Extracts from lecture before Fabian Soc in London; views on length of working day, religion, education, marriage - issues that would confront his theoretical Socialist State, D 20, III, 3:1
12/20/25 I do not think I shall give you a definition by way of formula; but I will make, I think, perfectly clear what I mean by freedom.
I ask you to imagine a man standing between 8 and 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning on Hammersmith Broadway. He has to catch a train and to be, by 9 o'clock, perhaps half-past nine, possibly 10 o'clock, in some shop or office. He has to remain there until 1 o'clock. There is no use in your telling me that the man is free. He may be whistling 'Rule Britannia' as loudly as he possibly can; but he is not free, in any sense of the word that any ordinary sensible person will understand.
Even if he is not going into an ordinary shop or office; even if he is going to the Post Office, into the service of the community, although he is metaphysically free (from Mr Sydney Webb's point of view), from my practical and non-metaphysical point of view, which I am using for the moment, he is not free. If you ask him whether he can come with you to the National Gallery, say at half-past nine o'clock, he will tell you at once: "Oh, I am not free until 1 o'clock.'
Imagine that when it is half-past one o'clock that man is standing on Hammersmith Broadway again. His position is entirely altered. Now he is not bound to be in any particular place at any particular time. He considers what he will do. He can go to the Regent Theater matinee [where Mr Bernard Shaw's plays were being performed]; he can go off through Surrey on his motor bicycle and spend the afternoon there; he can go on the river; he can go home and foozle about with wireless, or he can dig in the garden, or he can sit down and read, or he can do nothing. That man is free for that Saturday afternoon. He is, for all ordinary purposes - and in fact in the only sense you can give to the word without getting into a terrific mess - free.
Can't Stop Growing Older
He says: 'I am free until 6 o'clock,' or something of that sort; and we all perfectly understand what he means. It does not, of course, mean that he can do exactly what he likes. There are certain things that he has to go on doing. For example, he is not free to stop growing older; and if you are a person of a litigious, argumentative sort you may say that a man who is not free to stop growing older is not really quite free at all.
He calls himself free, and I call him free, and in any practical discussion of the affairs of life you will have to call him free, to that extent. His freedom, we will say, lasts until 6 o'clock. Then there comes a further compulsion on him. He begins to get hungry. As a matter of fact, sometimes he gets hungry at 4:30.
The horrible habit of afternoon tea, which is destroying the nation, may come upon him. At any rate, he gets hungry. Also, to a certain extent, he gets dirty, especially if he is in London. Therefore he finds that he is no longer free. He must go somewhere and get a meal, and he must wash himself - unless he prefers to remain dirty.
When he has got through his meal he may have another little free time. But then he finds he wants to go to sleep; and as a matter of fact, he must go to sleep. He goes to sleep, we will say, for eight hours, during which, if his digestion is good, you may say he ceases to exist.
Standard Day
Now I suggest to you that what one may call the standard day, the standard working day, under socialism, will probably be something like that. Four hours work, eight hours sleep (which comes to twelve hours), and say four hours for eating, drinking, dressing, undressing, and a little resting that is not included in your sleep, and a certain amount of time for getting about.
So far as socialism goes it will give people the possibility of being free for eight hours; and it would seem that, having shewn how that may be secured, the Socialist has nothing more to say on the subject of freedom that anybody else has. He may say: 'Having gained this leisure, which we never had before, if you like to use it to enslave yourselves (which would be very likely what you would do, judging by what you do at the present time) well, that is not the fault of socialism.'
Partly through the domestic enthusiasm of Rosalyn Mitchell we have become very much interested in the question of marriage. How will marriage be affected by this extension of freedom?: It will be affected, not only by the mere question of leisure (which in itself would not affect it) but that condition of socialism, that condition of the working day, of equal income, and so on, will involve the almost entire abolition of what we call vested interests.
Anybody who has tried in our present society to get any change made knows that he always came up against a vested interest some time. You will see that the entire disappearance of these vested interests would make political change very much easier than it is at present; that is to say would make political progress, would make social progress - which is essentially a matter of change - easier.
