What a transformation scene from those first years I knew him: the scathing bitter opponent of wealth and leisure, and now! the adored one of the smartest and most cynical set of English Society... our good sense preserve us!
The Diary of Beatrice Webb (14 October 1905)
‘Politics are very topsy-turvy just now,’ Beatrice Webb wrote at the end of December 1903, ‘and one never knows who may be one’s bedfellow!’ Many of the Fabians were suspicious of the social glamour with which the Webbs surrounded themselves. Sidney himself warned Beatrice that they should not be ‘seen in the houses of great people’. But the Fabian policy of permeation made it obligatory for them to enter the drawing-rooms of Edwardian polite society.
This permeation was taking the Webbs away from the evolution of the Labour Party. They took little notice of the attempts to bring socialism and the trade unions together as a parliamentary Labour Party. As Shaw warned Pease, ‘any sort of amalgamation means, for us, extinction’. Power, they believed, still resided with the traditional parties in Parliament and access to power must still lie through persuading them.
Among the Liberals, they had chosen Lord Rosebery, an enigmatic figure who had left the leadership of the party in 1896. The speech he made in Chesterfield at the end of 1901 owed much to ‘Lord Rosebery’s Escape from Houndsditch’, the article that Sidney Webb had written, and Shaw toned up, the previous September. Using this as his brief, Rosebery attacked the record of party politics and called for a ‘clean slate’ on which to draft a programme of national efficiency.
At the top of this clean slate, the Webbs hoped to chalk up housing and education. But what did Rosebery himself intend? He was grateful to Sidney Webb for giving him something to say, but he had taken off his ‘Gladstonian old clothes’ and, instead of putting on the new collectivist garments that Sidney Webb handed him, he simply put himself to bed and switched out the light. ‘Why are we in this galley?’ Beatrice wondered. And Shaw himself was driven to concede the emptiness of their Rosebery campaign.
But permeation did seem to work with the Conservatives. Their Tory bedfellow was Arthur Balfour who succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister in the summer of 1902 and ‘will I think,’ Beatrice predicted, ‘make no ripple of change’. Quietly scintillating at the dinner table, he was well-spoken and precise-sounding in the House of Commons, and as a political thinker elegantly indecisive. Like Beatrice, he sometimes felt he would have preferred a contemplative to a public life – in fact it struck Beatrice as ‘the oddest fact’ that he should be ‘mixed up... with democratic politics’. Really he had gone into politics to please his mother and then developed the knack of pleasing all sorts of people. He was at home on the golf course, in the concert hall and among the ‘gallants and graces’ of the fashionable world; popular too with the finer minds of the universities, the pick of the clergy, the flower of the bench: and also with the Webbs.
It seemed to them incredible that a Prime Minister in his mid-fifties should have preserved an open mind on so many political questions. His opinions shifted uneasily between the need for action and the futility of taking it. Unlike Rosebery he was not to be persuaded by what might be popular but by whether he was bored or not. He was easily bored – so much politics was without refinement of thought or sensibility. It was here that the Webbs saw their opportunity. Between 1902 and 1905 they ‘slipped into’ friendship with him. ‘He comes in to dinner whenever we ask him, and talks most agreeably,’ Beatrice noted. Balfour responded to these Fabians as a connoisseur might respond to an unusual wine. He believed Shaw to be ‘the finest man of letters of to-day’ – though he would not read his Plays Unpleasant because ‘I never read unpleasant things’. He counted on the Fabians painlessly fitting such unpleasant things into the perfect equilibrium of his life, and the Webbs endeavoured to oblige. ‘I set myself to amuse and interest him,’ Beatrice wrote. And he was so responsive intellectually, so courteous, that ‘we found ourselves in accord on most questions’.
But Beatrice distrusted her attraction to Balfour. She had with difficulty walked away from the social world to which her family belonged and dedicated herself to disinterested public service – and now found that this service was leading her back into the milieu she had abandoned. For Balfour belonged to ‘the Souls’, that exquisite group of intellectuals with artistic and aristocratic tastes who were to find an obituary in Heartbreak House.
This immersion in party-giving-and-going seemed justified by what the Fabians achieved over the Education Acts of 1902 and 1903. Sidney’s Fabian Tract No. 106, The Education Muddle and the Way Out, recommended the abolition of School Boards and the passing of control for education to the local government bodies. The Education Act of 1902 (which did not apply to London) ‘followed almost precisely the lines laid down in our tract,’ wrote Edward Pease. ‘Our support of the Conservative Government in their education policy caused much surprise.’
It caused more than surprise: it caused misgivings at the invasion of education by party politics, and Webb’s proposal to give assistance out of public funds to reactionary Church schools fomented outright opposition. It was far from being the ‘clean slate’ other socialists wanted. Over the Education Act of 1903, which transferred the School Boards’ powers to the London County Council, Webb experienced still greater difficulties. To Ramsay MacDonald it seemed that Sidney was collaborating with Balfour in order to get a Government post.
The Fabian success had been achieved at a dismaying price. There was, as Beatrice put it, ‘a slump in Webbs’ on the political market. After the local elections of 1904 Sidney was voted off the Progressive Party Committee and denied all positions of authority on the London County Council. He had hoped to be brought back into communication with the trade union world through his appointment by Balfour to a new Royal Commission on trade union law. But this became a ‘fiasco’ when the trade unions boycotted the Commission. Suddenly the Fabians seemed isolated. Through their educational reforms they had lost much of the interest they had spent years nurturing among the Liberals; and by their pronouncements on tariff reform they were to assist in the downfall of their one political ally, Balfour.
*
Webb had conducted the Fabian policy on education; it was Shaw who stage-managed their fiscal policy. The rightfulness of Free Trade had been taken for granted. But following Chamberlain’s speech in May 1903, ‘Free Trade versus Fair Trade’, tariff reform suddenly became a controversial electioneering issue. ‘I think we are clearly called upon to oraculate on the present crisis,’ Shaw wrote to Pease: and Webb reluctantly agreed. At a Fabian meeting in June 1903 he had given a tentative analysis of the situation, on balance against tariffs, but in effect recommending more Fabian research into the subject.
Shaw’s attitude was more dramatic. Following instinct rather than research, he had come out as ‘a Protectionist right down to my boots’, at one with Ruskin and Carlyle in his belief that ‘Free Trade is heartbreaking nonsense’.
Over the last six months of 1903, Fabian opinion had come to lodge halfway between tariff and Free Trade. To give commanding expression to such mixed opinion needed unusual dexterity. Shaw was convinced that the Fabian Society ‘must say something that nobody else is saying’. He had wanted to demonstrate that sensible tariff reform involved, as a preliminary step, the introduction of socialism. He proposed an agreement where, in exchange for their support of Chamberlain’s protectionist scheme, the workers were guaranteed a minimum wage. He also proposed that Chamberlain be invited to give a pledge that any extra revenue arising from tariffs would be applied to ‘public purposes’ and not ‘to still further reduce the existing shamefully inadequate taxation of unearned incomes’. Shaw argued that, in principle, there was no objection from a socialist point of view to ‘State interference with trade, both to suppress sweating at home and to guide and assist our exporters abroad’. Socialists were therefore necessarily anti-Free Trade as they were anti-Laissez-faire, both systems being historical counterparts of each other and idealizing the exploitation of market forces.
At a Fabian meeting on 22 January 1904 the draft of Shaw’s Tract No. 116, Fabianism and the Fiscal Question, was fought over page by page. With numerous amendments, it was published on 31 March. ‘Though I am the pen man of this Tract, its authorship is genuinely collective,’ Shaw explained in a Preface. It was as adept a performance as Fabianism and the Empire. Both tracts submerge immediate election questions and extreme Fabian differences in the creed of international collectivism and a lucid exposition of the practical benefits of domestic socialism that might be wrung out of an imperial policy.
Shaw did not believe that the Labour Party would win seats at the next election. He expected Chamberlain to become Prime Minister, and if Chamberlain could be persuaded to accept a minimum wage for workers, the Fabian work on tariff reform would not be in vain.
But in the election following Balfour’s resignation on 4 December, the Liberals won an unprecedented majority. Their leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, that ‘weak, vain man’ whom ‘nobody will follow’, became Prime Minister and various Liberal friends of the Webbs (Asquith, Grey and Haldane), making their peace, accepted office under him. Balfour was never again to lead the party in office; and Joseph Chamberlain (who suffered a stroke not long afterwards) never again held political office.
