While Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and their school left a distinct impress upon Shaw's mind, it is nevertheless true that he never became a Darwinian. To-day he is violently opposed to Darwinian materialism; and yet the Shavian philosophy, historically considered, is a natural consequence of that bitter fight against convention, custom, authority, and orthodoxy, inaugurated by Darwin and his followers. But Shaw's sociologic doctrine is a distillation, not of the Descent of Man or of the Data of Ethics, but of Das Kapital. At this crucial period in Shaw's career he was exactly in the mood for Marx's reduction of all the conflicts to the conflict of classes for economic mastery, of all social forms to the economic forms of production and exchange. The real secret of Marx's fascination for him, as he once said, was “his appeal to an unnamed, unrecognized passion—a new passion—the passion of hatred in the more generous souls among the respectable and educated sections for the accursed middle-class institutions that had starved, thwarted, misled, and corrupted them from their cradles.” In Marx, Shaw found a kindred spirit; for, like Marx, his whole life had bred in him a defiance of middle-class respectability, of revolt against its benumbing and paralyzing influence. As Shaw once said:
“Marx's 'Capital' is not a treatise on Socialism; it is a jeremiad against the bourgeoisie, supported by such a mass of evidence and such a relentless genius for denunciation as had never been brought to bear before. It was supposed to be written for the working classes; but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeois; Marx never got hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself—Lassalle, Marx, Liebknecht, Morris, Hyndman, Bax, all, like myself, bourgeois crossed with squirearchy—that painted the flag red. Bakunin and Kropotkin, of the military and noble caste (like Napoleon), were our extreme left. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society; the proletariat is the conservative element, as Disraeli well knew.”[40]
Some such Marxist passion, one surmises, subsequently carried weight with Shaw in influencing his choice of the Fabian Society as the fit milieu for the development and exploitation of his energy and talent. For at heart Shaw is what his plays so abundantly prove him—the revolted bourgeois.
Not only did Marx's jeremiad against the bourgeoisie awaken instant response in Shaw: it changed the whole tenor of his life. No single book—not the Bible of orthodoxy and respectability, certainly—has influenced Shaw so much as the “bible of the working classes.” It made him a Socialist. Although he has since repudiated some of the fundamental economic theories of Marx, at this time he found in Das Kapital the concrete expression of all those social convictions, grievances and wrongs which seethed in the crater of his being. He became that most determined, most resistless, and often most dangerous of men to deal with, a man with a mission. “From that hour,” I once heard Mr. Shaw say, “I became a man with some business in the world.”
During the years 1883 and 1884 Shaw threw himself heart and soul into the exciting task of Socialist agitation and propagandism. His dogged practice in public speaking now began to demonstrate its value with telling effect. While he spent his days in criticizing books in the Pall Mall Gazette and pictures in the World, he devoted his evenings to consistent and strenuous Socialist propagandism. He accepted invitations to address all sorts of bodies on every day in the week, Sunday not excepted. Remember his confession that he first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands. During these years, also, he was coming into close touch with the younger generation destined soon to unite in a solid phalanx as the Fabian Society. Probably no living man has touched modern life at so many points as has Bernard Shaw. In his lifetime he has traversed a very lengthy arc on the circle of modern culture, modern thought and modern philosophy. Sovereign contempt for the laggard is one of his prominent characteristics; he himself has ever been an “outpost thinker” on the firing-line of modern intellectual conflict. Essentially significant because essentially modern, Shaw owes no small share of his ability, his versatility, and his breadth of interests to his voraciously acquisitive, acutely inquisitive intellect. Clever acquaintances, brimming with ideas, and overflowing with combative zeal, furnished grist for the ceaselessly active mill of Shaw's intelligence. No biography which failed to trace the shaping influence exerted upon Shaw's frantically complex career by such men as Hubert Bland, Graham Wallas, Sidney Olivier, Sidney Webb and William Morris, could lay just claim to the title of genuine natural history.