But when you come to domestic freedom, then it is not so much a case of vested interests; it is a case of economic independence. A tremendous difference will necessarily be made if you bring about a state of society in which every individual is absolutely economically independent.
Unhappy Marriages
We are all, I suppose, happily married men - but more or less. Some of us are really so unhappily married that we allow ourselves to recognize that fact that we are unhappily married; but a very great many of us would recognize that we were not very happily married if we could escape from the marriage.
You know there is an extraordinary practicability about the human mind, men's and women's. Somehow or other the ordinary man or woman who has got what is called good sense - they do not allow themselves to worry about things that cannot be helped. Accordingly, if you have a man and woman married together, and if the woman cannot break up her household and go, because she has no means of existence (she can't go out into the street and practically starve, and she does not see that she can support herself), and if the man is really in the same position - if the man cannot extricate himself without ruining himself or without embarrassing himself tremendously - then those two people will never allow their minds to dwell on the fact that they are not well suited to each other and might do better elsewhere.
I think you will see that is a state of things where a wife could leave her husband without experiencing the slightest pecuniary embarrassment; where she would be perfectly self-supporting; where she would have an income quite independent or whether she was with her husband or not, and where the husband would be in exactly the same position in regard to himself - naturally, under those circumstances, the social pressure that keeps very many households together being completely relaxed in that direction, a great many households would break up. That is to say, a great many that do not now break up would break up under socialism, because there would be a great deal of trial and error before the perfect union was formed.
I also very much doubt whether the union would be of that extremely close nature that it is at present - I mean, the way in which married people, even under existing circumstances, interfere with one another's lives to an entirely unnecessary extent. When the economic pressure was removed, then, I think, on the whole, that the marriage tie would really literally be a looser tie. And that, I think, makes for greater freedom, and probably would make for greater happiness, in marriage. People under socialism are happily married - well, there they are. Nobody suggests that socialism is going to interfere with them. The only question is: Is socialism going to interfere at all? I think it is, because I do not think that any Government in any well-ordered State is likely to allow two people to get together and to produce children without asking them to register that bond in some way. One does not see, beyond the fact of registration, that socialism is going to interfere with them, except at one very important point, and that point is birth control.
Birth Control
It is difficult to conceive of a Socialist State which does not control birth. I do not want to pretend to know what I do not know about this question. It is an extremely obscure question. The question of birth control at present, and in our present society, has been prematurely forced on us. The present agitation for it is an entirely artificial thing, owing to the bad construction of our society.
If you take the world as a whole, to hear some of our Malthusian birth controllers dealing with the question, they really declare that the world is, and they imply always has been, under what is called by economists the law of diminishing returns. Which means, if you take it all through, that two men produce less per head than one man; that three men produce less per head than one man, and so on.
We all know, of course, that that is entirely untrue. Two men, if they cooperate with one another, instead of competing or trying to enslave one another, or fighting or squabbling (that is to say, if they are not normal Englishmen, brought up under our system) - those two men, by cooperating, will produce more per head than does one man, and three men cooperating will produce much more than three times one. When you come to the question of the relations between what a million men co-operating can produce, and what a hundred men cooperating can produce - well, the figures, if we could arrive at anything like exactitude in them would sound fabulous.
The Two Proletariats
A great many of our friends are very fond of talking about the class war. What they really imagine - what is at the back of their minds - is the idea that if they could organize the whole working class then they would be able to sweep away the proprietary class. They say that the war is between the proprietary class and the proletariat: 'Proletarians of all lands, unite, and you sweep away the proprietors.'
Yes, but the proletarians of all lands will not unite, for the excellent reason that one-half of them, instead of being productive, are hanging on to the proprietors; they are the retainers of the proprietors; they are the tradesmen of the proprietors. When the proprietors rob the real productive proletariat, then the parasitic proletariat proceed to rob the proprietors as best they can.
If we project ourselves into the remote future, when socialism has placed us all under the law of increasing returns in food, then for many reason, it may be desirable to limit the population - for a number of reasons that we do not at present think of. If you ask me how that is to be done, I do not know. I do not know what the real consequences of the artificial means that are used at present are. They are forced upon us, as I say, by our existing capitalist civilization. There are no visible bad results which are as bad as the results of the over-population which would be produced if they were neglected. The consequence is that they are practiced by practically all cultivated and educated people.
