I was a man with some business in the world... my main business was Socialism.
Shaw to Archibald Henderson (3 January 1905)
The London in which Shaw had been living was like a City of Revelation. From anarchists and atheists; dress- and diet-reformers; from economists, feminists, philanthropists, was the socialist revival of the late nineteenth century to be drawn. This was the last age of the religious and political tract. One, by a clergyman of the Established Church, proved that Jehovah was a small red venomous snake; a second, by a German, replaced this snake with a fish; yet a third, by a Methodist professor, abolished both snake and fish, explaining that Jehovah was a widower. Such scholarly confusion was intensified by the crumbling of known structures. Science, like a great steam engine, having crashed through the infallibility of the Bible, was being garlanded with the dogmas and symbols of mythology and made the Idol of a new religion.
A fresh urgency entered the progressive movement. New clubs and societies sprang up in London, catering for all talents and temperaments. Many working-class socialists joined the street parades of the Social Democratic Federation; anarchical socialists with a taste for sexual radicalism were attracted to the glamorous Socialist League; while the Fabian Society was filled by middle-class intellectuals who wanted to rewrite the economy and rearrange the social patterns of the country without a shot fired. All were agreed that there was a crisis in the land. Thirty per cent of the population of London – the richest city in the world – were living in poverty. Such was the magnitude of capitalism’s failure.
Shaw felt relief at entering this turmoil. His personal need coincided with the need of the age. The ‘power to stand alone’, which Smith had acquired in Immaturity, ‘at the expense of much sorrowful solitude’, was no longer necessary. G.B.S. stood shoulder to shoulder.
The man who, in 1885, could admit that ‘I hate all fraternity mongering just as heartily as any other variety of cant’ and go on to declare himself the ‘member of an individualist state, and therefore nobody’s comrade’, had decided at the beginning of 1887 that ‘it is time for us to abandon the principle of Individualism, and to substitute that of Socialism, on pain of national decay’. By 1891 he had reconciled his instinct with his practice by discovering that ‘the way to Communism lies through the most resolute and uncompromising Individualism’ – ‘pragmatic’ individualism, but not laissez-faire ‘economic’ individualism. So he could still reassure a friend: ‘Believe me, I always was, & am, an intense Individualist.’
His first manoeuvres towards shedding his neglected self aimed at replacing his family with a community of his own choosing. ‘I haunted public meetings,’ he remembered, ‘like an officer afflicted with cowardice, who takes every opportunity of going under fire.’ Towards the end of 1880 he had joined the Zetetical Society, which met weekly in the rooms of the Women’s Protective & Provident League in Long Acre. Though ‘nervous & self-conscious to a heartbreaking degree... I could not hold my tongue. I started up and said something in the debate, and then felt that I had made such a fool of myself... I vowed I would... become a speaker or perish in the attempt... I suffered agonies that no one suspected... my heart used to beat as painfully as a recruit’s, going under fire for the first time. I could not use notes: when I looked at the paper in my hand I could not collect myself enough to decipher a word.’
The Zetetical Society was a junior copy of the London Dialectical Society which Shaw joined in 1881, reading his first paper there (on the virtues of Capital Punishment over Life Imprisonment) early the following year. Women took an important part in the debates of both societies and helped to insist upon uncensored speech. From the practice of examining each speaker with questions at the conclusion of his paper (heckling was also part of the menu), Shaw began to sense his formidable debating powers.
He also experimented with some literary groups, passing calm evenings with the New Shakespere Society, and more breezy ones with the Browning Society. In 1886 he acted as press officer for the Shelley Society’s private production of The Cenci. This five-act blank-verse tragedy was, Shaw wrote, ‘a strenuous but futile and never-to-be-repeated attempt to bottle the new wine in the old skins’.
He was surprised to find that the Shelley Society presented the poet ‘as a Church of England country gentleman whose pastime was writing sermons in verse’. When he announced to the Society that ‘I am a Socialist, an Atheist and a Vegetarian’, two members resigned. Having begun to submerge his self-consciousness into a social conscience, he wanted, like Shelley, to pierce the illusions that made the present order seem eternal, and show the world its future. He wanted ‘a cause and a creed to live for’.
He found them on the evening of 5 September 1882 at the non-conformist Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street where the American economist, Henry George, was speaking on Land Nationalization. George spoke with an appealing American intonation. He was simple, he was sentimental; and, like the best avant-garde Americans, he was fifty years behind the times in most of Europe. But he gave to politics the powerful orchestration of religion.
George’s Progress and Poverty, which Shaw bought that evening for sixpence, offered an explanation as to why increasing economic progress brought increasing poverty. The ownership of land had always been a precondition of power in Britain. These few landowners monopolized the birthright of the people, but the nationalization of this land would give the people back their birthright.
For the first time it flashed on Shaw that all this controversy between Science and Religion, Darwin and the Bible, was barren ground. ‘The importance of the economic basis dawned on me.’ George’s book helped Shaw come to terms with his own past. He had been betrayed into his one exhibition of feeling (seizing and kissing his mother’s hand) over the possession of Torca Cottage – and that had led to disillusion. Now he could find an impersonal reason, bleached of grievance, for his loveless home and miserable years in the estate office of Uniacke Townshend. All had been part of an inhumane system of property-owning.
Henry George was to reduce Land Nationalization to a single tax on land – a casting back to the impôt unique of Honoré Mirabeau. His Single Tax was a stepping stone to socialism, and socialists stepping over it did not take it with them. They were converted by George, but not to him. Shaw, who played Voltaire to George’s Mirabeau, had no sooner read Progress and Poverty than he went on to Karl Marx, and finally ‘devoted about four years to the study of abstract economics so as to get my foundations sound for my work as a socialist in devising practicable methods of industrial and political reconstruction’.
He spoke at clubs; he read in the British Museum. He searched among new organizations for a political headquarters. He tried out his voice at the Bedford Debating Society organized by an Irish Unitarian preacher, Stopford Brooke (on whom Shaw partly modelled the Reverend James Morrell in Candida); he joined two discussion groups in Hampstead, and he went to meetings of the Democratic Federation, the first political organization of socialists in Britain.
The Federation was led by H. M. Hyndman who saw himself, in his immaculate frock-coat, fine gloves and silk hat, leading his rough proletarian army to a revolutionary dawn. But it was ballet rather than revolution. His drilling of the unemployed and parading of the working class in the streets appeared to be rehearsals for the Apocalypse which was fixed for 1889, the anniversary of the French Revolution. With his high-chested carriage, he already looked like a prime minister. Hyndman had known Marx and, when leaving his house one day, put on his hat by mistake and found that it fitted. In 1881 he had published a book, England for All, that, while introducing Marxist doctrines to English readers, did so without mentioning Marx’s name – except (a point that failed to satisfy Marx) in a Preface. But it was Hyndman’s connection with Henry George that had attracted Shaw to what became known as the Social Democratic Federation. At his first meeting, he mentioned George and was told to go off and read Marx. There was no English version available so he studied the first volume of Das Kapital in Deville’s French translation, working during the autumn of 1883 at the British Museum. ‘That was the turning point in my career,’ he told Hesketh Pearson. ‘Marx was a revelation... He opened my eyes to the facts of history and civilization, gave me an entirely fresh conception of the universe, provided me with a purpose and a mission in life.’ Das Kapital, he wrote, ‘achieved the greatest feat of which a book is capable – that of changing the minds of the people who read it’.
But when, brimming with Marxism, he returned to the SDF, he found that Hyndman’s lieutenants had not read him themselves. He was now a ‘candidate member’ of the SDF, but for two reasons decided not to join. The first was Hyndman’s own incapacity for teamwork. His famous temper was responsible for driving away many socialists – Edward Aveling, Belfort Bax, Walter Crane, Eleanor Marx and William Morris, who formed themselves into an anti-parliamentary group called the Socialist League, soon to be infiltrated by the anarchists.
But there was a second reason why Shaw turned his back on Hyndman. ‘I wanted to work with men of my own mental training.’ It was then that he came across the first tract, Why are the Many Poor?, of the newly formed Fabian Society. Here was an educated body appealing to the middle-class intelligentsia: ‘my own class in fact.’ From this tract he discovered the Society’s address and on 16 May 1884 turned up for its next meeting.
*
The nominal founder of the Fabian Society had been Thomas Davidson, the illegitimate son of a Scottish shepherd. Davidson was an inspired talker and very strong on immortality. In 1881 he had blazed through London, inflaming miscellaneous agitators and idealists with what William James called his ‘inward glory’. On his next visit two years later some of these acolytes formed ‘a sort of club’. Members were of two conditions: those whose impulse was primarily religious; and others, more politically minded, who wished to reconstruct society. Soon the club split up into two branches – ‘The Fellowship of the New Life’ attracting the former and the Fabian Society the socialists.
‘What does the name mean? Why Fabian?’ asked Edward Pease, the first secretary of the Society. The Fabian Society’s motto was printed as an epigraph to the Fabian Tract that Shaw read in the spring of 1884.
‘For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did, most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be vain and fruitless.’
When critics asked the name of the history from which this quotation came, Pease answered gleefully that the work of the Fabian Society was not to repeat history, but to make it. Since the instincts of the early Fabians were literary as well as political, their business – chiefly under Shaw’s influence – was to alter history by rewriting it.