At the Land Reform Union Shaw first met Sidney Olivier, then upper division clerk in the Colonial Office. Sidney Webb and Sidney Olivier, very close friends, were the two resident clerks there. When Webb, at Shaw's persuasion, joined the Fabians, Olivier went with him. There existed a very close relation, not only between the various members of the Fabian Society, but also between many of the advanced societies which came to life at this time. For example, Sidney Olivier, who was secretary of the Fabian Society for several years, and Edward Carpenter's brother, Captain Alfred Carpenter, of the Royal Navy, married sisters; in this way there was a sort of family connection between the Socialist and Humanitarian movements. Olivier had made friends at Oxford with Graham Wallas, who was probably influenced through this connection to become a Fabian. The very intimate relation existing between Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas, and the consequent marked influence upon Shaw's literary career and performance, will be spoken of elsewhere at greater length. It is noteworthy that all of these men possessed literary talents of no mean order. Webb's books have a world-wide reputation. Olivier's play, Mrs. Maxwell's Marriage, has been performed by the London Stage Society; and his literary talent has displayed itself, not only in plays, but also in verse, essay and story.[41] In addition to his ability as a facile public speaker, Graham Wallas also possessed literary talent of no mean order, displayed to best advantage in his book on Francis Place, with its lucid exposition of the way in which politics are “wire-pulled” in England by real reformers.[42]
Another man of talent, whose very opposition of belief and view-point exerted a sort of stimulating influence upon Shaw, was William Clarke, an Oxford M.A., who contributed the chapter on The Industrial Basis of Socialism to Fabian Essays. A Whitmanite, with strong feelings of rationalist type, allied in spirit to Martineau, the Unitarians, and their logical outgrowth, the American Ethical Society, Clarke made upon Shaw an ineffaceable impression. Shaw first met this remarkable man at the Bedford Society—a meeting which bore fruit in Clarke's joining the Fabian Society. Clarke had lectured in America, known Whitman, and is remembered as the author of several books. Although a successful lecturer, he had by this time exhausted the interest of lecturing, being much older than the other Fabians. A very unlucky man, he was, in consequence, very poor. It has been often said that in the matter of philanthropy Shaw never let his right hand know what his left was doing; he found a way to relieve Clarke's poverty without even letting Clarke, who quarrelled with everything and everybody, suspect that he was the recipient of benefaction. When the Daily Chronicle changed its policy and decided to give a column in its pages to Labour, its concerns and interests, the editor, in his search for young blood, hit upon Shaw, who quietly substituted Clarke in his place. Had Clarke ever discovered the truth it might have mitigated the profound moral horror of Shaw he always entertained. How Shaw must have chuckled over the latent comedy! The secret philanthropist regarded as a moral anarchist, a monstrum horrendum, by his highly moral beneficiary! To Clarke, an altruist and moralist to the backbone, the dawning of Ibsenism, of Nietzscheism, of Shavianism, seemed to be the coming of chaos. “Yet the fact that I knew his value and insisted on it, and that I could sympathize even with his horror of me,” Mr. Shaw once told me, “kept our personal relations remorsefully cordial. The last time I called on him was in the influenza period. He was working madly, as usual. He would have certainly refused to see anyone; but he was alone in the flat, and opened the door for me. With a savage, set face that would have made even Ibsen's mouth look soft by contrast, he said, through his shut teeth: 'I can give you five minutes and that is all.' 'My dear Clarke,' I replied, ambling idly into his study, 'I must leave in half an hour to keep an appointment; and I have just been thinking how I am to get away from you so soon; for I know you won't let me go.' And it turned out exactly as I said. We began to discuss the Parnell divorce case and the Irish crisis, and I could not get away from him until the hour was nearly doubled.”[43]
The part which the Fabian Society has played in English life, and the share of Bernard Shaw in the task of advancing the principles of Collectivism in the last twenty odd years, alone offer ample material for a book. So diverse in its ramifications is the subject, that it will be possible here to trace the evolutionary advance of Socialism in England only in so far as it directly bears upon Shaw's career.[44] As we know, Shaw began his real education as a pupil of Mill, Comte, Darwin and Spencer. Converted to Socialism by Henry George and his Progress and Poverty, Shaw took to insurrectionary economics after reading Das Kapital. Marx's book won his support because it so fiercely “convicted private property of wholesale spoliation, murder and compulsory prostitution; of plague, pestilence and famine; battle, murder and sudden death.” For some time before joining any Socialist society, Shaw preached Socialism with the utmost zeal and enthusiasm. The choice of a society lay between the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League—both quite proletarian in their rank and file, both aiming at being large working-class organizations—and the Fabian Society, which was middle-class through and through. “When I myself, on the point of joining the Social Democratic Federation, changed my mind and joined the Fabian instead,” Shaw once wrote, “I was guided by no discoverable difference in programme or principle, but solely by an instinctive feeling that the Fabian, and not the Federation, would attract the men of my own bias and intellectual habits, who were then ripening for the work that lay before us.”
Facsimile of Cover of Fabian Tract, No. 2.