[63] In a long contemporary account of the debate, a French newspaper commented approvingly on the high tone maintained throughout, placing the English in sharp contrast with French debates on similar subjects, which were not regarded as unqualified successes unless they broke up in personal encounters, with the attendant imprecations: “Assassins! A bas les Socialistes! A la lanterne!”
[64] The Legal Eight Hours Question. A two-nights' public debate between Mr. G. W. Foote and Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Verbatim Report. London: R. Forder, 28, Stonecutter Street, E.C. 1891.
[65] Who I Am, and What I Think. Part I. The Candid Friend, May 11th, 1901.
SHAVIAN SOCIALISM
“Of course, people talk vaguely of me as an Anarchist, a visionary, and a crank. I am none of these things, but their opposites. I only want a few perfectly practical reforms which shall enable a decent and reasonable man to live a decent and reasonable life, without having to submit to the great injustices and the petty annoyances which meet you now at every turn.”—George Bernard Shaw: an Interview. In The Chap-Book, November, 1896.
“Economy is the art of making the most of life.
The love of economy is the root of all virtue.”
—The Revolutionist's Handbook. In Man and Superman.
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”?