The Minutes of the meeting of 16 May had a famous mauve-ink side-note in unmistakably Shavian hand and style – the careful signature with its incongruous flourish of defiance: ‘This meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Bernard Shaw.’ On 5 September he formally enrolled and before the end of the year had published an unsigned two-page leaflet entitled A Manifesto, listed as Fabian Tract No. 2. Never again was Shaw so succinct. His seventeen propositions have a trenchancy and wit giving it a different tone from other socialist documents. Under present circumstances, he wrote, ‘wealth cannot be enjoyed without dishonour or foregone without misery’; the result of nineteenth-century capitalism in Britain had been to divide society ‘into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme and large dinners and no appetites at the other’; under laissez-faire, competition ‘has the effect of rendering adulteration, dishonest dealing and inhumanity compulsory’; instead of leaving National Industry to organize itself, the State should compete ‘with all its might in every department of production’; and there should be equal political rights for the sexes, since ‘Men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against Women’. The Manifesto ended with the proposition: That we had ‘rather face a Civil War than such another century of suffering as the present one has been’.
By the beginning of 1885 two things had been achieved. The Fabians had found a programme – and Shaw a platform.
I found that I had only to say with perfect simplicity what I seriously meant just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh. My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity. And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest.
During 1884 and 1885, Shaw had taken on two gruelling jobs. Between November and April he edited for H. H. Champion’s Modern Press an edition of Lawrence Gronland’s The Cooperative Commonwealth, an exposition of socialism that had recently appeared in the United States. ‘By God, I never read [such] English!’ he exclaimed to Champion. Shaw’s editing gave the book a sparkling tone. He polished it with optimism. His payment for this editing was to be £5, ‘if the book ever produces anything over the costs & advts’ – a figure that became more remote once Gronland, repudiating Shaw’s version, published his American ‘authorized’ edition, with a preface addressed ‘To the British Reader’.
Even less profitable was a commission Shaw had accepted as early as January 1884 to provide a glossary and index for the Hunterian Club’s edition of Thomas Lodge’s Works. ‘I wasted the year deplorably,’ he noted in his diary. At intervals over the following year he would receive imploring letters from the Club, and these would result in desperate resolutions to buy an alarm clock. In July 1885 he transferred the commission to Thomas Tyler, a ‘rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless... man of letters of an uncommercial kind’ who had previously made a translation of Ecclesiastes. Tyler completed the job but not long afterwards died, ‘sinking unnoted like a stone in the sea’ – though remaining for the grateful Shaw ‘a vivid spot of memory in the void of my forgetfulness’.
During 1885 Shaw ‘slipped into paid journalism’. This had come about through his friendship with William Archer who, two months younger than Shaw, had already made his name with a charming series of articles on theatre in the London Figaro. Working at the British Museum Reading Room in 1883, Archer’s attention had been drawn to what appeared as an undelivered brown paper parcel on the next seat. This was Shaw. ‘There I used to sit day by day,’ Archer recalled, ‘beside a pallid young man with red hair and beard, dressed in Jaeger all-wool clothing which rather harmonized with his complexion. My interest was excited... by the literature to which he devoted himself day after day. It consisted of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in French, and a full orchestral score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.’ Before long they were introduced. ‘We had many interests in common,’ Archer recalled, ‘and soon became intimate friends.’
Shaw loved Archer and Archer reciprocated this love. They shared an intimacy of humour, and neither mistook the other’s emotional reticence for lack of feeling. When emotional, Archer grew so wooden that, on the point of tears, he looked like a piece of mahogany. Shaw admired him for his unpretentiousness and integrity. They teased and chided and fathered monstrous advice on each other freely. The candour of their exchanges was a relief to them both, for they inflicted no malice and received no wounds. Under the device of open disagreement they made a secret code of their affection.
They disagreed most on whatever interested them most. As dual champions of Ibsen they each regretted that the other was not an Ibsenite. Each wanted the other to succeed – and felt that he alone knew how this quality of success was to be come by. Archer might not be able to combat his high cheek-bones or the outline of his jaw, but he could unbutton the collar that gave ‘his head the appearance of being wedged by the neck into a jampot’ – and, in doing so, Shaw counselled, ‘consent to make an ass of yourself publicly’. Shaw had to do the opposite thing: quell all that reckless extravaganza, grow up, and cease from making an ass of himself in public. ‘He loses influence by being such an incorrigible jester,’ Archer lamented, ‘by wearing the cap and bells in and out of season.’
Both had made one awful error: Shaw in writing plays, and Archer in not writing plays. ‘Why the devil dont you write a play instead of perpetually talking about it?’ Shaw demanded. Goaded by the perpetual stings, when just short of his sixty-fifth birthday, Archer woke up one morning from a dream of a Rajah in the depths of the Himalayas accompanied by his valet – obviously a ‘complete scheme for a romantic melodrama,’ he revealed to Shaw, ‘which only needs your co-operation to be infallibly THE PLAY OF THE CENTURY.’ But Shaw collaborated only to the extent of helping him to transform the dream into a lurid plot ‘about an Asiatic Rajah made cynical by a western education, and a Green Goddess who had to be propitiated by blood sacrifices’. The Green Goddess became a melodramatic success because, Shaw felt, ‘collaboration between us was impossible’. He had learned this when, in the late summer of 1884, he set to work on an earlier theatrical notion of Archer’s.
With our knowledge of Shaw’s success in the theatre, it is easy to ridicule Archer’s cordial discouragement. But Shaw’s plays were not plays. Archer had no trouble in spotting this. His friend had dispensed with plot, with character, with drama and the red corpuscles of life, to demonstrate that argument squeezed into a well-built dramatic machine was as good as any play. So: ‘Let us be grateful for him as he is, and... enjoy and applaud him. He is not, and he never will be, a great dramatist; but he is something rarer, if not better – a philosophic humorist, with the art of expressing himself in dramatic form.’
Archer’s criticism, presented as friendly and despairing advice, required Shaw to change into someone else (or to reverse the change into G.B.S.). ‘I doubt whether there has ever been a more extraordinary and fascinating combination of gifts in one single human brain,’ he acknowledged. He saw through Shaw’s optimism; he did not see Shaw’s need for optimism. It was the urgency of this need that was driving Shaw to hammer together, like a magical raft, his philosophy and float lightly upon it over the sea around him. Archer wanted him to abandon this whimsical craft and plunge into the water. But Shaw’s nourishment came not from reality as Archer witnessed and experienced it, but from a fantasy that, for all its hard businesslike style, slid along a slice of invisible air. His word-addiction kept him incredibly suspended, and he seldom allowed himself to fall victim to events. But Archer believed this limited his appeal. He would never get a ducking. His audiences might not be able to ignore him but, resenting his superiority, they were resolved never to take him seriously.
Archer would occasionally slip along to Shaw’s little room on the second floor of 36 Osnaburgh Street. Troubled by what he saw, he ‘took my affairs in hand,’ Shaw recorded, planting him among the reviewing staff of the Pall Mall Gazette, where he contributed book reviews from May 1885 to December 1888. He also procured him a place on the Magazine of Music, which applied to Shaw for articles pretty regularly during the later months of 1884; and he introduced him to an Irishman named Edwin Palmer who, in February 1885, started the Dramatic Review and employed Shaw as his music critic.
But Shaw was not an easy man to help. ‘I am making more money than I have any present need for, and shall always be glad to help you to keep going until one or other of your argosies comes home,’ Archer wrote to him. Such help, which Shaw was frequently to offer others in a similar manner, he could never receive himself. Archer, however, had hit on a more delicate ruse. He had been prevailed upon by Edmund Yates, editor of The World, through whose columns he had recently begun what Shaw called ‘his victorious career’ as theatre critic, to double as a critic of art. Knowing nothing about pictures, yet knowing Shaw, Archer invited his friend to accompany him round the galleries. Shaw agreed and, as Archer had expected, poured forth a stream of comment and suggestion. Archer listened, then wrote the article and forwarded to Shaw a cheque for £1 6s. 8d., being half his fee. But Shaw, recommending more exercise and earlier hours, sent it back. Archer, exasperated by his friend’s stubbornness, told him he was a ‘damned fool not to accept the money,’ adding, ‘I certainly should in your position.’ Since Archer’s incorruptibility was notorious this should have served as a telling argument when he sent the cheque back to Shaw: ‘If you took the trouble to read what I do write you would see that every second idea is yours... So be a good fellow and stow your logic.’
But Shaw was proof against this plea. He re-returned the cheque, ‘and if you re-re-return it,’ he warned, ‘I will re-re-re-return it’. He then treated Archer to an outpouring of Shavian economics that, by way of Ricardo’s Law of rent and Lassalle’s Law of wages, concluded that it paid him famously to go without remuneration: ‘I have the advantage of seeing the galleries for nothing without the drudgery of writing the articles.’ Archer was adding to his schooling in the National Gallery of Ireland, with a free education and: ‘we all grow stupid and mad to just the extent to which we have not been artistically educated.’
Archer had no way of telling that the arrangement he was proposing reproduced for Shaw those ghost-writing days with Lee on The Hornet. It was as if Shaw was being given an opportunity to scrub away that tainted year when he had submitted to polite fraud. It was particularly ingenious that he should be tempted by his closest and most honourable friend, and from the worthiest motives. As an admirer of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Shaw would not have had it differently. It was a soft and amiable corruption to which he was being beckoned, and the first major test of whether his socialism was making a new man of him. Archer, the innocent implement of this trial, is a siren voice: everything he says is reasonable, well-intentioned and brimful of sense. But Shaw steadfastly refuses. He is impoverished and free.
Archer, however, was not free. For some weeks he continued to work laboriously as art critic for The World ‘until my conscience could endure it no longer’. He then persuaded Shaw to do a specimen article which he sent to Yates and which secured him the post. In Shavian language, Archer had ‘rescued me by a stratagem’, having deliberately planned to resign his post as soon as Shaw got a firm hold on it. This, so Archer held, was a lovely essay in a priori Shavianism, where true belief becomes a matter of will over chronology.
