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.'”