There was one further surprise at the election: fifty-three seats were captured by Labour men. Of these, twenty-four were trade unionists (mostly textile and mining men) who owed their primary allegiance not to Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie, but to the Liberal Party which had pledged to restore protection of union funds from liability for loss caused through industrial disputes. The complexion of British politics was changing. A successful pact had been made between socialism and trade unionism that gave the Labour movement a parliamentary base in national politics. In The Clarion Shaw laid down some ‘Fabian Notes’ on the election. The Labour members had provided nothing more than ‘a nominally independent Trade Unionist and Radical group,’ he wrote. ‘...I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a party.’
We have always been misunderstood, mistrusted, and from time to time roundly denounced and vilified not only by the other Socialist Societies but even by a minority of the Fabian Society... From William Morris in 1890 to H. G. Wells in 1906, all the able, energetic and impatient spirits have begun by demanding an abandonment of the Fabian policy, and have ended by perceiving that it is the only possible policy under the circumstances.
Discarded section of Shaw’s leaflet, Election of Executive Committee 1907–8 (8 February 1907)
The unease felt by growing numbers of Fabians swelled after the General Election of January 1906 into a tumour of discontent. Their policy of permeation looked like a series of little interferences and minor activities that had wasted resources and produced dubious results. What was the point of Sidney Webb ingratiating himself with Tories and Liberals at the dinner table while Shaw drastically insulted both parties in his tracts? ‘I quite understand that you can so define permeation as to cover all forms of Socialist activity,’ S. G. Hobson wrote to Shaw. ‘But that won’t help us.’
Hobson and others felt that the Fabian Society was in danger of counting for very little in politics. During its first twelve years, it had lined up what was potentially a great following in the country. Then it had ‘ossified’. The last ten years seemed to be a history of lost opportunities. They had been supplanted by Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie, by the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee.
Like Fabius, the Fabians had waited. But when the new century arrived they had not struck hard – they had gone on waiting. Rising numbers of them however were insisting that the waiting game must end. ‘Webb has repeatedly told me that he does not believe in the possibility of a Socialist Party,’ Hobson told Shaw. ‘On the contrary, I think that an organized Socialist Party which shall include the LRC and the ILP is quite feasible and in every sense desirable.’
Shaw was not unsympathetic to this argument. The Fabian tracts gave the new Labour Party a programme for a decade of electioneering. Shaw argued that the Fabian Society must nevertheless continue with the policy of placing its work at the disposal of ‘anybody and everybody, including the established capitalist governments, who can and will carry out any instalment of it’. If, however, socialism precipitated itself into a genuine political party, then the Fabian Society must back it for all it was worth. But if trade unionism and traditional radicalism prevailed, then the next job for the Fabians would be to detach socialists from the Labour Party and ‘form a Socialist party in parliament independent of all other parties, but leading the advanced elements in all of them by its ideas and its political science’.
He envisaged the bulk of this new party coming from the middle-class proletariat, and substituting middle-class methods of business and conceptions of democracy for trade union methods – representative government in place of bodies of delegates. Their socialism (what Shaw would later call communism) would work to reverse the policy of capitalism by transferring private property into common wealth. The question was whether such a revolutionary programme could be carried out by Parliament, the municipalities and parish councils.
‘Do not let us delude ourselves with any dreams of a peaceful evolution of Capitalism into Socialism, of automatic Liberal Progress... The man who is not a Socialist is quite prepared to fight for his private property... We must clear our minds from cant and cowardice on this subject. It is true that the old barricade revolutionists were childishly and romantically wrong in their methods; and the Fabians were right in making an end of them and formulating constitutional Socialism. But nothing is so constitutional as fighting.’
Once a true socialist party was born in Britain, the Fabian Society ‘would shrink into a little academic body’. Shaw had been on the Fabian executive now for twenty years. He felt loyalty; he felt weariness. He wanted freedom as well as ownership – his child must grow up, become independent and powerful: his child. ‘We cannot sit there any longer making a mere habit of the thing,’ he advised Webb.
He dreamt sometimes of a Fabian party in Parliament. If the thing caught on it would prove the ‘right climax of the whole Fabian adventure’ – and if it failed what was there to lose? ‘This is the psychological moment,’ Shaw told Webb late in 1906. He had been convinced of this by a new leader that the Fabians had thrown up – a brilliant intellectual prospector on whom he might unload his political burden, as he hoped one day to hand over the theatrical future to Harley Granville Barker.
*
H. G. Wells was ten years younger than Shaw. He had seen the aggressive Dubliner with his ‘thin flame-coloured beard beneath his white illumined face’ at Kelmscott House. Like other students, Wells had been converted to socialism under the aesthetic influence of Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin. Late at night, walking back from Hammersmith through the gas-lit streets, or travelling by the sulphurous underground railway, their red ties giving zest to frayed and shabby costumes, he and his fellow-students would speak enthusiastically of Morris and Shaw – how fierce they were in spirit, how sage in method. A revolution seemed to be breaking out around them.
But by the time Wells and Shaw met almost a decade later, this revolution seemed to have become a cultural event. Wells, at the beginning of 1895, was suddenly given the post of theatre critic for the Pall Mall Gazette. On 5 January he turned up at the St James’s Theatre to see Guy Domville, ‘an extremely weak drama’ by Henry James. There were two audiences in the theatre that night. When the curtain came down ‘jeers, hisses, catcalls were followed by great waves of applause... The two audiences declared war.’
Wells, in his new evening clothes, had noticed how Shaw ‘broke the ranks of the boiled shirts and black and white ties in the stalls, with a modest brown jacket suit, a very white face and very red whiskers’. The new drama critic of the Pall Mall Gazette accosted the new drama critic of the Saturday Review as a colleague and, as Wells had to pass Fitzroy Square to reach his home near Euston, the two writers walked back together, a lean spring-heeled marcher and a valiant sparrow hopping beside him.
‘Fires and civil commotions loosen tongues,’ commented Wells, who described Shaw as talking ‘like an elder brother to me’. His conversation was a ‘contribution to my education,’ Wells recalled. But Wells felt out of place in the theatre, whereas Shaw understood that the pandemonium at the St James’s, likened by Henry James to a set of savages pouncing on a gold watch, had been a warning of what might happen in Britain if Fabian tactics failed.
After four months on the Pall Mall Gazette Wells decided to throw over theatre reviewing. During the next half-dozen years, he created a new genre of scientific fairy-tale with his vivid fantasies, allegories, fables and adventures – The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon. He wrote one book, then another, and then half a dozen more. They came like magic. ‘It did not take us long to recognise that here was Genius,’ wrote Ford Madox Ford. ‘...And all great London lay prostrate at his feet.’
Shaw too had been impressed. A natural story-teller, with a fertile imagination, Wells spoke directly to the people and was ‘our nearest to a twentieth century Dickens’. His romances of time and space stimulated Shaw’s optimism. Dickens’s world ‘becomes a world of great expectations cruelly disappointed,’ he wrote. ‘The Wells world is a world of greater and greater expectations continually being fulfilled.’
Wells was the modern man who accepted nothing of the past and could hardly wait to experiment with the future. He wanted to write history before it happened. It was after his next book, a ‘prospectus’ called Anticipations, that Shaw asked Graham Wallas (whose sister-in-law was Wells’s neighbour at Sandgate) formally to introduce them. ‘He [Wells] interests me considerably.’
Wells had also begun to interest the Webbs. Beatrice Webb confided in her diary that Anticipations was the ‘most remarkable book of the year... full of luminous hypotheses and worth careful study by those who are trying to look forward’. She gave the book to Sidney. Wells had imagined a technocratic élite called ‘the New Republicans’ that could regenerate the nation. I ‘find myself in sympathy with many of your feelings and criticisms and suggestions,’ Sidney wrote.
The Webbs seemed to stand for the more disciplined, better-informed expression of all that Wells was eager to achieve. ‘We discovered each other immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and co-operation,’ he wrote. This was the beginning of a pincer movement by the Webbs and the Shaws to recruit him to the Fabian Society. Wells is ‘a good instrument for popularising ideas,’ Beatrice noted in her diary, ‘...it is refreshing to talk to a man who has shaken himself loose from so many of the current assumptions, and is looking at life as an explorer of a new world.’