*
Shaw held the post of art critic on The World from the spring of 1886 to the autumn of 1889. He had in June 1885 started to contribute an ‘Art Corner’ (covering all the arts) to Our Corner, having met its editor Annie Besant at the Dialectical Society that January, and he continued this column until September 1886. ‘On art I am prepared to dogmatize; on traffic, ask a policeman,’ he wrote. It was his comic dogmatism that made these catalogues of pictures so entertaining to readers of Our Corner and The World:
‘Concerning Mr Poynter’s “Difference of Opinion”, with its expanse of closely-clipped grass glittering in the sun, one can only suggest, not disrespectfully, that it would make a capital advertisement for a lawn-mower...’
‘Mr Phil Morris’s “Storm on Albion’s Coast” contains a raging ocean made of what I think is called “tulle”... Mr Kennedy has spent much careful work to doubtful advantage on something resembling an East End starveling stuffed into the tail of a stale salmon, and called a mermaid. Miss Dorothy Tennant is reviving the traditional “brown tree” with a vengeance, as a background to her dainty little nude figures. The humorous picture of the year is Mr C. Shannon’s “Will he come in?” a group of primeval men in a pond, where they have taken refuge from a red-haired mammoth...’
‘“Disaster” is the title given by Mr Walter Langley to his scene in a Cornish fishing-village; and, on the whole, I agree... The tiger in “Alert” is sitting for its portrait with immense self-satisfaction...’
‘The President’s [Walter Crane’s] design, in which Mr Gladstone axe in hand, cuts down a serpent a thousand feet high, is allegory reduced to the desperation of mixed metaphor...’
Shaw’s two gods in matters of art were Ruskin and Morris. Of Ruskin, ‘a really great artist-philosopher,’ he was to write: ‘He begins as a painter, a lover of music, a poet and rhetorician, and presently becomes an economist and sociologist, finally developing sociology and economics... to an almost divine condition.’ Even in a small way Shaw considered himself as carrying on Ruskin’s business. ‘In a society in which we are all striving after the thief’s ideal of living well and doing nothing,’ he said, ‘...and in which the only people who can afford to buy valuable pictures are those who have attained to this ideal, a great artist with anything short of compulsory powers of attraction must either be a hypocrite... or starve.’ We looked for no valuable advance in art, he argued, ‘until we redistribute our immense Wealth and our immense Leisure so as to secure to every honest man his due share of both in return for his share of the national labour’.
Shaw enjoyed affronting picture-gallery conventions. He advised artists to sell their paintings ‘by the foot’. ‘Did they never teach you that the frame is the most important part of the picture, and a good “trade finish” (like Van Eyck’s) its most indispensable quality?’ he innocently asked Austin Spare.
Shaw followed Ruskin’s taste as well as his example. ‘I went into the National Gallery and spent more than an hour over the Turner drawings in the basement with deep pleasure in them,’ he noted in his diary. But he claimed to be as much a politician at the press-view as a Member of Parliament on the hustings: ‘I am always electioneering.’ Recalling his work as art critic half a dozen years later, he wrote: ‘Certain reforms in painting which I desired were advocated by the Impressionist party, and resisted by the Academic party. Until these reforms had been effectually wrought I fought for the Impressionists... [and] did everything I could to make the public conscious of the ugly unreality of studio-lit landscape and the inanity of second-hand classicism.’
Shaw criticized the ‘insistently mundane’ exhibitions at Burlington House and championed the Society of British Artists led by Whistler who ‘must be at least as well satisfied as any propagandist in London,’ he commented. ‘The defeat of his opponents at the [1887] winter exhibitions is decisive.’ This was an example of Shavian electioneering by a critic who privately believed Whistler to be a gentleman painter clever enough to make a merit of his limited ability. Yet his work was preferable to that of the future President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Leighton, who specialized in ‘the arts of the toilet as practised by rich ladies’.
Shaw was ideologically committed to progress and sensed that the notations of Whistler’s ‘symphonies’ and ‘harmonies’, dashed off in an hour or two, were shorthand messages from the future. At the same time Whistler was Ruskin’s enemy, and had declared in his famous Ten O’Clock lecture that art was ‘selfishly preoccupied with her own perfection only... having no desire to teach’. Shaw’s art criticism is impressive in its political dexterity: he treats Whistler more as a campaigner-artist than an artist-philosopher. Closer to his natural taste were the Pre-Raphaelites. The prize painter of the Brotherhood was Burne-Jones, who ‘has the power to change the character of an entire exhibition by contributing or withholding his work’.
At least three times a week Shaw would abscond from literature and art, go down among the Fabians and, like a man bathing himself, ‘talk seriously on serious subjects to serious people. For this reason... I never once lost touch with the real world.’ The real world without art was deeply unsatisfying to Shaw, but the art world without reality seemed worse. As a compromise he supported the Arts and Crafts movement:
‘It has been for a long time past evident that the first step towards making our picture-galleries endurable is to get rid of the pictures – the detestable pictures – the silly British pictures, the vicious foreign pictures, the venal popular pictures, the pigheaded academic pictures, signboards all of them of the wasted talent and perverted ambition of men who might have been passably useful as architects, engineers, potters, cabinet-makers, smiths, or bookbinders. But there comes an end to all things; and perhaps the beginning of the end of the easel-picture despotism is the appearance in the New Gallery of the handicraftsman with his pots and pans, textiles and fictiles, and things in general that have some other use than to hang on a nail and collect bacteria. Here, for instance, is Mr Cobden Sanderson, a gentleman of artistic instincts. Does Mr Cobden Sanderson paint wooden portraits of his female-relatives, and label them Juliet or Ophelia, according to the colour of their hair? No: he binds books, and makes them pleasant to look at, pleasant to handle, pleasant to open and shut, pleasant to possess, and as much of a delight as the outside of a book can be.’
Shaw promoted artists as people who, while apparently providing something that few people wanted, anticipated a demand. Whether it preached or argued, exposed, assured, revealed, consoled, art was a magic and, like Prospero’s Ariel, it commanded kings. Through new combinations of sound, new bridges of feeling and rhythms of colour, people absorbed information that, presented merely as information, they would reject from prejudice or boredom. This was the penetrating power of art, and when Shaw spoke of it he turned naturally to music. ‘And great artists, in order to get a hearing, have to fascinate their hearers; they have to provide a garment of almost supernatural beauty for the message they have to deliver. Therefore, when a man has a message to deliver in literature, with great effort and toil he masters words until he can turn them into music.’
This formed part of Shaw’s case against Whistler’s concept of art. We must not limit art, he argued, to the satisfaction of our desire for beauty. People cannot endure beauty any more than they can endure love. The paradoxical triumph of romanticism was to have drugged us into believing that we worshipped love and beauty even as we struggled to avoid their demands. Self-respect curdled into self-love, in Shaw’s prescription, unless preserved by seriousness: the dilettante was always narcissistic. Oscar Wilde appeared the pre-eminent dilettante; the best example of the serious man was William Morris. His love of the medieval world sprang from a longing to regain those happy years ‘when I was a little chap’. He summoned up a vision of the long past, a garden of happiness where nature, in the pattern of leaves and flowers, invaded the rooms: ‘it was a positive satisfaction to be in his houses,’ Shaw remembered. Morris had set his heart on founding a brotherhood that, by seeking medieval cures for the malaise of capitalism, would crusade against industrial squalor and replace it with a regenerated Britain – a green-tree land of gardens, fields and forests. His revolutionary politics followed a revolution in his own life to which Shaw’s attitude is revealing.
Like Shaw, Morris had an extreme fear of emotional suffering; like Shaw, he identified schools as prisons, locking him out of Eden. But he returned to Eden when, in 1859, he married ‘an apparition of fearful and wonderful beauty’, Janey Burden, the daughter of a groom. For her, as for Augustus John’s Dorelia, beauty had been a means of emancipation. She looked like a ‘figure cut out of a missal,’ Henry James said, and had been raised from her simple working-class life to be Queen of the Pre-Raphaelite kingdom, a Blessed Damozel, tragic, imposing, silent. Morris’s developing interest in the working class seemed to threaten her with a return to the mean conditions of her past. Shaw observed no unhappiness. ‘Their harmony seemed to me to be perfect. In his set, beauty in women was a cult.’ When Morris, in old age, covered the forests of his wallpapers with whitewash, Shaw recognized not the extinction of something essential but an advance in ‘his need for the clean, the wholesome, & the sensible’.
To Shaw, it was as if Morris had woken up from an impossible dream of fair women, opened his eyes on a Ruskinian landscape and strode out to reach the communism that ‘was part of his commonsense’. He had transferred his hopes from an individual to a collective sphere, achieving fulfilment through the integration of politics and art. No matter that he had little natural aptitude for politics. Shaw acknowledged his position as head of the Socialist League to be ‘absurdly false’, recommending that he be treated with marked consideration as ‘a privileged eccentric and in no way an authority as to socialist policy’ – almost exactly in the same manner as the Labour Party was later to regard G.B.S. himself.
Morris was the clearest example of a hero in the Shavian iconoclastic world. Shaw felt wonderfully at home at his house on Hammersmith Terrace where he met many kindred spirits – men such as Sydney Cockerell and Walter Crane. In place of Wilde’s aesthetics for the elite stood a man who worked with others on behalf of everyone – a man who wanted to bring applied arts and the perspective of beauty into all life. The ‘idle singer of an empty day’ had grown into the busy singer of a bursting day. Shaw believed that the artist’s wares had to be marketed in the knowledge that most customers hated beauty because, as a reflection of love, it could hurt them. Though his capacity for loving was undeveloped, Shaw did not lack emotion. Cunningly fenced off behind some of the most brilliantly unsentimental prose in the language, is plenty of feeling. His faith in the employment of the arts is expressed in a puritan encyclical:
‘The claim of art to our respect must stand or fall with the validity of its pretension to cultivate and refine our senses and faculties until seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting become highly conscious and critical acts with us... The worthy artist or craftsman is he who serves the physical and moral senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays and dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable activity. The great artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.’