I suggest to you - I cannot, of course, hold out any hope as regards birth control at the present moment; birth control is a fact and a necessity at the present moment created by capitalism - if you want to get rid of that immediate necessity, you can bring about socialism.
Education And Religion
My subject would not be complete if I simply dealt, as I have done, with marriage and politics and Parliament (which I have referred to in the matter of vested interests) - if I left out the very important subject of religion, and, what is necessarily associated with that, the subject of education.
Grown-up people must find their own religion. You cannot control their religion. You can make them go to church; you can make them repeat a certain creed; you can say: 'If you do no repeat the creed we will burn you.' Under such circumstances you say: 'Thank you, I will repeat the creed.' That does not make people believe the creed, and it finally cannot make them behave as if the creed meant anything. But when you come to the question of children, then, of course, socialism will necessarily bring about a very great change
If there is one lesson which we ought to have learned from the history of the last two centuries, it is the lesson taught us quite early in them by the German poet Goethe, who said that the man who wanted life and freedom had got to fight for them every day. Socialism has not only to be set going, but it has to be kept going - and it never can be kept going unless every child is educated as a Communist.
I remember devoting one of these lectures to this question of education. I pointed out how utterly disheartening it was to us all to find that when we had educated those people in our own generation who were live wires, who were capable of education; that when one generation of men had had, say, free trade knocked into them, then had socialism knocked into them, then a few years passed and the whole thing was gone, a new generation had come up in the hands of the parson, in the hands of the squire, being taught in the old ways and taught the old things; being given the Bible as a rule of conduct, and being given the Catechism and Prayer Book, and so on.
These people grew up knowing nothing whatever about free trade, nothing whatever about socialism, about utilitarianism, about any of these things that had so definitely been taught by Fabian Societies, by utilitarians, by free-traders and all the rest, it was rolling a stone up a hill.
New Religion Needed
It is clear to me that a Socialist Government will say of the Bible: This literature is very interesting from an artistic point of view; people who want to become cultivated, people who for instance want to get an artistic literary cultivation, certainly must read the Bible. But we are not going to allow any person to put that Bible into the hands of a child and tell the child either that it is true as a statement of fact in every particular, or that it is a desirable guide to conduct.
Socialism will say: We will have our own religion. We will not have an Oriental religion which is completely out of date and is getting out of date even in the East. We will have an Occidental, a Western, religion, that belongs to our own time and that touches the morality of our own time.
You will have, of course, many people who will say; 'We told you so. Socialism wants to abolish religion.' If the sort of thing that they teach in the schools is religion, we are going to abolish it. But genuine religion is not quite so easily killed. Even the Bible cannot kill it, no matter how unscrupulously you use it.
You may take it that on the whole there will be a tolerably stiff State religion which will be taught to children; and anybody endeavoring to teach the children anything else will probably be treated exactly as we should treat a person like Fagin in 'Oliver Twist,' who deliberately taught children how to pick pockets. A great deal of the morality which is taught at the present time, and which children are taught to regard as very sacred, and as being the quintessence of honesty, you must remember, is, from the Socialist point of view, nothing but picking pockets and trying to cover up the fact with fine phrases.
My own opinion is that the burden of what is at present called religion has become so intolerable that people are unable to conceive freedom without getting rid of a great deal of it at least. You need not be afraid of killing what are called the eternal elements in it, and you will have to be rather careful in dealing with it, because it is very hard to say exactly where people find their natural religious food.
The Ethical Societies
I hope that a Socialist Government will deal very carefully and not too rationalistically with religion. There are people who call themselves ethical people, and very good people they are. Our ethical societies contain a great many admirable people; but they have produced some of the most horrible literature of modern times. They have produced books on morality for the use of children, and I solemnly declare that if I had a child I would give it ten Bibles - the Bible, and the Koran, and all the books that belong to the remotest past ages - I would say: 'Read these to nourish your soul, and to give you lofty ideals; but for God's sake don't read the works of the Ethical Society!'
