In March, 1886, Shaw participated in a series of public debates held at South Place Institute, South Place, Finsbury, E.C. Here for the first time he tried his hand, in a fairly large hall, on an audience counted by hundreds instead of scores. “Socialism and Individualism” was the general title of this series of Sunday afternoon lectures.[57] This was a daring undertaking for Shaw, who had neither the experience nor the savoir faire of his colleagues. It was perhaps for this reason that he did not particularly distinguish himself, his opponent giving him as good as he sent. Mrs. Besant, a born orator, was interesting and eloquent, while Webb quite eclipsed Shaw, positively annihilating his adversary. One who knew him well at this initial stage, however, said that if Bernard Shaw knew nothing, he invented as he went along. The lightness of touch, the nimbleness of intellect, lacked complete development. At this time the clever young Irishman had neither memory enough for effective facts, nor presence of mind enough to be an easy winner in debate.
No one has yet measured the all-important influence Sidney Webb has exerted upon Shaw's career, dating from that memorable evening at the Zetetical Society when Shaw gazed in open-mouthed wonder at that miracle of effectiveness and model of self-possession. Shaw's admiration has waxed, not waned, with the passage of time. To-day he regards Webb as one of the most extraordinary and capable men alive. The critic who, in Disraelian phrase, regards Shaw as “one vast appropriation clause,” will find some support for this belief in Shaw's statement that the difference between Shaw with Webb's brains and knowledge at his disposal, and Shaw by himself, is enormous. “Nobody has as yet gauged it,” Mr. Shaw once said in a letter to me, “because as I am an incorrigible mountebank, and Webb is one of the simplest of geniuses, I have always been in the centre of the stage whilst Webb has been prompting me, invisible, from the side.” Shaw's faculties of acquisitiveness and appropriation are enormously developed, a fact once comically accentuated by him in the frank avowal he once made to me: “I am an expert picker of other men's brains, and I have been exceptionally fortunate in my friends.”
Program of Sunday Afternoon Lectures.
South Place Institute, South Place, Finsbury, E. C.
March, 1886.
It was not without severe training and incessant work that Shaw and his fellow Fabians acquired the equipment in the historic and economic weapons of Social Democracy, comparable to that which Ferdinand Lassalle in his day so defiantly flaunted in the faces of his adversaries. While Stead, Hyndman and Burns were organizing the unemployed agitation in the streets, the Fabians were diligently training themselves for public life. Frank Podmore, a Post Office civil servant, and Edward Reynolds Pease, present secretary of the Fabian Society, two original Fabians, were great friends, and the earliest Fabian meetings were held alternately at Pease's rooms in Osnaburgh Street, and at Podmore's, in Dean's Yard, Westminster.[58] Certain of the Fabians sadly felt the need of solid information and training, in addition to that afforded by the meetings of the society. Thrown upon their individual resources, those most scholarly inclined of the Fabians, a veritable handful, founded the Hampstead Historic Club. First established as a sort of mutual improvement society for those ambitious Fabians wishing to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest Marx and Proudhon, this club was afterwards turned into a systematic history class, in which each student took his turn at being professor. Thus they taught each other what they themselves wished to learn, acquiring the most thorough and minute knowledge of the subject under discussion. In these days Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas were the bravoes of advanced economics—the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan. As Olivier and Wallas were men of very exceptional character and attainments, Shaw was enabled, as he once expressed it in my presence, to work with a four-man-power equal to a four-hundred-ordinary-man-power, which made his feuilletons and other literary performances “quite unlike anything that the ordinary hermit-crab could produce.” Mr. Shaw thus explained very quaintly the secret of his success at this period. “In fact the brilliant, extraordinary Shaw was brilliant and extraordinary; but then I had an incomparable threshing machine for my ideas—a machine which contributed heaps of ideas to my little store; and when I seemed most original and fantastic, I was often simply an amanuensis with a rather exceptional literary knack, cultivated by dogged practice.” And of his three warm friends he freely confessed: “They knocked a tremendous lot of nonsense, ignorance and vulgarity out of me, for we were on quite ruthless terms with one another.”