People who are much admired often get wheedled or persecuted into love affairs with persons whom they would have let alone if they themselves had been let alone.
These words appear in a short story, ‘Don Giovanni Explains’, that Shaw wrote in the summer of 1887. He makes use in this story of his experiences with women over the past three years to find the best truth available to him. Like Shaw, Don Giovanni had been born a shy man.
‘On rare occasions, some woman would strike my young fancy; and I would worship her at a distance for a long time, never venturing to seek her acquaintance... At last a widow lady at whose house I sometimes visited, and of whose sentiments towards me I had not the least suspicion, grew desperate at my stupidity, and one evening threw herself into my arms and confessed her passion for me. The surprise, the flattery, my inexperience, and her pretty distress, overwhelmed me. I was incapable of the brutality of repulsing her; and indeed for nearly a month I enjoyed without scruple the pleasure she gave me, and sought her company whenever I could find nothing better to do. It was my first consummated love affair; and though for nearly two years the lady had no reason to complain of my fidelity, I found the romantic side of our intercourse, which seemed never to pall on her, tedious, unreasonable, and even forced and insincere except at rare moments, when the power of love made her beautiful, body and soul.’
There were three categories of relationship in Shaw’s life: flirtations with single women, usually at this time young Fabian girls; philanderings with the wives of friends, usually socialist colleagues; and a consummated love affair with a divorced or separated lady. With Alice Lockett he had tried to combine all his emotional needs in one person, and concluded that it could not be done. On 29 September 1888, more than three years after they had parted, Alice spent the day with Shaw in London. ‘I sang some of the old Figaro bits with Alice, who presently went home,’ he noted in his diary, ‘overcome, I think, by old associations.’
There was no chance of Shaw being overcome: he overcame. He had plumed himself into a dazzling lecturer, enthralling audiences with his vitality and wit. He was marvellously adroit too in debate, catching his opponents’ sallies in mid-air like a conjuror and returning them with amazing speed. The expectations he raised are beautifully caught by a young Fabian called Grace Black. ‘People are so exceedingly miserable in every class, that I should lose hope if I did not know there are many who devote themselves entirely to trying to make things better,’ she wrote to him.
‘...you have a greater power of seeing truth than most people: you can do more than most. It is impossible to help expecting a great deal from you and now is the point – don’t fail – please don’t. For one thing I don’t know how I could bear it – but that is not the point. What I fear is that you do not care for nor believe in people sufficiently... do care more for people for that is where you seem to fail.’
Shaw recognized at once a case of Fabian love. He could diagnose love as efficiently as a doctor identifying death. His objection to it was part of his hatred of private property. People said that all the world loved a lover: the truth was that a lover loved all the world, and therein lay his crime. Providing we were in love, the world was a fine place, and we condoned its awfulness. That we needed to love, he knew. But he represented the partiality of romantic love as a perversion of our deepest desire. For it was not to this person, then to that person, but to the whole world that we owed the comprehension of love. The world, however, was not ready for love. To renounce the indulgence of loving was in itself an act of love – the act of deferred love we call faith.
Grace Black had asked for no answer – ‘if you sent me one, you might make me unhappy,’ she told him. But Shaw could not let this alone. He sent his first letter to her by return of post. Her reply was a rebuke:
‘I guessed you would think I was in love with you. So I am, but that has nothing to do with my letter and it is a pity if that thought has clouded my meaning. My personal happiness is certainly connected with your success as a teacher of socialism, & in a less degree by that of Hyndman & Morris, because I care very much for what is implied to me by socialism. But apart from that I do love you, & why do you wish to dissuade me from that and from believing in you?... There is nothing in my attitude of humility, dependence or expectancy which would give reason for irritation... But it is true that I wish that love were an easier simpler thing than it is now; but that is to wish for heaven... You are not much older than me, but all experience is to the bad. I am serious.’
Shaw’s experience of love had been ‘to the bad’, and from Grace Black’s feelings he took care to protect himself. His description of Grace’s announcement in 1889 of her marriage is a good example of inverted Shavian romanticism: she ‘sent me a note to say what she was going to do,’ he wrote, ‘adding, by way of apology for throwing me over, that she could never marry a man she loved’. The letter he actually received read as follows:
‘You know that the reason I began to love you was because I believed you cared more for truth and would do more to help socialism than any other man... Long ago I saw that my love for you was a waste of force, because you were so different to me: but it is only lately I have been able to love anyone else. I do now, and am engaged to marry Edwin Human a Socialist... You have a place deep in my heart: my feelings have run through all the personal currents in respect of you & can’t go back but have ended as they began in something quite impersonal, rather painful but in a way sacred.’
Meeting Grace some years after her marriage, he records: ‘She looked extraordinarily youthful; she has children; her marriage is obviously as happy as it is possible for a marriage to be; her husband no more grudges her her adorations than he grudges her a motor car.’ In casting himself as a piece of extra-marital machinery, Shaw re-creates what he hoped were the circumstances of his own Dublin household.
One family to have benefited from Shaw’s interference had been the Beattys. Among others by now were the Avelings and the Blands. At the head of all three families was a husband notorious for his illicit love-affairs. Shaw, who was to place Edward Aveling on the stage as Louis Dubedat in The Doctor’s Dilemma, described him as the man who ‘seduced every woman he met and borrowed from every man’, and yet would have ‘gone to the stake bravely rather than admit that Marx was not infallible or that God existed’. As his interest in politics deepened he turned his attention to Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor. Shaw used to see this clever dark-haired girl at the British Museum, working for eighteen pence an hour as a literary hack. In June 1884 she decided to go and live with Aveling on the understanding that they would marry if his wife died. For Shaw, who regarded himself as unattractive, here was a revelation. ‘Though no woman seemed able to resist him,’ he wrote of Aveling, ‘he was short, with the face and eyes of a lizard, and no physical charm except a voice like a euphonium.’ Like Wilkes, he was only a quarter of an hour behind the handsomest man in Europe. Shaw seemed determined to pursue this mystery. Aveling worked on the staff of the Dramatic Review and Shaw often called at his home, but his diary reveals that it was Eleanor (or ‘Mrs Aveling’) he came to see. She was not sure what to make of him. ‘If you are mad,’ she wrote, ‘there is marvellous method in your madness & penetration that sanity wd gambol from... oh, most amiable and sympathetic of cynics.’ She would appeal to him to save her ‘from a long day and evening of tête-à-tête with myself’, and he responded.
17 February Called on the Avelings... Talked with Mrs A between 17 and 18 (A went out shortly after I came in).
28 February Mrs Aveling asked me to call in the afternoon and have a chat. Went at 17 and stayed until 20 nearly. Aveling absent at Crystal Palace concert. Urged her to go on the stage. Chatted about this, death, sex, and a lot of things.
28 March Went to Mrs Aveling and discussed Love Among the Artists with her.
14 April Called on the Avelings – A[veling] at Ventnor: Eleanor at home: stayed with her from 17 to 19.45.
20 June After meeting on musical pitch called on Mrs Aveling. Aveling came in later on. Went home and played all the evening.
24 August Rumour of split between the Avelings mentioned by [J.M.] Robertson.
Shaw recoiled at the news that the Avelings might separate. His instinct whispered retreat. The Avelings’ later history exposed everything he most feared about sexual passion. In 1897, following the death of his wife, Aveling secretly married Eva Frye, and following an anonymous letter telling her of this marriage, Eleanor poisoned herself. ‘My last word to you,’ she wrote in her suicide note, ‘is the same as I have said during all these long, sad years – love.’ But Shaw could not endure the agony of such love. In his tight little note on her death, he referred to ‘the news of Eleanor Marx’s suicide in consequence of Aveling having spent all her money’.
As he began easing out of the Avelings’ home, so he started to infiltrate the marriage of the Blands. Hubert Bland had been a founder of the Fabian Society, and its first treasurer. He was a man of Norman exterior, imperialist instincts, and huge physical strength, though to Shaw he seemed ‘an affectionate, imaginative sort of person’. Like Hyndman, he wore Tory clothes and ‘never was seen without an irreproachable frock coat, tall hat, and a single eyeglass which infuriated everybody’.
‘Hubert was not a restful husband,’ Shaw conceded. He had married his wife, Edith Nesbit, in 1880, when she was twenty-one and seven months pregnant, and subsequently had children by two other women. The first of these women Edith befriended; the second, Alice Hoatson, already was her friend and a part of the Bland household, where her daughter Rosamund was brought up by Edith as her own child. The Blands’ home was a disorganized ménage and the conglomeration of parties, charades, music and children formed a refreshing contrast to sterner Fabian entertainments. Shaw would slip on boxing-gloves and dance round the short-sighted Bland who was incapable of deliberately hurting anyone. ‘I was taller by a couple of inches and with longer reach,’ Shaw calculated. And Edith watched.
According to Edward Pease, Edith was acknowledged as ‘the most attractive and vivacious woman of our circle’, though burdened with spectacular fainting fits and, at supreme moments of Fabian drama, the habit of calling sensationally for glasses of water. She abstained from corsets (a false method of ‘girding the loins’), rolled her cigarettes which she smoked from a long holder, and looked every inch an advanced woman. ‘On the other hand,’ Shaw believed, ‘she is excessively conventional; and her ideas are not a woman’s ideas, but the ideas which men have foisted, in their own interest, on women.’
She was soon confiding her ideas to Shaw. Sometimes she would invite him to tea, but more often she met him at the British Museum, and they would go for long striding walks. By the summer of 1886 these meetings had grown longer and more intricate. ‘On the whole the day was devoted to Mrs Bland,’ Shaw wrote on 26 June 1886. ‘We dined together, had tea together, and I went out to Lee with her and played and sang there until Bland came in from his volunteer work. A memorable evening!’