Wells was nervous of the Webbs. Sidney was so excessively devoted to the public service; and the handsome figure of Beatrice alarmed him. But he liked the notion of meeting influential people – Members of Parliament such as Asquith, Haldane and Grey, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, and Pember Reeves, soon to be made High Commissioner for New Zealand – at their political dinners.
In February 1903 Wells joined the Fabians. The Society ‘is always open to new ideas,’ Charlotte innocently encouraged him, ‘& to criticism of its past action.’ Sidney Webb had listed Wells’s Anticipations as one of his favourite books of 1901. Wells had chosen Three Plays for Puritans. ‘You are, now that Wilde is dead, the one living playwright in my esteem,’ he wrote to Shaw. He went to see John Bull’s Other Island at the Court Theatre, pretended that the figure of Broadbent had been a ‘disgusting caricature’ of himself (‘even my slight tendency to embonpoint was brought in’), and concluded: ‘The play has some really gorgeous rhetoric, beautiful effects, much more serious Shaw than ever before & I’d rather see it again than see anyone else’s new play.’
But underlying Wells’s admiration of Shaw boiled a vast irritation. In the mid-1890s he had been prepared to learn from the older writer as from an elder brother: he was not content to do so ten years later – especially on subjects about which he was educated and G.B.S. was not. ‘I was a biologist first and foremost, and Shaw had a physiological disgust at vital activities,’ he was to write. ‘...He detected an element of cruelty, to which I am blind, in sexual matters.’ Shaw’s main impulse towards other human beings was to establish a dominant relationship over them – something which Wells fiercely resisted. He regretted having fallen in with these Fabians.
A year after joining the Society, Wells attempted to resign. He was working so hard at his new books – A Modern Utopia and Kipps – he did not have time to attend the Fabian meetings. At once the prevailing influences of the Fabians, the Webbs and the Shaws closed in on him. And Wells capitulated.
He now felt trapped. For he was an escapologist, and this need to escape lay at the centre of his politics, Utopias and love affairs. The claustrophobia of marriage was to become endurable for him only after he had set up an alternative household with a mistress and could oscillate between two homes. ‘He is a romancer spoilt by romancing,’ Beatrice decided in her diary, ‘ – but in the present stage of sociology he is useful.’
Of the two romances he published in 1905, Kipps was an affectionate glance backwards at what had moved him in the past, and A Modern Utopia a blue book vision of the future disinfected of pain. His anxiety to escape from the present fitted perfectly with the mood of a country travelling from Victorian traditions into the complex territory of the twentieth century. He had made converts to socialism by translating the Fabian creed of national efficiency into popular fiction. In A Modern Utopia he reinvented the ‘New Republicans’ as a benevolent dictatorship of noblemen called ‘the Samurai’ who preside as social engineers over the ideal state. ‘The chapters on the Samurai will pander to all your worst instincts,’ he assured Beatrice Webb. But he had done what the Webbs had wanted. ‘He is full of intellectual courage and initiative,’ Beatrice observed. A Modern Utopia made Wells a hero among the more radical Fabians. ‘I’m going to turn the Fabian Society inside out,’ he promised Ford Madox Ford, ‘and then throw it into the dustbin.’
*
Wells’s campaign opened on 6 January 1906 with a Fabian lecture, ‘This Misery of Boots’, using the shoe trade to satirize the condition of England. It was both an illustration of what he wanted from the new Fabians, and an indictment of Shaw and the Webbs, ‘who will assure you that some odd little jobbing about municipal gas and water is Socialism, and backstairs intervention between Conservative and Liberal is the way to the millennium’.
He launched his main attack in a second lecture a month later on 9 February. ‘Faults of the Fabian’ was Wells at his most comic-destructive. Almost everything in the sphere of thought had changed in the last twenty years – unless it was the Fabian Society. ‘I am here to-night to ask it to change.’ A great deal of work, ‘with a certain lack of charm perhaps’, had been invested in permeation. Some of it was gratuitous, some of it unfortunate; and almost all of it was removed from socialism. Their indirect methods were a senile conceit of cunning: ‘something like a belief that the world may be manoeuvred into socialism without knowing it; that... we shall presently be able to confront the world with a delighted, “But you are socialists! We chalked it on your back when you weren’t looking...”
‘The mouse decided to adopt indirect and inconspicuous methods, not to complicate its proceedings by too many associates, to win over and attract the cat by friendly advances rather than frighten her by a sudden attack. It is believed that in the end the mouse did succeed in permeating the cat, but the cat is still living – and the mouse can’t be found.’
Wells’s next criticism of the Society was its size. It had an air of arrested growth, as if by the effort of taking an office in a cellar in Clement’s Inn, it had exhausted its energy. From this cellar, through the burrowings of one secretary and his assistant, the Fabian Society was to shift the industrial basis of civilization. Amid the jungle of politics it looked to Wells like ‘a pot-bound plant’.
They were also poor, the Fabians, always in debt. ‘You have it from Mr Bernard Shaw that poverty is a crime, and if so, then by the evidence of your balance-sheet ours is a criminal organization.’
Wells spoke on, adding to his catalogue of defects and accusations. The Fabians had evolved into a conservative society, and were collectivist only by definition of their collective inactivity. ‘We don’t advertise, thank you; it’s not quite our style. We cry socialism as the reduced gentlewoman cried “oranges”: “I do so hope nobody will hear me.”’
After an hour and a half Wells had nearly concluded his Fabian indictment. He had just one more vice to nail. ‘Our society is small; and in relation to its great mission small minded; it is poor; it is collectively, as a society, inactive; it is suspicious of help, and exclusive,’ he summarized. And, he added: ‘it is afflicted with a giggle.’
Of all the faults of the Fabians, he declared, this juvenile joking was probably the worst. No wonder they were never taken seriously by politicians. The giggling excitement that ran through their meetings ‘flows over and obscures all sorts of grave issues, it chills and kills enthusiasm,’ he said. ‘Its particular victim in this society is Mr Bernard Shaw.
‘It pursues him with unrelenting delight, simply because he is not like everybody else, as he rises, before he opens his mouth to speak it begins. Shaw has a habit of vivid statement... and he has a natural inclination to paradox. Our accursed giggle lives on these things. Now Bernard Shaw is at bottom an intensely serious man, whatever momentary effect this instant dissolution of sober discussion into mirth may produce on him, he does in the long run, hate this pursuit of laughter... you will not suppose that in attacking laughter I am assailing Bernard Shaw. But I do assail the strained attempts to play up to Shaw, the constant endeavour of members devoid of any natural wit or wildness to catch his manner, to ape his egotism, to fall in with an assumed pretence that this grave high business of Socialism, to which it would be a small offering for us to give all our lives, is an idiotic middle-class joke.’
The timing of this attack on the political insidiousness of Shavianism, and the humorous requiem over permeation, was perfect and during the discussion afterwards, and in the weeks that followed, Wells was engulfed by support. ‘People in the provinces think H. G. Wells is a great man,’ the secretary of a Socialist League branch in a Yorkshire mill town wrote to him, ‘and I can assure you they pay great attention to anything you say. Your audience is assured already, let the prophet appear.’
The prophet’s chariot took the form of a Special Committee – a squadron of Wells-picked men and women whose mission was to increase the ‘scope, influence, income and activity of the Society’. Wells had wanted them to move fast, finishing their work before he left at the end of March for a lecture tour in the United States. But Shaw and the Webbs, word-perfect in gradualism, entangled him with their assistance. The Webbs believed that, lacking the capacity for co-operation, he would not have the stamina to carry through his revisionist programme.
‘The more I think of Mr Wells’s Fabian Reforms the more do I welcome them & if only everyone will be sensible & broadminded I foresee a new era for Fabianism,’ wrote Marjorie Pease. Shaw too believed Wells was vitally important to the future of Fabians. But below his admiration lay resentment, almost envy. He saw Wells as attractive, gifted with intimacy and lovable while he was fated to be unloved. Wells had succeeded at once and (so it seemed to Shaw) without effort. ‘He was born cleverer than anybody within hail of him,’ Shaw wrote, using his own upbringing as an invisible comparison. ‘You can see from his pleasant figure that he was never awkward or uncouth or clumsy-footed or heavy-handed...