Another associate, one of the Fabian essayists and now a journalist, Hubert Bland, was—and is still—of great value to Shaw and his colleagues, by reason of his strong individuality and hard common sense, and on account of the fact that his views ran counter to Webb's on many lines. Bland lived at Blackheath, on the south side of the river, at this time; and his wife, the very clever woman and distinguished author, “E. Nesbit,” was a remarkable figure at the Fabian meetings during the first seven or eight years of its existence. During the era of the Hampstead Historic Club, Bland had a circle of his own at Blackheath; and although Hampstead, lying north of London, was quite out of Bland's district, Shaw and his friends used sometimes to descend on his evening parties. Bland had an utter contempt for the Bohemianism of Shaw and his companions, evincing it by wearing invariably an irreproachable frock-coat, tall hat, and a single eyeglass which infuriated everybody. Mrs. Bland graciously humoured the reckless Bohemianism of the insouciant Fabians, and on one memorable occasion stopped them at her door, went for needle and thread, and—perhaps with a faint hope of preserving the haut ton of her social evening—then and there sewed up the sleeve of Sidney Olivier's brown velveteen jacket. A dernier ressort, for the sleeve was all but torn out! There was some compensation in the fact that, even then, Olivier fully looked the dignified part he was one day to fill. But it is not easy to doubt that the arrant Bohemianism of the luckless Fabians, their reckless disregard of evening dress, must have been very trying to the decorum of Blackheath.
Of fierce Norman exterior and great physical strength, Bland dominated others by force of sheer size. Pugnacious, powerful, a skilled pugilist, and with a voice which Mr. Shaw once accurately described as being exactly “like the scream of an eagle,” he made such a formidable antagonist that no one dared be uncivil to him. Just as William Clarke always combated and consequently stimulated Shaw by a diametrically opposite point of view, so Bland exerted a like influence upon Sidney Webb, and indirectly upon Shaw. Strongly Conservative and Imperialist by temperament, Bland stood in sharp contrast to the Millite, Benthamite recruits of the Fabian Society. There were many other clever fellows, many other good friends in Shaw's circle at this time; but through circumstances of time, place and marriage—the changes and chances of this mortal life—they could not be in such close touch with Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas as were these four with one another.
It is not, of course, to be supposed that Shaw was merely the recipient, like Molière always taking his material where he found it. In his own peculiar and, at times, vastly irritating way, he made his personality strongly felt, exerting great influence by sheer force of a sort of perverse common sense. To employ Poe's apt descriptive, he was the Imp of the Perverse made flesh. In the circle of the Fabians there was room for considerable strife of temperaments, and in the other Socialist societies, quarrels and splits and schisms were rather frequent. Unquestionably Shaw's quintessential service to the Fabians lay in his pioneering ideas and his knack of drafting things in literary form and arranging his colleagues' ideas for them with Irish lucidity. A somewhat less conspicuous, yet little less important, service consisted in clearing the atmosphere, in easing off the personal friction which not infrequently produced smoke and at times threatened to kindle a conflagration. This personal friction Shaw managed to eliminate in a most characteristic way: by a sort of tact which superficially looked like the most outrageous want of it. Whenever there was a grievance, instead of trying to patch matters up, Shaw would deliberately betray everybody's confidence after the fashion of Sidney Trefusis, by stating it before the whole set in the most monstrously exaggerated terms. What would have been the result among acquaintances less closely linked by ties of personal friendship it is easy to imagine. The usual result, however, of Shaw's hazardous and tactless outspokenness was that everybody repudiated his monstrous exaggerations, and whatever of grievance there was in the matter was fully explained. Of course, Shaw was first denounced as a reckless mischief-maker, and afterwards forgiven as a privileged lunatic.
Once every fortnight, for a number of years, Shaw attended the meetings of the Hampstead Historic Club; and in the alternate weeks he spent a night at a private circle of economists which subsequently developed into The Royal Economic Society. Fabian, and especially Shavian, Socialism is strictly economic in character, a circumstance due in no small measure to the fact that in this circle of economists the social question was left out and the work kept on abstract economic lines. In speaking of this period, Shaw afterwards confessed:
“I made all my acquaintances think me madder than usual by the pertinacity with which I attended debating societies and haunted all sorts of hole-and-corner debates and public meetings and made speeches at them. I was President of the Local Government Board at an amateur Parliament where a Fabian ministry had to put its proposals into black-and-white in the shape of Parliamentary Bills. Every Sunday I lectured on some subject I wanted to teach to myself; and it was not until I had come to the point of being able to deliver separate lectures, without notes, on Rent, Interest, Profits, Wages, Toryism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Trade-Unionism, Co-operation, Democracy, the Division of Society into Classes, and the Suitability of Human Nature to Systems of Trust Distribution, that I was able to handle Social Democracy as it must be handled before it can be preached in such a way as to present it to every sort of man from his own particular point of view. In old lecture lists of the Society you will find my name down for twelve different lectures or so. Nowadays (1892), I have only one, for which the secretary is good enough to invent four or five different names.”[59]