Edith, who was to become famous as a writer of stories for children, appealed to Shaw partly because she retained so much of the child in her. In the 1880s she wrote poetry. ‘The faults of the poems are so directly and intimately the faults of the woman,’ Shaw wrote in a review of her Lays and Legends (1886), ‘...there is too much of the luxury of unreal grief, of getting into the vein by imagining churchyards and jiltings and the like.’ Shaw composed music for some of these verses, among which were love poems to himself.
She called him ‘the grossest flatterer (of men women and children impartially) I ever met’. He ‘repeats everything he hears, and does not always stick to the truth, and is very plain... and yet is one of the most fascinating men I ever met’. She would pursue him to his lair in the British Museum, and he would hurry her out to pretty scenes on the river and in the park; give her tea in the Wheatsheaf; see her on to buses and trains. On their way to Baker Street Station one day, they called in at Shaw’s home. From then on it became a struggle for her to get into his house, and for him to keep her walking in the open air. If, on their way to some bus stop or railway station, he needed to leave his books at home, she accompanied him inside and beckoned him upstairs; at other times he went on grimly walking through all weathers, hour after hour, till she dropped exhausted and veered off home. It was an exercising business.
It became increasingly difficult to detect in Bland the overflowing gratitude Shaw claimed such husbands lavished on him. He hoped, by everything short of a sexual relationship, to give Edith compensation for her husband’s infidelities. But she protested to him: ‘You had no right to write the Preface if you were not going to write the book.’ He had made her determined to bring matters to a climax. On 11 May 1887, finding him hunched over More’s Utopia in the Reading Room, she marched him out to tea at the Austrian Café and insisted on leading him off to his home. Believing his mother to be there, he agreed. His mother was out. There followed ‘an unpleasant scene caused by my telling her that I wished her to go, as I was afraid that a visit to me alone would compromise her’. She went: but the friendship survived and the marriage endured. For Shaw, in his fashion, was a true friend of this marriage, rather than the ally of one partner. In 1914, when Bland was dying and felt troubled as to whether there would be enough money for the education of one of his sons, he told his daughter: ‘If there is not enough, ask Shaw’ – and indeed it was Shaw who paid for John Bland to go to Cambridge.
‘I was, in fact, a born philanderer,’ he later told Frank Harris. In his play The Philanderer he was to portray himself in the part of Leonard Charteris, whom he described as ‘the real Don Juan’. With married women and Fabian girls, Shaw philandered. But Mrs Jane Patterson was to make a Don Juan out of him.
*
‘Jenny’ Patterson was a particular friend of Shaw’s mother – indeed she was closer in age to Mrs Shaw than to her son and may have known the family in Ireland where she had been married to a well-to-do country gentleman. After his death, she moved to London and by 1885 was living in Brompton Square. Coming home from the British Museum, Shaw would find the two women together. Sometimes he joined them singing, sometimes he escorted Mrs Patterson to her bus home; but there seems to have been no romantic interest on his part until after his father’s death on 19 April 1885. Almost at once their relationship changed. On 20 April, finding Mrs Patterson at home when he returned, he ‘wasted all the evening’ with her – the first entry of this sort in his diary. Seven days later occurs a note of his visiting her alone in Brompton Square: ‘Went to Richter concert in the evening, but instead of waiting for the symphony went on to Mrs Patterson. Found her alone, and chatted until past midnight.’ Up to the time he was twenty-nine, he told Ellen Terry, ‘I was too shabby for any woman to tolerate me... Then I got a job to do & bought a suit of clothes with the proceeds. A lady immediately invited me to tea, threw her arms round me, and said she adored me... Never having regarded myself as an attractive man, I was surprised; but I kept up appearances successfully.’
The clothes with which Shaw tells his story, while fashioning an outline of the truth, also conceal something. At the beginning of his 1885 diary he had written: ‘Took to the woollen clothing system, and gave up using sheets in bed.’ He had been persuaded to ‘rational dress’ by a friend of William Morris, Andreas Scheu, an advocate of Dr Gustave Jaeger’s sanatory system. Jaeger expected to regenerate the world by wool. He claimed to have tried out his wool-theories on himself and to have been restored by them from a sick creature – ‘fat and scant of breath’ with haemorrhoids and tendencies to indigestion – to a man who everywhere inspired affection. Shaw, who recognized in Jaeger another Vandeleur Lee, was enthusiastically converted.
He ordered his first Jaeger outfit on 19 June 1885 – ‘the first new garments I have had for years’. They were ‘paid for out of the insurance on my father’s life,’ he noted in his diary. The reddish-brown Jaeger suit was to become part of his physical personality – ‘as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur,’ G. K. Chesterton observed. The uniform was finished off with correct knee-breeches and stockings after a formula devised by Dr Jaeger to replace the insalubrious tubes of trousers. This was the Shavian equivalent to Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic costumes.
Many of Jaeger’s most faithful ‘Woolleners’, as they were called, came from among the Fabians who paid fastidious attention to diet and clothes, eating vegetables and wearing animals. Shaw advertised his brown combination as being ‘the plumes and tunic of Don Juan’ and so irresistible to women that almost anyone could knit himself into popularity. In fact it seems to have been less a matter of women regarding him so favourably in wool as of the woollen Shaw looking at women more confidently.
On 30 June, he ‘got clothes from Jaeger’s and put them on’. Next day he caught a cold but by 4 July was sufficiently recovered to call on Mrs Patterson and stayed with her till one o’clock. ‘Vein of conversation decidedly gallant,’ he logged in his diary. Over the next three weeks he visited her constantly. She provoked him, taunted him, half-defying and half-inviting him to advance, and he seemed spellbound. ‘Supper, music and curious conversation,’ he noted on 10 July after another evening in Brompton Square, ‘and a declaration of passion. Left at 3. Virgo intacta still.’ But only just. For these evenings were unlike his visits into other people’s love lives. There he had been Vandeleur Lee, the chaste wizard; here, dressed in the clothes from his father’s life insurance and with his mother’s closest friend, he could re-enact and improve on the romance of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth. On 18 July he bought some contraceptives (‘French letters 5/–’) which, on examination, ‘extraordinarily revolted me’ – so much that in the evening at Jenny’s there were ‘forced caresses’ instead of love-making. Much of this must have been known to Lucinda Shaw. She and Jenny had spent most of 25 July together. In the evening, Shaw came across them walking along the Brompton Road ‘looking for a bus, but they were all full,’ he noted. ‘So, on the corner of Montpelier St. Mother went on by herself, and I returned to the Square with JP, and stayed there until 3 o’clock on my 29th birthday which I celebrated by a new experience. Was watched by an old woman next door, whose evil interpretation of the lateness of my departure greatly alarmed us.’
He had been starved of sex. ‘I was an absolute novice,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I did not take the initiative in the matter.’ During his ’teens and twenties he was ‘perfectly continent except for the involuntary incontinences of dreamland’. All these years he exercised his imagination in daydreams about women, but not until Jenny Patterson broke through his celibacy did he know the power of sex. Sometimes he resented this power she had over him. ‘The spell of your happiness has been potent.’ But when the spell evaporated, he was filled with mortification. Love un-Shavianized him, robbed him of his authority and the hard discipline of work through which he was trying to re-create himself. In retrospect his embraces with Jenny became part of a wrestling match between her possessiveness and his independence. His diary entries over the next weeks indicate the ambivalence of his feelings.
27 July No work done. Went to Museum and wrote a letter to JP...
3 August Wrote full circumstantial account of affair with JP to E. McN[ulty]... Spent the evening with Sidney Webb at Colonial Office. He told me about his love affair and disappointment. Wrote a rather fierce letter to JP on my return.
4 August Did nothing practically. Called on Eleanor Aveling in the afternoon. Resolved to begin new Pilgrim’s Progress at once... Wrote JP in reply to her answer to yesterday’s explosion.
5 August Wrote the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress... to JP to eat and make love until 1.20.
10 August... JP came. To dinner at 16 then to Jaeger’s where I ordered a knitted woollen suit. Mother and JP at Jaeger’s too. After tea went home with JP & stayed until five minutes before midnight.’
He saw her every week, ending the day with her at Brompton Square and walking back home in the early hours. There would be intervals when she went out of town, usually to her cottage in Broadstairs, but when she returned, the entries in Shaw’s diary would start up again: ‘Called on JP’; ‘Went to JP in the evening’; ‘JP here when I came home. Walked to Brompton Square with her.’ He turned up whenever he could not stay away – she hardly knew when it might be. Sometimes he came when she would have preferred him not to: ‘You will not believe me I know,’ she was to write to him, ‘but it is absolutely true that often my body has been an unwilling minister to you.’ At other times he would arrive so late that she was asleep and he would stand in the square looking up at the unlit windows.
In the shorthand diaries where he listed his expenditure on food and travel, he also noted in code the number of times he and Jenny made love: once on the 2 and 10 August; twice on 16 and 22 August – and so on. ‘Sexual experience seemed a natural appetite,’ G.B.S. wrote forty years later, ‘and its satisfaction a completion of human experience necessary for fully qualified authorship.’ The author learned about the demands and excitements of loving; and the wiles of self-protection. ‘Only by intercourse with men and women,’ he reasoned, could we learn humanity. ‘This involves an active life, not a contemplative one... you must... give and receive hate, love, and friendship with all sorts of people before you can acquire the sense of humanity.’