‘He was probably stuffed with sweets and smothered with kisses... He won scholarships... The world that other men of genius had to struggle with, and which sometimes starved them dead, came to him and licked his boots. He did what he liked; and when he did not like what he had done, he threw it aside and tried something else.’
Shaw knew nothing of the illnesses and insecurities of Wells’s early years. He simply saw, in contrast to himself, someone who had ‘never missed a meal, never wandered through the streets without a penny in his pocket, never had to wear seedy clothes, never was unemployed’. And now he was being fussed over by the whole family of Fabians.
Wells arrived back from the United States still eager to put ‘woosh’ into the Fabians. The contrast between the go-ahead Americans and recalcitrant Englishmen had stimulated his radical energies. He wanted to change permeation into propaganda: to make the Society into a bigger, richer, simpler, less centralized organization. He wanted to obliterate Shaw’s influence, to fade him out of its past by rewriting the Fabian tracts himself, and by realigning Fabian loyalties with the Labour Party and Keir Hardie who had fought the battle for socialism while Shaw had been making jokes elsewhere. He proposed changing the name of the Society to the British Socialist Party – but this was unanimously rejected by the executive which also rejected (by six votes to five) Wells’s redefinition of the purpose of the Society as forwarding the progress of socialism ‘by all available means’.
His report was published in November together with a Counter Report and Resolutions on behalf of the executive which had been written by Shaw. To Wells it seemed the most ‘mischievous piece of writing I have read for a long time’, destined, with its preposterous fables of Fabian foresight, to become ‘a classic in the humorous literature of Socialism’.
Most of the issues which divided these two teeming documents were matters of internal reorganization and not difficult to reconcile. But beneath this administrative business lay a hidden agenda. The Fabians were a family, with Wells their rebel son. They had prevented him leaving and he now turned murderously back on them. He wanted to kill off the parents and, in his own image, father a new breed of this family. His fantasy of omnipotence, with its current of sexual energy, attracted crowds of excited Fabians for his dramatic confrontation with G.B.S.
Their first crossing of swords took place on 7 December at Essex Hall. Shaw moved the executive’s resolution. His tone was friendly, his argument ominously reasonable.
Then Wells rushed up and began to address the meeting. Until then it had seemed as if, like the magical hero in his story ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’, he might perform anything he wished. But he spoke badly. His proposals for reorganizing the Society degenerated into a list of accusations against Shaw and the Webbs. He moved an amendment calling for the abolition of the executive and its replacement by a larger representative body that would endorse the ‘spirit and purport’ of his Special Committee’s proposals. There had been a swell in favour of his amendment at the start; by the time he ended it had sunk. A second-reading debate was arranged one week later.
During the interval both parties prepared. Wells had described as ‘shabby and unwise’ the Fabian failure to co-operate with Keir Hardie. What he did not reveal was that he had written to Keir Hardie and been advised by him not to waste time bullying these steady-going Fabians ‘who would continue to do their own useful work’. It was ‘not quite fair’ to the Society. ‘Why not leave it to pursue its own way by its own methods,’ Keir Hardie suggested, ‘and come in and take your part in the political side of the movement as represented by the ILP?’
The answer to this was that Wells wanted to capture the Fabian army from Shaw, lead it over to Keir Hardie, and then go off to do something else. But Keir Hardie had been critical of Shaw too. Had his report been ‘more accurate historically and less bombastic,’ he wrote to G.B.S., ‘the task of averting a menace to the movement wd have been easier.
‘That apart what I wd like to see passed wd be a declaration of loyalty to the Labour Party which wd be binding on the Society and on its officials [who]... shall not support the candidates of other political parties... in this respect members of the Fabian Society are sad sinners.’
Neither Wells nor Shaw mentioned their letters from Keir Hardie when Wells turned up at Adelphi Terrace the day after the Essex Hall encounter. He came with an offer of compromise. ‘Why dont you see how entirely I am expressing you in all these things?’ he had asked G.B.S. But Shaw had scented victory. He proposed leading this second debate. It would be a peculiarly Shavian exercise – a ‘terrific’ verbal victory achieved without ‘saying anything unkind’. He retreated into the country to gather his superiority. ‘All I dread is being in bad form,’ he wrote; ‘for I am overworked.’
The crowd was even larger for this second contest. At nine o’clock Shaw rose to speak. If Wells’s amendment abolishing the executive were passed, he said, the executive would obey it ‘by not offering themselves for re-election’. It would be dismissal with dishonour: they would be drummed out. But this amendment, he reminded the audience, had nothing to do with the two reports. Over the serious business of the proposals in these reports, the executive would never resign, even if defeated on every resolution, but would faithfully carry out the decisions of the Society. Above the uproar Wells was heard pledging himself not to resign. ‘That is a great relief to my mind,’ continued Shaw. ‘I can now pitch into Mr Wells without fear of consequences.’
He then offered up Wells for Fabian entertainment. ‘During his Committee’s deliberations he [Wells] produced a book on America,’ Shaw told his audience. ‘And a very good book too. But whilst I was drafting our reply I produced a play.’ Shaw paused and there was silence. S. G. Hobson in the audience noticed his eyes vacantly glancing round the ceiling. ‘It really seemed that he had lost his train of thought,’ Hobson remembered. ‘When we were all thoroughly uncomfortable, he resumed: “Ladies and gentlemen: I paused there to enable Mr Wells to say: ‘And a very good play too!”’
Wells had paid the penalty for having attacked the Shavian joke. For it was this joke which seemed to dissolve him into sustained laughter. The chairman took it for granted that the amendment was withdrawn by consent: and Wells made no protest. ‘Keats was snuffed out by an article,’ commented Hobson; ‘Wells was squelched by a joke.’
‘No part of my career rankles so acutely in my memory with the conviction of bad judgement, gusty impulse and real inexcusable vanity,’ Wells afterwards admitted. But: ‘I was fundamentally right.’ He had reacted with imaginative enthusiasm to the future; and to the past with splenetic irritation. The present had been turned into theatre, which he had never liked or understood. ‘Now we shall see whether he will forgive G.B.S.,’ commented Beatrice.
This was not how G.B.S. saw it. He had arranged everything so that Wells could ‘come up smiling’ again among the Fabians. His purpose extended not a frown further. For he recognized that ‘Wells is a great man’. He was a glamorously popular figure, particularly among the women of the new Fabian nursery. ‘Tell the dear man that it is almost impossible to do anything without him,’ Maud Reeves wrote to Wells’s wife. Other Fabians, too, begged him not to desert them. To Shaw it seemed that the worse Wells behaved the more he was indulged.
No one knew what Wells would do next. The past still rankled: he felt a grievance. It seemed to him that Shaw’s mind had been corrupted by public speaking and destroyed by the committee habit. Nevertheless he told Shaw: ‘you are always sound hearted & I am always, through all our disputes & slanging matches, Yours most affectionately, H.G.’ And Shaw agreed that Wells had played a ‘great game’ with ‘immense vitality and fun’. There was no excuse for quarrelling – yet it seemed inevitable.
‘I’m damnably sorry we’re all made so,’ wrote Wells.
‘To complain of such things is to complain that the leaves are green and the sky blue,’ wrote Shaw.
But what good came of it in the end? The issue had been shifted from a comparison of reports and policies to a gladiatorial contest of personalities. To Wells’s frankness, his raging desire to discover the truth, Shaw had opposed something polemically formidable and professionally correct, yet somehow dubious. ‘I incline to the prophecy that five years will see H. G. Wells out of the Society,’ Beatrice Webb wrote. ‘...It will be interesting to watch.’
As a matter of fact, I am overrated as an author: most great men are.
When the curtain came down on 28 November 1905, it was clear that Major Barbara was to be Shaw’s most controversial success. The critics were impressively divided. Desmond MacCarthy told his readers: ‘Mr Shaw has written the first play with religious passion for its theme and has made it real. That is a triumph no criticisms can lessen.’ But the anonymous critic of the Pall Mall Gazette found that the play betrayed ‘an utter want of the religious sense’ and that its author was ‘destitute of the religious emotion’. In the Sunday Times, while acknowledging G.B.S. to be ‘the most original English dramatist of the day’, J. T. Grein recoiled from Bill Walker’s punching of the down-and-out Rummy Mitchens and his assault on the young Salvation Army lass Jenny Hill; this ‘double act of brutality literally moved the audience to shudders. It was beyond all bounds of realism in art. It was ugly and revolting.’ But Max Beerbohm saw that ‘the actor impersonating the ruffian aimed a noticeably gentle blow in the air, at a noticeably great distance from the face of the actress impersonating the lass’. Critics who professed themselves outraged, Beerbohm concluded, ‘must have been very hard up for a fair means of attack’.
