Shaw addressing the dockyard men outside dockyard gate on behalf of Alderman Sanders.
G. B. S. is annoyed with the interrupter, but is ready with an instant retort.
Courtesy of Stephen Cribb, Southsec.
With his long, loose form, his baggy and rather bizarre clothes, his nonchalant, quizzical, extemporaneous appearance; with his red hair and scraggly beard, his pallid face, his bleak smile, his searching eyes flashing from under his crooked brows; with his general air of assurance, privilege and impudence—Bernard Shaw is the jester at the court of King Demos. Startling, astounding, irrepressible, he fights for opposition, clamours for denial, demands suppression. Shaw was once completely floored by a workman, who rose after he had completed a magnificent pyrotechnic display, and said: “I know quite well that Bernard Shaw is very clever at argument, and that when I sit down he will make mincemeat of everything I say. But what does that matter to me? I still have my principles.” Shaw had to admit, as he once told me in speaking of the incident, that this was unanswerable and thoroughly sound at bottom. “Call me disagreeable, only call me something,” clamours Shaw; “for then I have roused you from your stupid torpor and made you think a new thought.” The incarnation of intellect, not of hypnotism, of reason, not of oratory, this strange image of Tolstoy as he was in his middle years has always made his audience think new thoughts. He has never given the audience what it liked; he has always given it what he liked, and what he thought it needed: a bitter and tonic draught. The successes of the orator who is the mere mouthpiece of his audience have never been his. But he has achieved a more enviable and more arduous distinction; I have heard him say with genuine pride that more than once he has been the most unpopular man in a meeting, and yet carried a resolution against the most popular orator present by driving home its necessity. For the transports which the popular orator raises by voicing popular sentiment Shaw has no use. Of the orator's power of entrancing people and having his own way at the same time he has never had a trace. He is the arch-foe of personal hypnotism, of romance, of sensuous glamour. He has sought the accomplishment of the demand of his will; he never practised speaking as an art or an accomplishment. The desire for that, he once told me, would never have nerved him to utter a word in public. Just as Zola used his journalistic work as a hammer to drive his views into the brain of the public, Shaw used his dialectical skill as a weapon, as a means to the end of making people think. One might truly say of all the things that he has either spoken or written: “Ils donnent à penser furieusement.” As a speaker, he first startled and provoked his audience to thought, and then annihilated their objections with the sword of logic and the rapier of wit. His ready answer for every searching query, his instantaneous leap over every tripping barrier, seemed to the novice a proof of very genius. To strange audiences, his readiness in answering questions and meeting hostile arguments seemed astonishing, miraculous. On several different occasions I have heard Mr. Shaw modestly give the explanation of this apparently magic performance. “The reason was that everybody asks the same questions and uses the same arguments. I knew the most effective replies by heart. Before the questioner or debater had uttered his first word I knew exactly what he was going to say, and floored him with an apparent impromptu that had done duty fifty times before.” Shaw always carefully thought out the thing for himself in advance, and, which is far more important, had thought out not only an effective, but also a witty answer to the objections that were certain to be raised. This is the secret of Shaw's success in every task which he has undertaken: to think each thing out for himself, and to couch it in terms of scathing satire and fiery wit. His is the sceptical Socratic method pushed to the limit.
Confronted with the point-blank question: “To what do you owe your marvellous gift for public speaking?” Shaw characteristically replied: “My marvellous gift for public speaking is only part of the G. B. S. legend. I am no orator, and I have neither memory enough nor presence of mind enough to be a really good debater, though I often seem to be when I am on ground that is familiar to me and new to my opponents. I learned to speak as men learn to skate or to cycle—by doggedly making a fool of myself until I got used to it. Then I practised it in the open air—at the street corner, in the market square, in the park—the best school. I am comparatively out of practice now, but I talked a good deal to audiences all through the eighties, and for some years afterwards. I should be a really remarkable orator after all that practice if I had the genius of the born orator. As it is, I am simply the sort of public speaker anybody can become by going through the same mill. I don't mean that he will have the same things to say, or that he will put them in the same words, for, naturally, I don't leave my ideas or my vocabulary behind when I mount the tub; but I do mean that he will say what he has to say as movingly as I say what I have to say—and more, if he is anything of a real orator. Of course, as an Irishman, I have some fluency, and can manage a bit of rhetoric and a bit of humour on occasion, and that goes a long way in England. But 'marvellous gift' is all my eye.”[65]
FOOTNOTES:
[57] On March 6th, Mrs. Annie Besant (Fabian Society) spoke versus Mr. Corrie Grant, subject: “That the existence of classes who live upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the community, and ought to be put an end to by legislation.” On March 13th, Mr. G. B. Shaw (Fabian Society) versus Rev. F. W. Ford, subject: “That the welfare of the community necessitates the transfer of the land and existing capital of the country from private owners to the State.” On March 20th, Mr. Sidney Webb (Fabian Society) versus Dr. T. B. Napier, subject: “That the main principles of Socialism are founded on, and in accordance with, modern economic science.” On March 27th, Mr. H. H. Champion versus Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe (Liberty and Property Defence League), subject: “That State interference with, and control of, industry is inevitable, and will be advantageous to the community.”
[58] At this time, it is interesting to recall, Pease and Podmore were deeply interested in the Psychical Research Society, which had its office in the Dean's Yard rooms. In this way the Fabians, Shaw in particular, were brought in close touch with the exploits of this society at its most exciting period, when Madame Blavatsky was exposed by the American, R. Hodgson. Compare, for example, Shaw's two book-reviews in the Pall Mall Gazette: A Scotland Yard for Spectres, being a notice of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (January 23d, 1886), and A Life of Madame Blavatsky (January 6th, 1887). On one eventful evening Shaw attended a Fabian meeting, then went on to hear the end of a Psychical Research séance, and ended by sleeping in a haunted house with a committee of ghost-hunters. Picture, if you can, Shaw's deep mortification, his intense disgust over having a nightmare on that night of all nights, and waking up in a corner of the room struggling desperately with the ghost.
[59] Tract No. 41, The Fabian Society: Its Early History, by G. Bernard Shaw.
[60] The Gonner here referred to is E. C. K. Gonner, M.A., now Brunner Professor of Economic Science at the University College, Liverpool.
[61] While Shaw has stated publicly numbers of times that he was an atheist, an explanation here is necessary. Shaw has always had a strong sense of spiritual things; his declarations of atheism should always be taken with the context. “If this be religion,” he has virtually said in reply to someone's exposition of religion, “then I am an atheist.” In the case of Shelley, it is perfectly plain that Shaw meant that he was all these things—a Socialist, an atheist and a vegetarian—in the Shelleyan sense.
[62] “Take the amusing, cynical, remarkable George Bernard Shaw, whose Irish humour and brilliant gifts have partly helped, partly hindered the (Fabian) Society's popularity. This man will rise from an elaborate criticism of last night's opera or Richter concert (he is the musical critic of the World), and after a light, purely vegetarian meal, will go down to some far-off club in South London or to some street corner in East London, or to some recognized place of meeting in one of the parks, and will there speak to poor men about their economic position and their political duties.”—William Clarke, in The Fabian Society and Its Work. Preface to Fabian Essays. Ball Publishing Co., Boston, 1908.