‘I wanted to love,’ he wrote, ‘but not to be appropriated.’ He wanted Jenny to take the edge off his lust so that he was unassailable in his Fabian flirtations and with those wives into whose marriages he had introduced himself as the favourite son. Whenever he felt restless, he looked to her to settle him; but ‘I was never duped by sex as a basis for permanent relations, nor dreamt of marriage in connection with it,’ he insisted. ‘I put everything else before it, and never refused or broke an engagement to speak on Socialism to pass a gallant evening.’ But once the Fabian meetings were over, he would find himself, like a sleepwalker, back at her house. ‘Went to JP’s,’ he wrote in his diary on 9 January 1886. ‘Revulsion.’ But three days later he was there making love to her again. ‘Went to JP in the evening and there met T. Tighe Hopkins. He was bent on seduction, and we tried which should outstay the other. Eventually he had to go for his train... To bed late.’
‘What a fascinating & charming lady your friend Mrs Patterson is!’ May Morris told Shaw. ‘I wonder why you professed to be reluctant to introduce me to her.’ He was reluctant – but not to talk about her. ‘Are you not a rather disloyal friend?’ May questioned him. ‘I confess I should hate to be scoffed at behind my back as you profess to scoff at Mrs Patterson.’ But Shaw admitted to betraying everybody’s confidences in the most exaggerated way. It was a sample, he explained, of Irish tact. Everyone branded him a mischief-maker but thought no worse of the people gossiped over.
Shaw’s natural tendency to put Jenny Patterson in a compartment was strengthened by her jealousy. She accuses him of having ‘kissed & mauled about’ other women. She assails him with her need for reassurance. ‘Are you thinking of me? Wanting me?... I wish you were here now! Goodnight my darling love – when shall I see you?’ Then came apologies for her ‘awful’ rages – ‘You know how hard it is to master oneself and it is doubly hard for one like myself who has never been educated or controlled – in fact a savage.’ She woos him back to Brompton Square with fresh grapes, honey, cocoa, brown bread, strawberries and the promise that they could both be fast asleep by 2 a.m. ‘You are absolutely free to do as you please,’ she instructs him. But not for long. ‘You will run many dangers from my abandoned sex. You will be hardly safe without me... don’t fall in love with anyone but me...’
Early in 1886 Shaw made an effort to end their relationship. ‘Do you wish never to see me again?’ she asks him, and adds, with truth: ‘I could never make you see me if you did not want to... You have done me no harm. Nor have I harmed you.’ But Shaw felt he had harmed her; he had used her body and only he knew what he felt when he did so. His urge to make a confession to McNulty and to start a ‘new Pilgrim’s Progress’ were symptoms of his dissatisfaction. ‘Be happy,’ he had written to her in the first week of their affair, ‘for I have not the fortitude enough to bear your misfortunes.’ ‘Let me be happy,’ she wrote back to him. ‘I love you.’ But the currency of their love was different, and there could be no exchange between them that seemed fair. He could not make her happy for long. ‘When a woman does what I have done & expects either consideration or love from her lover she is a fool. I am one for I believed in you & loved you. I alas love you too much now... You are the one man in all the world to me & this I feel I know after nearly ten months of intimacy.’ This letter was written on 8 May and preceded a ‘violent scene’ between them at Brompton Square the following day. When Shaw got home that night he wrote to tell her that ‘our future intercourse must be platonic’. In this letter, which made Jenny ‘unutterably unhappy’, Shaw tried to explain his own guilt: ‘I see plainly that I have played a very poor part for some time past... I have sacrificed you and am so far the better for it – but you are the worse... I had nothing to lose – but I had something to gain and therein lies the rascality of it.’
Jenny was unhappy, but by no means ‘unutterably’ so. In page after page over the next two days she went through her fears and regrets: ‘You make me suffer tortures. Have pity on me. I have some little right to ask it of you. I write in despair... oh my love, my love, be good to me... do not abandon me... I said leave me but you would not. The parting then would have been less hard for me... You tell me to take other lovers as if I took them as easily as a new pair of gloves... I deeply deplore Sunday’s work – but I am the sufferer. I couldn’t help it. My grief is for your loss to me.’
She feared to open his letters, writing to ask whether they were unkind – and not daring to open the answers. He filled the backs of her envelopes with notes for political speeches. But what he wrote to her was not unkind. ‘I do not mean to abandon or desert you – I will not change – but in one thing [sex]. All shall be as before – but that.’ Knowing she still had some physical influence over him, Jenny decided to go and see him. ‘JP called here in the morning distracted about my letter,’ Shaw jotted in his diary on 13 May. ‘There was a scene and much pathetic petting and kissing, after which she went away comparatively happy’, and Shaw, with intense relief, settled down to the economic study of Jevonian curves of indifference. A few days later she wrote to him accepting ‘all you offer. It will be for you to prove that it [sex] was not “the” one thing that brought you here, that nothing is altered betwixt us really except the thing you hold so cheap.’ But, she added, ‘I do know that you are outraging nature.’
He continued visiting her, but less often; and he left earlier. This had been one of the difficulties between them: whether he should stay the night and neglect his work, or return home at night and neglect her. Fearing that they would drift apart she promised to be ‘as good as I possibly can if you will come, not even try to kiss you – unless you wish it’. So he began seeing more of her, sometimes walking her to the door of her house, sometimes going in. Seven Sundays after their platonic intercourse had begun they made love – twice – and things were calmer. ‘My Friend & Lover,’ she wrote to him at the end of July 1886, ‘I am content that there are no barriers betwixt us – that you have taken me back. I will try to make you content with me.’ But over the next eighteen months they made each other deeply discontented. When she went off to her cottage at Broadstairs, he felt ‘much indisposed for her society’; when she returned to London he found himself ‘much out of humour with her and things in general’. On 16 December, their relationship exploded in a quarrel that lasted till one o’clock in the morning.
‘I am so happy when I am with you. Be as platonic as you will,’ she had written to him. ‘...I can care for you without any sensuality.’ What he apparently wanted was a platonic experiment with full sexual intercourse. The uncertainty of her position swept Jenny into a variety of distracted moods. She would demand that he ‘sacrifice something or someone for me’; plead with him: ‘Where are you?... its a million years since I have been in your arms’; cross-examine him: ‘Have you been faithful? Absolutely faithful??’ The thought of his unfaithfulness made her ill. ‘I am consumed by all sorts of fancies about you.’ During platonic intervals, Shaw would drop in on her to change his clothes, plunge into a bath or dash off letters to other women. Once, after she caught him writing to Annie Besant, she followed the two of them next day in the street and was soon plastering him with reproaches. ‘You belong to me,’ she insisted.
*
At the beginning of his diary for 1886 Shaw recorded that ‘my work at the Fabian brought me much into contact with Mrs Besant, and towards the end of the year this intimacy became of a very close and personal sort, without, however, going further than a friendship’.
Annie Besant was nine years older than Shaw. Though separated from her husband she was still legally tied to him and, better still, ‘had absolutely no sex appeal’. Like Shaw, she had endured a loveless childhood, but at the age of twenty propelled herself into a painful marriage with a clergyman, Frank Besant, by whom she had two children, and from which she emerged with a fascination for celibacy and a devotion to atheism. Expelled from their home, she set out on an extraordinary pilgrimage, moving from one cause to another, each embodied by a man. The first had been the great secularist saint, Charles Bradlaugh, with whom she had ‘fought all England in the cause of liberty of conscience’. Then she veered towards the insidious Aveling, but he had left her for Eleanor Marx. She had then persuaded a dependable young Scottish secularist, John Mackinnon Robertson, to take Aveling’s place on Bradlaugh’s National Reformer as well as her own new journal Our Corner.
She and Shaw met formally in January 1885 at the Dialectical Society near Oxford Circus where Shaw was to deliver a socialist address. It was rumoured that Annie, as the most redoubtable champion of individualist free-thought, had come down to ‘destroy me,’ Shaw recalled, ‘and that from the moment she rose to speak my cause was lost’. Public meetings were the elixir of life to her. From the platform her voice, low and thrilling, seemed neither that of a woman nor of a man, but godlike and of irresistible authority. To Shaw’s mind she was the greatest orator in England. Everyone waited for her that night to lead the opposition against Shaw, but she did not rise and the opposition was taken up by another member. ‘After he had finished, Annie Besant, to the amazement of the meeting, got up and utterly demolished him,’ Shaw remembered. ‘...At the end she asked me to nominate her to the Fabian Society and invited me to dine with her.’ She was, he concluded, ‘a woman of swift decisions’. And she was an ‘incorrigible benefactress’. She arranged the serialization of The Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists in Our Corner; and it was she who launched him there as an art critic. But she found, as Archer had previously done, that Shaw was extremely difficult to help. He had ‘a perfect genius for “aggravating” her’. When he declared, after her death, that she had had no sex appeal, he meant that she was without a sense of humour. ‘Comedy was not her clue to life,’ he admitted:
‘...no truth came to her first as a joke. Injustice, waste, and the defeat of noble aspirations did not revolt her by way of irony and paradox: they stirred her to direct and powerful indignation and to active resistance... the apparently heartless levity with which I spoke and acted in matters which seemed deeply serious... must have made it very hard for her to work with me at times.’
At the beginning of his diary for 1887 he noted that their intimacy had reached ‘a point at which it threatened to become a vulgar intrigue, chiefly through my fault. But I roused myself in time and avoided this.’ Such Shavian rousing was signalled from his side by the despatch of his photograph, and from hers by the composition of a number of fevered poems which, her sympathetic biographer Arthur H. Nethercot comments, ‘perhaps fortunately, have not survived’. They orchestrated their incompatibilities over a series of piano duets on Monday nights. ‘Shaw always came in, sat down at the piano, and plunged ahead,’ Nethercot records, ‘but Mrs Besant whenever possible practised for hours to perfect her parts in advance. The neighbourhood resounded with their efforts to keep in time.’