These critics felt inconvenienced on several counts. The play’s ‘lack of straightforward intelligible purpose’ (Morning Post) made it spectacularly difficult for them to calculate its effect on audiences. Collectively they offered the choice between ‘an audacious propagandist drama’ (Clarion), ‘one of the most remarkable plays put upon the English stage’ (Speaker), a work of ‘deliberate perversity’ (Morning Post) or of the ‘keenest insight and sense of spiritual beauty’ (Saturday Review). There was no consensus as to whether G.B.S. was ‘ephemeral’ (John Galsworthy) or ‘a high genius’ (Oliver Lodge).
The war that had opened between the two audiences at Henry James’s Guy Domville was now breaking out between critics and the public. Against all odds Shaw had become a fashionable craze. ‘The old order is changing,’ calculated one of the Clarion writers. Shaw’s message to society ‘to cast all its obsolete creeds and moral codes to the scrap heap’ matched the new order.
Yet Shaw’s career was now being blessed by the guardians of a society he was working to destroy. On the first night of Major Barbara there were almost as many carriages and motor cars outside the Court ‘as there are in the Mall on a Drawing-room day’. Shaw was box office at last. Rupert Brooke, after flying visits to the Court from Rugby and then Cambridge, described John Bull’s Other Island as ‘unspeakably delightful’, Candida ‘the best play in the world’ and Major Barbara ‘highly amusing & interesting, & very brutal’. G.B.S. had been voted ‘one of our leaders in the revolutionary movement of our youth,’ wrote Leonard Woolf. Though Shaw’s dramas did not have the grandeur of Ibsen’s, they were played at the Court Theatre with relentless gusto, like a hurricane sweeping into the alley of Victorian morality and scattering the accumulated litter. Shaw, the champion of free speech and free thought, of paradoxical common sense and the ingenious use of reason, had ‘a message of tremendous importance to us’. Along with Wells and Arnold Bennett, he had become one of the idols of young intellectuals. Many of the young men and women who attended the Court Theatre entered as fin de siècle Bohemians and emerged as twentieth-century radicals. Even A. B. Walkley, the reactionary critic of The Times, was obliged to admit that ‘there is no such all-round acting in London as is nowadays to be seen at the Court theatre’.
The ensemble playing at the Court handed over the actor-manager’s authority to the dramatist-producer. For over two centuries, from Thomas Betterton to Beerbohm Tree, the history of the British theatre had been the history of great actors. The Court Theatre set up a different standard of merit, bringing the acting and production of plays more in line with that of the contemporary Scandinavian and German stage. It changed the public’s attitude. They went to see the play rather than an actor; and they had confidence in the all-round excellence of the cast.
Because the actors recognized Barker and Shaw as practical men of the theatre and respected their choice of plays, knowledge of stagecraft and skill at casting, they were willing to work as a team, accepting the smallest parts however successful they had earlier been in major roles. Barker believed that a variety of parts extended an actor’s range, and he believed in repertory as a method of sustaining a school of actors.
Barker was a more literary and autocratic producer than Shaw. He liked to question his actors over the past history of their characters. ‘You are not, I hope, going to tell me that the fellow drops from the skies, ready-made, at the moment you walk on the stage?’ The biographies he provided became green-room legends. ‘I want when you enter to give the impression of a man who is steeped in the poetry of Tennyson,’ he was reputed to have told Dennis Eadie. For a scene in one of his own plays, he advised an actress that ‘from the moment you come in you must make the audience understand that you live in a small town in the provinces and visit a great deal with the local clergy; you make slippers for the curate and go to dreary tea-parties.’ Her one line in this scene was: ‘How do you do?’ Though a target for jokes, Barker was introducing a form of Stanislavsky’s method of psychological realism which, he claimed, had been forced on actors by the bare dialogue of Ibsen with so much implicit in it.
Shaw was more matter-of-fact. If the producer, watching rehearsals, noted ‘Show influence of Kierkegaard on Ibsen in this scene’ or ‘the Oedipus complex must be very apparent here. Discuss with the Queen’, then ‘the sooner he is packed out of the theatre the better’. If he noted ‘Ears too red’, ‘Further up to make room for X’, ‘He, not Ee’, ‘This comes too suddenly’, then, Shaw concluded, ‘the producer knows his job and his place’.
Shaw would read his plays, first to friends, then to the company. Before the first rehearsal, he worked out on a chessboard with chessmen and a boy’s box of assorted bricks, every entry, movement, rising or sitting, disposal of tambourine and tennis racket. The first rehearsals at the Court were always choreographic, the actors having their books in hand and the producer on the bare stage with them (the exits marked by a couple of chairs) teaching them their movements. Once these had been mastered, the words learned, and the actors made comfortable with what was going on, the books were discarded and the producer would leave the stage to sit front of house with a notebook and torch. ‘From that moment, he should watch the stage as a cat watches a mouse,’ Shaw advised, ‘but never utter a word or interrupt a scene during its repetition no matter how completely the play goes to pieces, as it must at first when the players are trying to remember their parts and cues so desperately that they are incapable of acting.’
The producer at the Court (whom we would now call director) involved himself in reading plays, choosing casts, inventing the machinery, arranging the lighting, designing scenery and costume, adding incidental music, and co-ordinating everything except finance, which belonged to Vedrenne. Shaw liked to take a week over the stage movements, a fortnight for memorizing, and a final week for the dress rehearsals, when he would come on the stage again, going through passages that needed finishing, and interrupting now whenever he felt like it. Barker liked longer but in the crowded Court schedule this was seldom practicable.
Shaw had come to the theatre with the twin aspirations of giving the British public a political education and creating verbal opera; Barker’s aim was to discover, through fractured syntax, crafted inarticulateness, oblique dénouement, the naturalistic dialogue to express a new stage situation. From those different aims as composers of plays arose their different styles of conducting the players.
Barker had never witnessed the heroic acting of old-timers. His taste for low tones, which worked perfectly for his own plays and those of Galsworthy, did not seem to suit Shaw who entreated him to ‘leave me the drunken, stagey, brassbowelled barnstormers my plays are written for’. Barker’s restrained style ‘makes me blush for the comparative blatancy of my own plays,’ Shaw conceded.
Shaw was patient and persistent, used a good deal of flattery, and took advice from some of the better actors. Barker was more persistent and less patient. Shaw set a limit of three hours (preferably between breakfast and lunch) and ensured that actors with only a few lines to speak were not kept hanging around all day while the principals rehearsed. Barker was a perfectionist and sometimes refused to leave off rehearsing until, according to Shaw, ‘the unfortunate company had lost their last trains and buses and he had tired himself. He also got alarmingly annoyed. ‘His curses are neither loud nor deep: they are atmospheric,’ one actor remembered. ‘It is what he doesn’t say that paralyses one. He looks; and having looked, he turns his back to the stage – and you can still see him looking through the back of his head.’
But it was exciting to work for Barker. If he did not spare his actors, he did not spare himself. They had the sense of collaborating at the beginning of a revolution in British stage production. The plays Barker presented had the appearance of being more natural, more lifelike, than anything else being performed in London and gave audiences a sensation of participating in the drama, rather than watching it from the auditorium.
Shaw’s fatherly feelings for Barker spilled over on to the whole company at the Court. They felt part of a family, working to restore the English theatre to its rightful place in national life. A vivid example was the career of Lillah McCarthy. Shaw had seen her first in 1895 as a sixteen-year-old Lady Macbeth, ‘immature, unskilful, and entirely artificial’. Yet she had gone at it bravely, her instinct and courage helping where her skill failed, and produced an effect that was ‘very nearly thrilling’. ‘She can hold an audience whilst she is doing everything wrongly,’ he wrote in the Saturday Review. ‘...I venture on the responsibility of saying that her Lady Macbeth was a highly promising performance, and that some years of hard work would make her a valuable recruit to the London stage.’
