of the world. He realized that only by personally seeking to effect the salvation of society could he achieve the salvation of his own soul. The Will to Socialism was thus grounded in a profound individualism: he felt their organic connection. Socialism was the need of the age; and it could only be achieved through the freedom and development of the individual.

That other wit and paradoxer, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, told the very truth itself when he said that Bernard Shaw “has done something that has never been done in the world before. He has become a revolutionist without becoming a sentimentalist. He has revolted against the cant of authority, and yet continued in despising the cant of revolt.” To Shaw, the middle-class origin of the Socialist movement is in nothing so apparent as in the persistent delusions of Socialists as to an ideal proletariat, forced by the brutalities of the capitalist into an unwilling acquiescence in war, penal codes, and other cruelties of civilization. “They still see the social problem,” Shaw wittily remarks, “not sanely and objectively, but imaginatively, as the plot of a melodrama, with its villain and its heroine, its innocent beginning, troubled middle, and happy ending. They are still the children and the romancers of politics.”[92]

Shaw finds a sort of sly gratification in the reflection that the world is becoming so familiar with the Socialist, that it no longer fears, but only laughs at him. “I, the Socialist, am no longer a Red Spectre. I am only a ridiculous fellow. Good: I embrace the change. It puts the world with me.... All human progress involves, as its first condition, the willingness of the pioneer to make a fool of himself. The sensible man is the man who adapts himself to existing conditions. The fool is the man who persists in trying to adapt the conditions to himself. Both extremes have their disadvantages. I cling to my waning folly as a corrective to my waxing good sense as anxiously as I once nursed my good sense to defend myself against my folly.” Shaw is the very man of whom his own Don Juan said: “He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason.”

FOOTNOTES:

[66] Letter to Hamlin Garland, as Chairman of the Committee, the Progress and Poverty dinner, New York, January 24th, 1905. The letter, dated December, 1904, was kindly lent me by Mr. Henry George, Jr.

[67] In the early eighties the monthly magazine To-Day was purchased by three Socialists: Henry Hyde Champion, Percy Frost and James Leigh Joynes. Mr. Wicksteed's article, entitled Das Kapital: a Criticism, appeared in To-Day, New Series, Vol. II., pages 388-409, 1884; publishers, The Modern Press, a printing business conducted by Messrs. H. H. Champion and J. C. Foulger.

[68] This article appeared in To-Day, New Series, Vol. III., pages 22-26, 1885.

[69] The leading members of this club were Beeton, Wicksteed, Foxwell, Graham Wallas, F. Y. Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall, Edward Cunningham, Charles Wright and Armitage Smith. The club met monthly—from November to June—during the years 1884 to 1889 inclusive, when it came to an end through the formation of what was formally entitled The Economic Club, organized mainly at the instance of Alfred Marshall. It may be worthy of mention that Wicksteed dedicated his Alphabet of Economics to this club. Shaw joined the club because he wanted to learn abstract economics, and he occasionally contributed something to the programme himself. On November 9th, 1886, for example, he read a paper before the society on the subject of Interest.

[70] As late as 1905 Mr. E. Belfort Bax is found maintaining that Jevons was the mere tool of capitalism, seeking to undermine the Marxian theory of value in the interests of social order and political stability. Compare his article, Socialism and Bourgeois Culture, in Wilshire's Magazine, 1905.

[71] This Shaw achieved with great success in his review, in three parts, of Das Kapital, English translation, which appeared in the National Reformer.

[72] The National Reformer, now extinct, then the weekly organ of the National Secular Society, editors, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant; policy, Atheism, Malthusianism and Republicanism. These articles, three in number, under the general heading Karl Marx and 'Das Kapital,' appeared in Vol. I., pages 84-86, 106-108, 117, 118. On receiving a cheque for these articles at a rate which he felt sure the National Reformer could not afford, Shaw found that the beneficent Mrs. Besant had made a contribution from her private purse, which Shaw characteristically hurled back with indignant gratitude.

[73] These ideas seem to have found expression simultaneously in England and Austria. Compare The Theory of Political Economy, by W. S. Jevons, London, 1871; Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, by Anton Menger, Vienna, 1871.

[74] The question of the validity of the Marxian theory is not now a live subject in England. Mr. Hyndman's defence of the Marxian position is to be found in his Economics of Socialism, in which he attempts to demonstrate the “final futility of final utility.” It is still a mooted question on the Continent; compare, for example, the works of Böhm-Bawerk, perhaps the most eminent of the “Austrian School” of political economists.

[75] These conclusions were reached before the third volume of Capital appeared. The editor of the first volume, Mr. Frederick Engels, promised that the third volume, when it appeared, would reconcile these and other seeming contradictions. Marx does seem to have modified certain of his theories in the third volume.