Annie Besant seemed to borrow everything from other people, adding nothing except the wonder of her voice. Beatrice Webb, who disliked her, nevertheless felt that she was ‘the most wonderful woman of her century’. To Shaw also she was wonderful, but as someone on stage. ‘Like all great public speakers she was a born actress,’ he wrote. He tried to make her a good Fabian. ‘I ought to have done much more for her,’ he concluded, ‘and she much less for me, than we did.’ Annie, too, had hoped for more. In August 1887 she wrote in the National Reformer: ‘Life had nothing fairer for its favourites than friendship kissed into the passion of love.’ Shaw’s love had two qualities – extreme levity and extreme tenacity. In December 1887 she presented him with a contract setting forth the terms on which they were to live together. When he refused to sign it (‘I had rather be legally married to you ten times over,’ he cautiously fulminated) she produced a casket in which she kept all his letters and handed it to him. Next day, 24 December, he returned her side of the correspondence, and on reaching home found that Jenny Patterson had been to his room ‘and had read my letters to Mrs B. which I had incautiously left on my table’. Some of these letters mentioning herself she had taken with her. ‘I make no excuse for taking the letters,’ she wrote.
‘You have taken advantage of... my belief & trust in you... I am ill & numb... & [my] loneliness is almost unbearable. I try to think what it is I have done to deserve this evil... I have a thousand memories of you that I can’t forget... I feel ashamed beyond telling when I try to imagine what she must think of me. You have humbled me in the dust.’
On the morning of Christmas Day, Shaw was woken by a hammering at the door. It was Jenny Patterson, bristling with letters. They argued about it all, and then ‘I at last got those she had taken and destroyed them’. The following evening they passed together, and so far mended matters that a few days later they saw in the New Year by making love.
Jenny still engaged his body as Annie Besant faded to a luminous voice in his memory. She flung herself violently into street socialism and then surrendered to the masculine charm of Madame Blavatsky, ‘one of the most accomplished impostors in history’. ‘Gone to Theosophy,’ Pease noted on his Fabian list, and crossed out her name.
As for Shaw: ‘Reading over my letters before destroying them rather disgusted me with the trifling of the last 2 years with women.’
The Fabian lecturers are famous throughout the world. Their women are beautiful; their men brave. Their executive council challenges the universe for quality... Say to the horseleech, ‘I have joined the Fabian,’ and he will drop off as though you have overwhelmed him with salt.
Shaw to Pakenham Beatty (27 May 1887)
‘Whatever Society I joined,’ Shaw wrote, ‘I was immediately placed on the executive committee.’ The Fabians had elected him to their executive on 2 January 1885, and Hyndman came to accept that he was lost for ever to the Social Democratic Federation. In selecting a political partner for himself, Shaw was guided by the need to discover someone as unlike Hyndman as possible, someone vividly unheroic and unfrockcoated, who would never play at soldiers in the street. He had already spotted the man: a crushingly plain clerk from the Colonial Office, his bulky head set on a dumpy body, graceless in movement, and as a public speaker inaudible. According to his future wife, he looked something between a London tradesman and a German professor. ‘This was the ablest man in England,’ Shaw decided: ‘Sidney Webb. Quite the wisest thing I ever did was to force my friendship on him and to keep it.’
He had first met Webb in October 1880 at the Zetetical Society. ‘He knew all about the subject of debate,’ Shaw recalled; ‘knew more than the lecturer; knew more than anybody present; had read everything that had ever been written; and remembered all the facts that bore on the subject. He used notes, read them, ticked them off one by one, threw them away, and finished with a coolness and clearness that seemed to me miraculous.’ Though Webb was to laugh away this recollection, he acknowledged fifty years later that their meeting led to a friendship ‘which has been most fruitful to me. I look back on it with wonder at the advantage, and indeed, the beauty of [it]... Apart from marriage, it has certainly been the biggest thing in my life.’ And Shaw, in his ninetieth year, wrote in a letter to Webb that ‘I never met a man who combined your extraordinary ability with your unique simplicity and integrity of character... you knew everything that I didn’t know and I knew everything that you didn’t know. We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it.’
Webb was indefatigably packed with information. But in Shaw’s opinion, his simplicity of character was a political disadvantage. He was not mean, he had no envy, he was never a Party man. He had little humour, was impatient with people less clever than himself, and incapable of dramatizing himself or his subject. ‘I did all that for him,’ Shaw told Kingsley Martin, and in a letter to Lady Londonderry he explained: ‘All I could do for Webb was to beat the big drum in front of his booth, as he would not master that useful instrument himself.’ The description he gave of Webb as one who ‘never posed, never acted... and was never in danger of becoming a humbug and a living fiction, not to say a living lie’, points to the disgust felt by the fastidious Shaw at the gyrations G.B.S. went through to gain public attention. He produced a fountain of sparkling illustrations to make the dullest subject entertaining. And people listened. For the first time Webb’s arguments began to command an audience. Shaw had become his loudspeaker. From the other side of a Fabian screen that hid his physical defects, Webb planned to get his ideas implanted in the smart, the powerful, rich and successful figures of the world. People who felt chilled by Webb’s programme of national efficiency adored Shaw’s jokes, his acting, and gift for addressing two boys, a woman and a baby in the rain as if they were the greatest demonstration in the world. And behind him, invisible to the public, Webb was whispering the researched facts. But who had really ‘permeated’ the other was more difficult to know.
According to Webb, the Fabians always expressed Shaw’s ‘political views and work’. According to Shaw, Webb was ‘the real inventor of Fabian Socialism’. Each was a wonder to the other. Writing in the third person for his biographer Archibald Henderson, Shaw declared that ‘they valued and even over-valued one another’. But in overvaluing each other they overlooked one quality, essential in politics, that neither of them possessed: the ability to take action. Neither of them wanted to go directly into national politics, and it was this side-stepping that gave the Fabians their peculiar obliqueness.
Webb, the man of numbers, gave the Fabians their policy; Shaw, the man of letters, their tactics; and the two of them created the Fabian legend. From Webb came the distinguished Fabian tradition of research and education. In Shaw, they had a propagandist of brilliance. Everything he touched was given a bewilderingly cheerful coherence. Under their joint management, the Fabian Society became a club, a debating chamber, an ideas factory for the Labour movement in Britain, a focus for sociological research and literary-political propaganda. In place of the old revolutionary notion of attracting recruits until they were numerous enough to defeat capitalism at the barricades, the Fabians substituted the novelty that socialists should join other groups and permeate them with socialist ideas. They took socialism off the streets and sat it down in the drawing-room. They made it respectable by dealing it out as a series of parliamentary measures designed to merge political radicalism with economic collectivism. Shaw offered revolution without tears – you would hardly know it had happened. ‘A party informed at all points by men of gentle habits and trained reasoning powers may achieve a complete Revolution without a single act of violence,’ he stated.
Fabianism came to mean ‘permeation’. In the political vocabulary it was the Fabians who patented the word. This policy gradually gave the Society its identity. Shaw and Webb believed in argument on paper. Other leading Fabians were also men of paper, for example Graham Wallas, a schoolmaster and political scientist who eventually lost his capacity for agreeable companionship in the grind of public service. A more attractive figure was Sydney Olivier. ‘He was handsome and strongly sexed,’ wrote Shaw, ‘looking like a Spanish grandee... I believe he could have carried a cottage piano upstairs; but it would have cracked in his grip.’ Shaw recognized in Olivier the powerful man needed by the Fabians.
Olivier joined the Fabians with Webb in May 1885, and Wallas enrolled the following year. They became known among Fabians as ‘the Three Musketeers’, with Shaw taking the role of d’Artagnan. This small group directed the affairs of the Society. The ‘fifth wheel’ on the Musketeers’ coach was Annie Besant: ‘a sort of expeditionary force,’ in Shaw’s words, ‘always to the front when there was trouble and danger... founding branches for us throughout the country, dashing into the great strikes and free-speech agitations of that time... generally leaving the routine to us and taking the fighting on herself.’
With the support of Hubert Bland, Annie Besant urged the Fabians to advance boldly into front-line politics. But Shaw resisted this appeal and persuaded her that society must be reformed ‘by a slow process of evolution, not by revolution and bloodshed’. This was a preliminary to Webb’s famous phrase, first uttered in 1923: ‘the Inevitability of Gradualness’ – a philosophy that, by emphasizing the practical nature of their socialism, surrounded the Fabians with the glow of constitutional power and postponed for many years Shaw’s disillusion with parliamentary politics in Britain.
*
Shaw calculated that if the Fabian Society was to become the centre of British socialism then its independence from other groups must be established not only in tone and tactics, but also in the dismal matter of economic theory.
The job of shifting the Fabians out of the shadow of Marx had begun late in 1884. Marx’s value theory defined the value of a commodity as being determined by the labour involved in producing it. But Philip Wicksteed, a Unitarian minister devoted to the works of Ibsen and the study of economics, had argued that Marxist economists failed to account for the obvious dependence of prices on supply and demand and concluded that value depended on the utility of the commodity to the consumer. From 1885 to 1889, Shaw went to the meetings of a group which, under Wicksteed’s leadership, later grew into the British Economic Association. It was composed mainly of professional economists and members of the faculty of University College, London, and ‘was the closest Shaw had ever come to a university education’. A controversy with Wicksteed ‘ended in my education and conversion by my opponent,’ Shaw later concluded, ‘and the disappearance of the Marxian theory of value from the articles of faith of British Socialism’.