After ten years of hard work she wrote and asked to see Shaw. He was at this time looking for someone to play Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman. When she arrived at Adelphi Terrace (‘a gorgeously good-looking young lady in a green dress and huge picture hat... in which she looked splendid, with the figure and gait of a Diana’), he gave her a broad smile of recognition: ‘Why, here’s Ann Whitefield.’
As one of the principal players at the Court, Lillah ‘created the first generation of Shavian heroines with dazzling success’. Her technique, which combined the manner of ‘the grand school with a natural impulse to murder the Victorian womanly woman’, fell in perfectly with his stage needs. ‘And with that young lady,’ he wrote a quarter of a century later, ‘I achieved performances of my plays which will probably never be surpassed.’
Working at the Court was a revelation for Lillah. She seemed hypnotized by G.B.S. ‘With complete unselfconsciousness he would show us how to draw the full value out of a line,’ she wrote. ‘...With his amazing hands he would illustrate the mood of a line. We used to watch his hands in wonder. I learned as much from his hands, almost, as from his little notes of correction.’ During rehearsals they often lunched together at the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square – apples, cheese, macaroni and salads with chilly milk and soda. ‘I ate it because everything he did seemed right to me,’ she remembered.
Lillah worshipped Shaw: but she did not understand his plays. Mrs Pankhurst was to tell her that Ann Whitefield had ‘strengthened her purpose and fortified her courage’ and many other women told her that Ann had ‘brought them to life and that they remodelled themselves upon Ann’s pattern’. Lillah played Ann Whitefield at the Court in May and June 1905, and again in October and November, and bore witness that ‘she made a new woman of me’. She acted the part of Ann with earnest intensity. Barker, in the role of Tanner, ‘carried the thing through remarkably well’. But it was difficult to keep Lillah’s feet on the ground. ‘Her life was rich in wonderful experiences that had never happened, and in friendships with wonderful people (including myself) who never existed,’ Shaw remarked. She pursued Barker across the Court Theatre: and on 24 April 1906, at the West Strand Registry Office, she caught and married him.
The marriage had the air of being a brilliant success. ‘She was an admirable hostess; and her enjoyment of the open air and of travelling made her a most healthy companion for him,’ Shaw explained. Marriage suited Barker, who was no Bohemian. ‘The admirations and adorations the pair excited in the cultured sections of London society could be indulged and gratified in country houses where interesting and brilliant young married couples were welcome.’ Why then was Shaw ‘instinctively dismayed’? As his Court ‘children’, their marriage was that of brother and sister. They had no children, and were not well cast for what the other needed: a mother for him, a father for her. ‘There were no two people on earth less suited to one another,’ Shaw wrote. It was the marriage of actors and actresses, a stepping aside from reality, an escapade.
That summer after their marriage they went to stay with the Webbs. ‘I think what he [Barker] lacks is warmth of feeling – he is cold, with little active pity or admiration, or faithful devotion,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary. ‘A better acquaintance than a friend, a better friend than a husband...
‘She is a strikingly handsome lady, also hard-working and dutiful – a puritan, I think, by temperament... Otherwise, I fear she is... commonplace, and he has all the appearance of being bored by her after two months’ marriage.’
By the end of October 1906, they were back on stage as Tanner and Ann Whitefield. Next month they stepped into a new Shaw play at the Court: a tragedy in which Barker was an artist dying of consumption, with Lillah his wife – ‘the sort of woman I hate’, Shaw notified her.
Here am I, for instance, by class a respectable man, by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by intellectual constitution legally minded to the verge of pedantry, and by temperament apprehensive and economically disposed to the limit of old-maidishness; yet I am, and have always been, and shall now always be, a revolutionary writer.
Preface to Major Barbara
Over the early summer of 1906 Shaw wrote prefaces to John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara. The first, discursively favourable to Home Rule, ridiculed nationalism and the military and bureaucratic imagination that supported it. The second, in celebration of social equality, included some powerful invective against the malicious injury of judicial punishments and the social damage resulting from an inequitable distribution of money. Both prefaces were assaults on institutions of power. Then over the late summer, he wrote The Doctor’s Dilemma, a play aimed at another powerful institution, the medical profession.
It was Charlotte who reminded him of a good dramatic subject he had come across earlier that year at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. The Principal of the Institute of Pathology there was Almroth Wright who had recently created a scientific sensation by claiming to have found a method of measuring the protective substances in the human blood. Wright ‘discovered that the white corpuscles or phagocytes which attack and devour disease germs for us do their work only when we butter the disease germs appetizingly for them with a natural sauce’. The chemical condiments ebbed and flowed like the tide. Wright believed he had invented a means of calculating the periodical climaxes. Vaccine therapy could now proceed, he announced, on a scientific basis.
Shaw was keen to let the London drama critics know that the ‘scientific side’ of his play was ‘correct and up to date’. Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the hero, ‘is, serum pathologically, Sir Almroth Wright, knighted last birthday (May [1906]) for his opsonic discovery,’ he informed A. B. Walkley. Some of Sir Almroth’s friends would drop in to his research institute at St Mary’s at night and, among the glass tubes, bottles, powders, plasters, discuss the newest theories of ‘Vaccinotherapy’. Shaw was present at one of these late-night tea parties when a discussion arose among the physicians over admitting an extra tuberculosis patient who had arrived that day for experimental treatment. Wright’s chief assistant objected: ‘We’ve got too many cases on our hands already.’ Shaw then asked: ‘What would happen if more people applied to you for help than you could properly look after?’ And Wright answered: ‘We should have to consider which life was worth saving.’
This weighing of human worth on the scales of life and death is superficially the problem at the centre of Shaw’s play. Whose life is of greater value: the unprincipled artist of genius or the honest sixpenny doctor? If there is an air of unreality about this choice it is because, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, nobody at sea shouts ‘Bad citizen overboard!’ In real life, the doctor ‘doesn’t fool himself that the moral value of the characters comes into it,’ James Fenton was to write. ‘He chooses the people he has the best chance of saving.’
The real dilemma in the play, and the pivot of Colenso Ridgeon’s choice, involves the nature of our unconscious motives and the idealizing process of logic by which we justify them to ourselves and represent them to one another. Almroth Wright was a misogynist who had concluded in The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage that the feminine mind ‘accepts the congenial as true, and rejects the uncongenial as false: takes the imaginary which is desired for reality’. In The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw takes Wright’s view of the inferior and irrational feminine mind and applies it to his gallery of scientific men. In particular he focuses on the unconscious sexual motives of Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the fashionable physician modelled on Wright who, listing his symptoms, innocently takes medical advice when he is about to fall in love.
Shaw liked Wright and disagreed with him about almost everything. Lord Moran, who heard some of their contests at St Mary’s, remembered feeling sorry for Wright once Shaw had finished speaking. ‘I felt that he had been pulverized, but at the end of Wright’s reply I blushed to think that Shaw, who was after all a guest, had been so mercilessly shown up. The devastating effect of such speech depends on the art of selection. Every single sentence was a direct hit; there was not a single word which did not contribute to the confusion of the enemy.’
Here is a source and echo of the medical crosstalk in The Doctor’s Dilemma. Shaw’s sense of vulnerability to the power of this medical élite, displacing a fear of death, gave his satire its edge; his sparring matches with Wright also enabled him to parody his own habit of presenting himself as morally superior to human frailty and devastatingly up to date with scientific fashion. Unlike Wright, who had won an extraordinary pile of medals, honours and academic prizes, Shaw had never learned anything at school. ‘I could not pass an examination and win a certificate in an elementary school to this day.’ He was an academic manqué and resented his exclusion from university excellence – that nest of singing birds.
Behind these years of controversy with Wright, and the play that derived from their association, there lay a wish to take authority from the orthodoxly educated and give it to outsiders. Like the scholastic profession, the medical freemasonry was a closed circle of privileged people whose mesmeric power over other human beings angered Shaw. ‘It is awful how these scientific men wallow in orthodoxy, when they get the chance,’ he complained to Gilbert Murray. ‘...Free thought really depends on the men of letters – and progressive thought, too.’
*
The Doctor’s Dilemma shows us a cabal of physicians driven into the position of private tradesmen, abjectly dependent upon their patients’ incomes and delusions. Beneath the invented drama of the play with its surface tension of ethics versus aesthetics, lies a theme that confronts the philosophies of science for science’s sake with the social usefulness of art, balancing Wright’s way of looking at the world against Shaw’s. Sir Colenso Ridgeon’s choice, which is intended to illustrate the subjective foundations of scientific reasoning, exposes him at the end of the play as having been so emotionally self-deluded as to have ‘committed a purely disinterested murder!’
