That other wit and paradoxer, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, told the very truth itself when he said that Bernard Shaw “has done something that has never been done in the world before. He has become a revolutionist without becoming a sentimentalist. He has revolted against the cant of authority, and yet continued in despising the cant of revolt.” To Shaw, the middle-class origin of the Socialist movement is in nothing so apparent as in the persistent delusions of Socialists as to an ideal proletariat, forced by the brutalities of the capitalist into an unwilling acquiescence in war, penal codes, and other cruelties of civilization. “They still see the social problem,” Shaw wittily remarks, “not sanely and objectively, but imaginatively, as the plot of a melodrama, with its villain and its heroine, its innocent beginning, troubled middle, and happy ending. They are still the children and the romancers of politics.”[92]
Shaw finds a sort of sly gratification in the reflection that the world is becoming so familiar with the Socialist, that it no longer fears, but only laughs at him. “I, the Socialist, am no longer a Red Spectre. I am only a ridiculous fellow. Good: I embrace the change. It puts the world with me.... All human progress involves, as its first condition, the willingness of the pioneer to make a fool of himself. The sensible man is the man who adapts himself to existing conditions. The fool is the man who persists in trying to adapt the conditions to himself. Both extremes have their disadvantages. I cling to my waning folly as a corrective to my waxing good sense as anxiously as I once nursed my good sense to defend myself against my folly.” Shaw is the very man of whom his own Don Juan said: “He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason.”
FOOTNOTES:
[66] Letter to Hamlin Garland, as Chairman of the Committee, the Progress and Poverty dinner, New York, January 24th, 1905. The letter, dated December, 1904, was kindly lent me by Mr. Henry George, Jr.
[67] In the early eighties the monthly magazine To-Day was purchased by three Socialists: Henry Hyde Champion, Percy Frost and James Leigh Joynes. Mr. Wicksteed's article, entitled Das Kapital: a Criticism, appeared in To-Day, New Series, Vol. II., pages 388-409, 1884; publishers, The Modern Press, a printing business conducted by Messrs. H. H. Champion and J. C. Foulger.
[68] This article appeared in To-Day, New Series, Vol. III., pages 22-26, 1885.
[69] The leading members of this club were Beeton, Wicksteed, Foxwell, Graham Wallas, F. Y. Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall, Edward Cunningham, Charles Wright and Armitage Smith. The club met monthly—from November to June—during the years 1884 to 1889 inclusive, when it came to an end through the formation of what was formally entitled The Economic Club, organized mainly at the instance of Alfred Marshall. It may be worthy of mention that Wicksteed dedicated his Alphabet of Economics to this club. Shaw joined the club because he wanted to learn abstract economics, and he occasionally contributed something to the programme himself. On November 9th, 1886, for example, he read a paper before the society on the subject of Interest.
[70] As late as 1905 Mr. E. Belfort Bax is found maintaining that Jevons was the mere tool of capitalism, seeking to undermine the Marxian theory of value in the interests of social order and political stability. Compare his article, Socialism and Bourgeois Culture, in Wilshire's Magazine, 1905.
[71] This Shaw achieved with great success in his review, in three parts, of Das Kapital, English translation, which appeared in the National Reformer.
[72] The National Reformer, now extinct, then the weekly organ of the National Secular Society, editors, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant; policy, Atheism, Malthusianism and Republicanism. These articles, three in number, under the general heading Karl Marx and 'Das Kapital,' appeared in Vol. I., pages 84-86, 106-108, 117, 118. On receiving a cheque for these articles at a rate which he felt sure the National Reformer could not afford, Shaw found that the beneficent Mrs. Besant had made a contribution from her private purse, which Shaw characteristically hurled back with indignant gratitude.