This was the first step for Shaw in getting rid of Marx’s inevitable class war. Marx, he insisted, had been a foreigner who, though he could analyse capitalist policy like a god, did not understand the British social system. As someone outside that system, he had lusted after its violent destruction. Those who swallowed Marxism whole were possessed by a need for war. Shaw’s need was for peace – to an extent where he made war (in Arms and the Man, for example, or in his journalism on boxing) unreal by mockery. Instead of a Marxist class war, he saw a conflict of interest between producers and the privileged unemployed – those who earned money and those who lived off rent. Such lines of battle did not run neatly between social classes, he pointed out, but through them. A continual civil war (as to some extent envisaged by Marx) could only come about if the Trade Unions and Employers’ Federations were determined to play the capitalist game of labourer versus employer, particularly through free collective bargaining.
On alternate weeks, Shaw attended another group, later known as the Hampstead Historic Society, that met at Wildwood Farm, a house on the northern edge of Hampstead Heath belonging to a stockbroker, Arthur Wilson. At the centre of this group was his wife Charlotte Wilson, a firebrand bluestocking from Merton Hall, Cambridge.
The Hampstead Historic Society became the chief policy-making forum of the Fabian cabinet. They would stride up to Hampstead and argue between themselves so forcefully that other socialists could not believe they would remain friends. For Shaw, the elimination of the traditional class war took the political initiative from the socialist body and gave it to the socialist head – a transference from the proletariat to the intellectual. If Shaw’s and Webb’s analyses of capitalism were right, then such men as they were to have the power in the twentieth century. The sense of this power gives Shaw’s Fabian writings their tone of authority, and Webb’s social investigations their extraordinary persistence.
But as Shaw admitted: ‘The fact is, 1886 and 1887 were not favorable years for drawing-room Socialism and scientific politics.’ These were the years in which the Tories, under Lord Salisbury, swept back to power, replacing Gladstone’s promise of Home Rule with the continuation of British dominance over Ireland, and replacing Chamberlain’s programme of land and housing reform financed by higher taxes on the rich with a policy of expanding the Empire abroad and protecting property at home. The new order was without authority in Parliament. The trade depression of these years had thrown many out of work. ‘They were years of great distress among the working-classes,’ Shaw wrote. In many large towns throughout the country stones were thrown, railings uprooted, windows smashed, shops looted. The times seemed to belong to the militants – in particular to Hyndman, who had created in the SDF ‘a machine that could mobilize up to twenty thousand demonstrators’. Compared with that, what was this stage army of Fabians – sixty-seven strong in 1886 and with an income of £35 19s.? The Fabian voice, insisting that true socialism was a matter of justice to the poor and not envy of the rich, was drowned. For the unemployed had begun to march and the Fabians, protesting their respectability, had no choice but to tag along behind them.
In the autumn of 1885 a police attempt to shut down a traditional ‘speakers’ corner’ had led to a socialist demonstration in which Shaw, as one of the volunteer speakers, had pledged himself to be imprisoned. ‘The prospect is anything but agreeable.’ But no arrests were made and the battle for free speech was won. The following February, the SDF paraded in Trafalgar Square and there was a ‘monstrous riot,’ as Queen Victoria described it, ‘...a momentary triumph for socialism and a disgrace to the capital’. London seemed open to a ‘French Revolution’.
The SDF planned the largest demonstration of all to take place once more in Trafalgar Square, on Sunday 13 November 1887 – a week after Sir Charles Warren, the new chief of the Metropolitan Police, had closed it for further meetings. Originally a protest against the Government’s Irish policy, it became another trial of strength over free speech. Every radical, socialist and anarchist body united to confront the forces of public order.
That day groups from all over London attempted to force their way into the square and were met by 1,500 police, 200 mounted Life Guards and a detachment of Grenadier Guards. Shaw, having studied the Act under which Warren had closed Trafalgar Square and decided that it was being illegally applied, joined the group at Clerkenwell Green. After speeches from William Morris, Annie Besant and Shaw himself, exhorting the people to be orderly and to press on in their irresistible numbers if attacked, the drums rattled, banners nodded, and they set off.
Shaw’s various descriptions of what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ are exultant. In every avenue leading to Trafalgar Square, the forces of Labour were broken up by squads of police. At High Holborn, Shaw and Annie Besant were swept aside by the front ranks of their own procession in counter-revolutionary retreat. ‘Running hardly expresses our collective action,’ he reported. ‘We skedaddled... On the whole, I think it was the most abjectly disgraceful defeat ever suffered by a band of heroes outnumbering their foes a thousand to one.’
The scene at Trafalgar Square was a débâcle. The red-haired adventurer Cunninghame Graham, rising like a Scottish Mephistopheles from the sulphurous smoke of Charing Cross Underground, was truncheoned to the ground and, along with the engineer John Burns, arrested and imprisoned. Annie Besant rushed everywhere trying to organize a defence line of carts and wagons against the Foot Guards. The mild-mannered Edward Carpenter was manhandled, he furiously wrote, ‘by that crawling thing a policeman’. Stuart Glennie, a Scottish philosophic historian whose special period was 6000 BC, charged the thin red line of Grenadiers with his raised umbrella as they were fixing bayonets. Shaw arrived unostentatiously with his vegetarian friend Henry Salt who, discovering his watch had been stolen, realized he could not complain to the police since he was there to complain against them. Shaw consulted his own watch and, deciding it was tea-time, walked home. After tea, he went with Annie Besant to Farringdon Hall where she chaired his evening lecture on ‘Practical Socialism’.
There were many lessons to be derived from Bloody Sunday. William Morris withdrew from outdoor militancy to the converted stable of his house on the Thames and the gatherings of his Hammersmith Socialist Society. For Hyndman it was the beginning of the end, as popular support hesitated, and veered elsewhere. To Shaw and Webb the retreat seemed a victory, not for capitalism over socialism, but for Fabian tactics over those of their socialist rivals. Once the Local Government Act of 1888 was passed, they set about turning defeat into success by working in municipal politics – a programme Hyndman called ‘gas and water socialism’. But two people, Annie Besant and John Burns, learnt another lesson for the twentieth century.
Amid all the vengeful growlings over their rout it was Annie Besant who acted most constructively, collecting funds, organizing newspaper support, arranging for the bail and legal defence of prisoners, storming the courts, contradicting witnesses, browbeating the police and overawing magistrates. She was all for returning the following Sunday to the Square, and made an impassioned appeal to the Fabians to do so. But Shaw, speaking in opposition, carried a reluctant meeting with him. ‘I object to a defiant policy altogether at present,’ he explained to William Morris. ‘If we persist in it, we shall be eaten bit by bit like an artichoke. They will provoke; we will defy; they will punish. I do not see the wisdom of that.’
Annie Besant was left with a conviction that success would have to depend on efficient planning and precisely calculated aims, on influencing public opinion through newspapers and the power of organization through the unions. Her leadership of the match-girls’ strike in 1888, which ended with improvements in working conditions and pay and led to the formation of a Matchworkers’ Union, was recognized as a triumph for these new orderly tactics.
Of the many strikes of 1889, the greatest, beginning on 14 August, was the London Dock Strike led by John Burns, which was won with the aid of funds from Australian unions and London demonstrations planned in consultation with the police. Burns emerged from the Dock Strike victory as a potential leader of British socialism. The future belonged to such people – a working-class man who represented Battersea on the London County Council, went into Parliament in 1892 and became the ‘first artisan to reach cabinet rank’.
The great Fabian success of these years was the publication, in December 1889, of Fabian Essays in Socialism. Shaw had been appointed editor and given the job of preparing the book from a number of Fabian lectures. Having been told by the publishers that the book was ‘commercially unproducible’, the Fabians decided to bring out a subscription edition themselves – a thousand copies at six shillings. It had decorations in dark green by Walter Crane on the front and by May Morris on the spine, and was distributed from Pease’s flat. The preface and two of the eight essays were supplied by Shaw, who also compiled the index, chose the paper and type, and drafted a handbill announcement. Within a month the entire edition was sold out – ‘it went off like smoke’. A year later, over 20,000 had gone and it was still selling at the rate of 400 copies a week. By becoming a best-seller, socialism was made respectable in capitalist terms.
Fabian Essays became a socialist bible. Suddenly Fabianism was famous. In 1891, 335,000 tracts were distributed; by 1893, the membership, which included many influential figures (Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Emmeline Pankhurst), rose to over five hundred and, in addition to the metropolitan groups, seventy local societies had sprung up.
One of the reviewers of Fabian Essays was William Morris. He regretted that such lucid economic analysis and exposition of socialist principles was no longer at the service of the revolutionary movement. Instead the Fabians advocated ‘the fantastic and unreal tactic’ of permeation which ‘could not be carried out in practice; and which, if it could be, would still leave us in a position from which we should have to begin our attack on capitalism over again’. Morris blamed Webb for this ‘somewhat disastrous move’. Webb had falsified the class struggle, substituted pieties about state regulation and reduced socialism to the mechanism of a system of property-holding. For Morris himself, socialism remained a ‘complete theory of human life, founded indeed on the visible necessities of animal life [which]... will not indeed enable us to get rid of the tragedy of life... but will enable us to meet it without fear and without shame’. He wrote warmly, if regretfully, of Shaw. ‘If he could only forget the Sidney-Webbian permeation tactic... what an advantage it would be to us all!’
Morris and Webb were Shaw’s political mentors. Morris was a great man and Webb a great brain; Morris a hero for all time and Webb a man of the times. Shaw wanted to unite the applied arts with the social sciences and use Webb’s logic to circumvent Morris’s sense of history. But they remained two heralds beckoning Shaw in different directions. So he continued speaking of the Fabians with two voices. His most persistent voice aggrandized the Fabian achievement. The other voice sounded his despair that they had not achieved more. He insisted that ‘Webb made no mistake’. But he was also to acknowledge by the 1930s the possibility that ‘Morris was right after all’. He turned to one and then to the other: and eventually he turned to Soviet Russia.