The most effective sections of the play depended on Shaw’s instinct rather than his research. He sensed that something was wrong with Wright’s reputation. The War Office, wanting to use Wright’s anti-typhoid injections, ‘first had him knighted and then used his knighthood as evidence of the unassailability of his theories’ – a similar process to that of Ridgeon’s knighthood in Act I of the play. One reason for the popularity of Wright’s treatment seems to have been its novelty. No Harley Street specialist could afford to see his patient leave him for someone more ‘up to date’. But looking back from 1970, W. D. Foster concluded in A History of Medical Bacteriology: ‘It is doubtful if this form of treatment produced any good results and certainly in most instances, it was valueless to the point of fraudulence.’
Shaw said of Wright that it was ‘useful to know a man who has discovered the philosopher’s stone but does not know the value of gold’. It was a percipient statement. The concept of certain body cells reacting in a measurable way to an invasion by bacteria ‘had great importance for the future development of bacteriology and immunology,’ wrote Dr Gregory Scott in British Medicine. But the significance of this discovery was taken up by Wright’s junior at St Mary’s, Alexander Fleming. While accidentally finding a drug that would take the place of vaccine therapy, Fleming was financed by money raised from the use of Wright’s vaccine, and obliged to pay perpetual lip-service to the man who became nicknamed ‘Sir Almost Wright’. The story was to end with the renaming of St Mary’s laboratory as the Wright-Fleming Institute and the development of the wonder-drug penicillin by Florey and Chain. Shaw’s instinct had alerted him to recurring and timeless patterns within the medical community.
There were several models for the artist Dubedat. Chief among them was Edward Aveling, the basilisk-eyed ‘blackguard’ whom Eleanor Marx had idolized. When Ridgeon assures Jennifer Dubedat that ‘your hero must be preserved to you’, he is protecting her from Eleanor Marx’s suicidal destiny by ensuring that her illusions survive her husband’s death. Shaw also recycled some of his feelings for H. G. Wells and Charles Charrington, used the case histories of Beardsley and Rossetti, as well as a scandal from the career of Sir Alfred Gilbert, sculptor of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and cast a backward look at Vandeleur Lee.
In the play Dubedat becomes the figure through whom ‘the Shavian devil is most active,’ writes Margery Morgan. ‘For the debate reflects a division that ran deep in the author himself.’ Critics have proposed that since Dubedat admits ‘I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw’, he represents G.B.S. But he had taken this statement from a court case. A youth called Rankin, sentenced early that year to six months’ imprisonment for attempting to blackmail his father, a schoolmaster, had pleaded guilty to being a disciple of Bernard Shaw as the explanation of his crime. In Wormwood Scrubs he refused the ministrations of the chaplain, and asked that G.B.S. be sent for. As Shaw was abroad, Stewart Headlam visited him in gaol. ‘It was quite clear that he was under the impression that my teaching was simply an advocacy of reckless and shameless disregard of all social and moral obligations,’ Shaw later reported, ‘an error which he owes, I should say, not to reading my works unsophisticatedly, but to reading the follies which the press utters about me... It was as a reductio-ad-absurdum of this error and partly as a warning against it that I made Dubedat in the play use Rankin’s defence.’
Shaw subtitled his play ‘A Tragedy’. To peddle self-delusion and advertise it as a happiness-drug was to manufacture human tragedy. Shaw recommended people to ‘stop taking any opiates or palliatives if you can endure life without them’; and he used the medical profession as a metaphor for every conspiracy of self-deception that worked against the public interest. The doctors in his play are all amiable men. It is public fear that insists on their omniscience, public superstition that equips them with their hocus-pocus of charms and cures, public ignorance that obliges them to trade in hypochondria. They are the idealists of Shaw’s philosophy, who are paid to give the philistines what they want and will be out of a job unless they do so.
Shaw believed that most progress depended on heretics but that most heretics were not vehicles for progress. In Dubedat we are shown a realist infected by poverty and the atmosphere of idealism. Ridgeon, the physician, romantically idealizes Jennifer who romantically idealizes her artist-husband Dubedat who idealizes his work as the murderous doctors idealize theirs.
The embodiment of romanticism is Jennifer. ‘Provisionally I have called her Andromeda; but Mrs Andromeda Dubedat is too long,’ Shaw wrote to Lillah McCarthy from Cornwall. ‘Here in King Arthur’s country the name Guinevere survives as Jennifer.’ The names reveal Shaw’s intention to parody the Greek and Arthurian myths of chivalry. Ridgeon sees himself as a Perseus rescuing his beautiful Andromeda by killing her monster-husband. By calling her Jennifer and preserving the connection with Arthurian legend, Shaw recalls his own ‘Mystic Betrothal’ to May Morris whose mother Jane had been painted as Guinevere by William Morris. The more recent case of Guineverism, Shaw implies, had been Lillah and Barker.
Shaw wrote his play, he said, in response to a challenge from Archer who had written that G.B.S. was incapable of writing a convincing death scene. ‘It is not the glory but the limitation of Mr Shaw’s theatre that it is peopled by immortals,’ he wrote. Shaw intended The Doctor’s Dilemma to be a ‘tragic comedy, with death conducting the orchestra’. To assist the critics, who had not yet heard of black comedy, Shaw issued a press release in which he prophesied ‘it will probably be called a farce macabre’; and as an aid for his audiences he added a quotation to the programme: ‘Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.’
The death of Dubedat is usually more interesting to scholars than spectators. The serious artist in Dubedat is already dead and the tragedy over. What remains is an actor performing a death scene for his audience on stage. The long operatic farewell, with its comic chorus, has none of the sordidness of death from tuberculosis.
Shaw was fond of his death scene. He described it as ‘none the worse because its climax is “derived” (not to say stolen) from Wagner’s End of a Musician in Paris’. The scholarship in which he wrapped the King of Terrors round becomes the weapon for a perfect riposte to charges of bad taste and cheap art.
‘The creed of the dying artist, which has been reprobated on all hands as a sally of which only the bad taste of Bernard Shaw could be capable, is openly borrowed with gratitude and admiration by me from one of the best known prose writings of the most famous man of the nineteenth century. In Richard Wagner’s well known story, dated 1841... the dying musician begins his creed with the words, “I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven”. It is a curious instance of the enormous Philistinism of English criticism that this passage should not only be unknown among us, but that a repetition of its thought and imagery 65 years later should still find us with a conception of creative force so narrow that the association of Art with Religion conveys nothing to us but a sense of far fetched impropriety.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant
G. Bernard Shaw.’
Touchstone: Wast ever at the Court, shepherd?
Corin: No, truly.
Touchstone: Then thou art damned.
Shakespeare, As You Like It
The materials for his play had accumulated gradually: but the writing was fast. Shaw had begun it on 11 August 1906 at Mevagissey on the coast of Cornwall. By 21 August, on Polstreath Beach, he finished the first act. A week later another act was completed. ‘It springs into existence impetuously with leaps & bounds,’ he told Trebitsch; ‘the only trouble is to get it inked.’
He wrote everywhere, ending the third act on St Austell Station in Cornwall and starting the fourth the same day after joining the train from Exeter to London. He came to the end of this act at the village of Moulsford in the Thames Valley, then started the last on the train from Reading to London. The first draft was completed at twenty minutes past six in the evening aboard a steamer on the Thames, as it docked at Cherry Garden Pier below Tower Bridge.
Shaw’s revisions (‘a slower job than the writing was’) persisted, through rehearsals, almost up to opening night on 20 November. From the Carfax Gallery the Court leased pictures by Augustus John, William Orpen and Will Rothenstein, suggesting an extraordinary diversity in Dubedat’s style.
Again the critics were divided. But Shaw himself noticed how they were beginning to compare him somewhat unfavourably to himself. ‘In the future, instead of abusing the new play and praising the one before, let them abuse the one before and praise the new one,’ he recommended. He was genuinely anxious for the press to act as a helpful patron to the Court. The ‘atmosphere of good humour’ which the newspapers could promote, he told Vedrenne, was ‘next to an atmosphere of solid money’ the most precious possession they could own. He felt a commitment to their enterprise not simply because it had given him an audience and made his name as a dramatist of performable plays, but because it represented a step towards establishing the theatre in England. ‘It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of points of honour, of conceptions of conduct,’ he wrote later when appealing for the building of a National Theatre, ‘of everything that finally determines the destiny of a nation.’