[76] In the Pall Mall Gazette the following articles appeared: Marx and Modern Socialism, by Shaw, May 7th, 1887, page 3; Hyndman's reply, May 11th, page 11; Shaw's rejoinder—Socialists at Home (this heading doubtless a jibe of the editor), May 12th, page 11; Hyndman's rejoinder, May 16th, page 2; Mrs. Besant's article on the same subject, May 24th, page 2. In To-Day, Vol. XI., New Series, 1889, appeared: An Economic Eirenicon, by Graham Wallas, pages 80-86; Marx's Theory of Value, by Hyndman, same volume, pages 94-104; Shaw's reply, Bluffing the Value Theory, following Hyndman, May, 1889, pages 128-135, was lately reprinted by Eduard Bernstein in Sozialistische Monatshefte. Shaw's letter in Justice appeared on page 3 of the issue of July 20th, 1889. The fine essay, entitled The Illusions of Socialism, quite penetrating in its psychology, although caviare to the ordinary reviewer, originally appeared in German in Die Zeit (Vienna), in 1896: No. 108, October 24th, and No. 109, October 31st; later it appeared in English in Forecasts of the Coming Century, edited by Edward Carpenter, Manchester: Labour Press, 1897; it afterwards appeared in French in L'Humanité Nouvelle (Ghent and Paris), August, 1900, edited by Auguste Hamon, the well-known Socialist and the French translator of Shaw's plays.

[77] The Class War, in the Clarion, September 30th, 1904.

[78] Shaw's position in regard to the Class War is ably set forth in his three articles, under the general heading, The Class War, which appeared in the Clarion, London; dates: September 30th, October 21st and November 4th, 1904.

[79] In 1888 Shaw wrote two very clever articles, which so far seem to have escaped attention, although the disguise is so thin as to be negligible. These two articles are, respectively, My Friend Fitzthunder, the Unpractical Socialist, by Redbarn Wash—note the anagram—(To-Day, edited by Hubert Bland, August, 1888), and Fitzthunder on Himself—A Defence, by Robespierre Marat Fitzthunder (To-Day, September, 1888). These very amusing papers, both written by Shaw, it is needless to say, constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the unpractical and revolutionary Socialist; Fitzthunder is evidently a composite picture, made up from a number of Shaw's Socialist confrères.

[80] Fabian Tract, No. 45: The Impossibilities of Anarchism, a paper by Shaw, written in 1888, read to the Fabian Society on October 16th, 1891, and published by the Fabian Society, July, 1893.

[81] Compare the former chapter; complete details are to be found in Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 12-15.

[82] In the twenty-seventh Annual Report on the work of the Fabian Society (for the year ended March 31st, 1910), the membership is given as 2,627.

[83] Worthy of record in connection with the new policy of the Fabian Society, although discussion is outside the scope of this work, is the movement inaugurated by Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. A. R. Orage, afterwards joint-editors of the London Socialist organ, The New Age, in the foundation of the Leeds Art Club in 1905. “The object of the Leeds Art Club,” their syllabus read, “is to affirm the mutual dependence of art and ideas.” This movement, supported by a group of able lecturers, proved so successful and so stimulating as to eventuate in the formation of the Fabian Art Group (Bernard Shaw presiding over the initial meeting), the declared object of which is “to interpret the relation of Art and Philosophy to Socialism.” Admirable pamphlets and brochures have been published under its auspices; and its meetings, and the Fabian Summer School in Wales, have been addressed by many of the most brilliant and advanced thinkers in England.

[84] Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 15-16; date, 1892.

[85] The Fabian motto, suggested by Mr. Frank Podmore, runs: “For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain and fruitless.”

[86] This book has now gone into its seventieth thousand, and has been republished in both Germany and America. It is regarded to-day as the standard text in English for Socialist lecturers and propagandists.

[87] Compare Fabian Tract No. 70: Report on Fabian Policy, the bombshell thrown by the Fabian Society into the International Socialist Workers' and Trade Union Congress, 1896.

[88] Socialism and Republicanism, in the Saturday Review, November 17th, 1900.

[89] For highly appreciative summaries of The Common Sense of Municipal Trading (Archibald Constable and Co.), and of Shaw's article, Socialism for Millionaires (first published in the Contemporary Review of February, 1896, and afterwards, in 1901, as Fabian Tract No. 107), compare Mr. Holbrook Jackson's monograph, Bernard Shaw, pages 114-131.

[90] Fabian Economics, in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1894. Mr. Mallock purposed to show how the defenders of a broad and social Conservatism, as outlined by himself, “may be able, by a fuller understanding of it, to speak to the intellect, the heart, and the hopes of the people of this country (England), like the voice of a trumpet, in comparison with which the voice of Socialism will be merely a penny whistle.” Shaw delightfully termed his rejoinder, On Mr. Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance, which brought forth, in the same magazine, not one, but two rejoinders from Mr. Mallock. In 1909 an attack by Mr. Mallock on Mr. Keir Hardie in the Times provoked Shaw to a fierce onslaught on his old opponent, and the Fabian Society presently republished the correspondence and the old Fortnightly article under the title, Socialism and Superior Brains. The latter, in a shilling edition, is also published by A. C. Fifield, London, in the Fabian Socialist Series.

[91] In his analysis of the situation in his native land, he insisted that Home Rule was a necessity for Ireland, because the Irish would never be content, would never feel themselves free, until Home Rule was granted them. It was not a question of logic, but a question of natural right.

[92] Socialism at the International Congress, in Cosmopolis, September, 1896.

THE ART CRITIC

“Produce me your best critic, and I will criticize his head off.”—On Diabolonian Ethics. In Three Plays for Puritans. Preface, p. xxi.