*
Barker used these years at the Court to test some of the ideas he and Archer had proposed in their book, A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates. This book, ‘the blueprint and the bible for the National Theatre movement’, envisaged a large repertory of plays, both ancient and modern, foreign and English. The Court was more avant-garde than anything that, for pragmatic reasons, they were recommending to the general public. But its success was an excellent advertisement for the scheme. Privately printed and circulated before the Court pilot project began in October 1904, their book was published shortly after the Vedrenne–Barker management left the Court in June 1907.
Barker and Shaw had introduced repertory into the London theatre and achieved what the young actor Hesketh Pearson called ‘the most famous epoch in theatrical management since the days of the Globe on Bankside’. But besides Barker and Laurence Housman, none of the contemporary playwrights (who included Galsworthy, St John Hankin, John Masefield and W. B. Yeats) wrote work that was really popular. The only outstanding success was G.B.S. himself. Of the thirty-two plays by seventeen dramatists presented at the Court over almost three years, eleven were his; and of the 988 performances altogether, Shaw’s plays made up 701. Everything could be explained away as having depended upon one man. After June 1907, when Don Juan in Hell and The Man of Destiny were presented in a double bill, Shaw’s portfolio was pretty well exhausted. There was a feeling that he had been rather too successful. John Quinn, the American patron and collector, reported that the theatre was ‘brimming over with Shaw and Shaw’s plays at present... Yeats says he will soon become a public nuisance.’
But the reputation of the Court partly owed its solidity to ‘the prudent pessimism’ of Vedrenne. ‘Barker, aiming at a National Repertory Theatre, with a change of program every night, was determined to test our enterprise to destruction as motor tyres are tested, to find out its utmost possibilities,’ Shaw wrote. ‘I was equally reckless. Vedrenne... was like a man trying to ride two runaway horses simultaneously.’ Vedrenne wanted to make money out of the theatre. Barker felt constantly balked by his subtle economies, his greeting of all fresh ideas with extravagant horror. Shaw represented their mutual dislike as a miraculous bonus. ‘The partnership of V & B has every aspect of permanence: you are exactly on the terms which bind men to one another for ever & ever,’ he promised Vedrenne, ‘each with a strong grievance against the other to give interest & life to what would otherwise be a tedious & uneventful routine.’
Everything was enlivened by what Barker felt to be Vedrenne’s ‘vendetta’ against Lillah McCarthy. ‘My position between you is very fearful,’ Shaw warned Lillah. ‘I ask myself repeatedly Is Lillah the greatest liar known to history, or is Vedrenne?’ And he cautioned Vedrenne: ‘You will end by busting up Vedrenne & Barker.’ Under this pressure they were all driven to abuse each other. ‘What with Barker gradually losing all desire to act, and Vedrenne gradually losing all desire to do anything else but act, the position has become more & more impossible,’ complained Shaw. ‘If I could only get V on the stage & B off it, I should amaze the world.’
In Shaw’s opinion, the job of producing plays was ruining Barker’s acting. But Shaw minimized Barker’s distaste for public performance. ‘I do believe my present loathing for the theatre is loathing for the audience,’ he was to write a decade later. ‘I have never loved them.’ He wished to retire and write for a more refined theatre – the National Theatre of his imagination. Shaw’s advice seemed partly to assist the first step in this retreat. ‘The next thing you have to do is to finish the play [Waste] & produce it,’ he had urged in the summer of 1906; ‘then publish it with Ann Leete & Voysey in a single volume.’
But Barker needed money to write at his ease and produce his plays fastidiously. By 1907 two possibilities lay open to him. ‘There is to be a new theatre in America financed by 23 millionaires; and I have been asked whether Barker will go over and manage it,’ Shaw announced to Lillah. This Millionaire’s Theatre, between 62nd and 63rd Streets on Central Park West, was being built to run on the repertory principles described in Barker and Archer’s blueprint, and it offered Barker an opportunity to cut free from Vedrenne and join a more intellectual partnership with Archer. ‘America looks rather real at moments,’ he wrote to Archer, ‘and it would be a correct sequel to the blue book if we went together.’
But the Millionaire’s Theatre was still under construction and other arrangements had to be made for the coming season of 1907–8. Shaw believed that repertory meant playing in London for advertisement and then playing on tour for money. Vedrenne wanted to capitalize on their success at the Court by advancing straight into the West End of London. Perhaps because touring was such a helter-skelter business, Barker mainly supported Vedrenne and together they leased the Savoy Theatre in the Strand. Shaw did not intend to join their partnership: ‘I shall act simply as usurer,’ he told them. To enable the Savoy season to open he put up £2,000 (equivalent to £94,500 in 1997) at five per cent interest – to which was added £1,000 each from Vedrenne and Barker who were both to draw salaries of £1,000 a year. ‘My own salary – another thousand – ’ added Shaw, ‘is to be taken out in moral superiority.’
The Savoy was twice the size of the Court and had become celebrated for its Gilbert and Sullivan productions. But the audiences from the Court never took to the Savoy where the management actually played the National Anthem and made them stand up. In his excitement Vedrenne appeared to Shaw to have thrown aside all his prudence; while Barker, his hopes focused on New York, would have been content with Restoration comedy. Shaw complained of his reluctance ‘to tackle anything but easy plays and easy people – easy, that is, to his temperament’. He also objected to the many revivals of his own plays, which were losing their sparkle. ‘The thing to aim at now,’ he insisted to Barker, ‘is a season without a single Shaw evening bill.’ He wanted Galsworthy’s new play Joy and Barker’s Waste to take up the running. But Galsworthy’s sentimental work was a disappointment; Barker’s Waste was banned by the Censor; and even the weakly cast production of Gilbert Murray’s version of Euripides’ Medea appeared lustreless. The Savoy season, which closed on 14 March 1908, had turned out a failure.
Immediately afterwards Barker took off with Archer for New York. But they found the New Theatre, ‘with an enormous, gaping, cavernous proscenium’, to be ‘fit only for old-fashioned, nineteenth century spectacle’. They returned in disappointment to London.
In the spring of 1908 Vedrenne leased another theatre, the Haymarket, to present Shaw’s new ‘dramatic masterpiece’ Getting Married. This was to be followed in the summer with The Chinese Lantern by Laurence Housman whose Prunella (in collaboration with Barker) had been one of the Court’s non-Shavian successes, and a new play called Nan by John Masefield whose Campden Wonder Shaw felt had been seriously underrated at the Court.
‘The Vedrenne and Barker enterprise then is as much alive as ever?’ Shaw made a Daily Telegraph reporter ask him in May 1908 – to which he answered: ‘it seems to be immortal.’ In fact Barker and Vedrenne longed to be free of each other, but (being so heavily in debt to him) could not come to any arrangement without Shaw’s consent. And Shaw, reluctant to announce their separation, succeeded in delaying it until early in 1911. Barker had by then written The Madras House, directed a season of plays at the Duke of York’s Theatre with the American producer Charles Frohman and begun a theatrical partnership with his wife. Vedrenne was starting on a new partnership, ‘Vedrenne and [Dennis] Eadie’, at the Royalty Theatre. To reunite them was no longer possible. Shaw, who had advanced £5,250 to them over the years and arranged for Barker to be repaid his loans first, agreed to accept £484 3s. 10d. (plus some assets from the sale of scenery) as a final settlement.
It had been ‘worth the cost a hundred times over,’ he declared; ‘but the cost fell on us, and the benefit went to the nation’. In 1909 he had joined the Organizing Committee of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, and converted his Vedrenne & Barker loss into an investment in the campaign. What could be done by private enterprise, he argued, had been exhaustively tried at the Court. ‘Messrs. Vedrenne & Barker were not rich men,’ he wrote. ‘They voluntarily forewent the opportunity of turning the enterprise into a lucrative commercial speculation and left themselves at the end with all their resources mortgaged. My own income falls very far short of the point at which the loss of sums of four figures becomes a matter of no importance... I had to stop.’