I do not want to sit down without hoping that some of you will be able to let your minds play over the sort of future which comes down to the eight hours leisure a day; the tremendous fruits of leisure; the fact that leisure might become by far the busiest and the most fruitful part of the days that we should live.
I believe that we should probably do with less bread and butter. I am certain we should do with less clothes, I am not at all certain Mr Wells is not right in looking forward to the time when, at least in the middle of the Summer, we might do almost without them. You see there is a large movement that way among women.
But that leisure will become an extraordinarily fruitful leisure. The freedom that it brings will lead to invention; will lead to all sorts of things. And it is that leisure, it is that freedom, which will transform the world far more than the mere economic side of socialism.
Sarcasm assailed by H Bernstein, art by W Littlefield, D 13, IX, 11:3
12/13/25 With unctuous phrases Pierre Brisson in Le Temps of Nov 16 rings down the curtain on the conflict of personalities between George Bernard Shaw and Henry Bernstein, which has been chronically raging with the English and French playwrights as protagonists ever since the Saint Joan of G. B. S. was acclaimed at the Theater des Arts early last Summer. Brisson advises them to "contend with their talent, fight with their plays."
G. B. S. having been asked to contribute to Le Temps an article on his art, cast art aside and began to tell the French, particularly the Parisians, what he thought of them: France was corrupt and stagnant; Paris was the victim of an "intense provincialism."
Bernstein, author of "Samson," Le Voleur" and "Le Secret," repelled Shaw's attack, saying: "George Bernard Shaw knows to their infinite depths the laws of impoliteness. He boasts of this knowledge - sometimes a trifle too much. Then he is tiresome. People have been captivated by his cocksureness, by his apparent detachment. They have been surprised into accepting him at his face value.
Bernstein's Taunts
"But why does M Shaw despise us? Does he harbor a grudge? Certainly he has accepted our neglect as he has our applause, with indifference. The success of his amusing literary exercise entitled Sainte Jeanne did not disconcert him. M Shaw apparently does not know how to meet an obligation, how to apologize. He is so certain of his own genius that he did not think it necessary to acknowledge what he owed in this instance to Voltaire's 'La Pucelle' and to the great art of the Pitoeffs, and, it must be added, to their infinite tact. A scientist would write that M Shaw regards the opinion of M Shaw as a 'constant,' as the invariable ratio between human beings and their acts and the value of these beings and their acts.
"By injuring us in these columns, M Shaw has tried to perform an operation of a kind in which he is past master. He counted on our temperament, he appealed to the polemic; he would only utter calm and sincere notes. Recently an English paper invited its readers to designate the greatest master in the art and science of advertising. Advertising does not create glory, but universal glory does not become firmly established without some preliminary publicity - which may be assured by active forces other than those possessed by the author himself. But art is best defended by itself."
Shaw's Rejoinder
Shaw's rejoinder is addressed to Henry Bernstein. He says he has read his polemic with great interest and finds the case of M Bernstein "naturally most interesting." He proceeds to draw a neat distinction between the Pierres, the Jacques, the Duvals, the Durands and the Duponts of provincial France, and the Rouls, the Henri de Larochejacquelins of the "City of Light" - to mention some of Bernstein's characters - each one of whom "is splendid, proud, sensitive of honor and passionately devoted to a wife who betrays him, or to the wife of another who refuses to betray her husband - an idealist always in a situation nobly tragic, and consequently produced only in the act before the last.
"It is revolting to you to hear a simple, ordinary person like myself say of this magnificient triumph of God's work, 'How provincial your are!' Your knightly indignation prevents you from noticing that the admirable creature does not in any way share your emotion.
"You see, it is this way: If Duval were a romantic Jew, and if I were to say to him that he was a provincial, he would immediately reply, 'One of us must die.' But being what he is, an Amaleisite of the French variety, well loving flattery and indifferent as to whom the flatterer may be - simply because he knows he does not deserve flattery, regarding it as the means by which something is expected to be drawn from him he would say nothing; but from the remark would draw certain conclusions: First, that I did not wish to entangle him in the trenches of imports, because persons who want to do that do not begin in that way; second, that I am a sort of practical joker, because I speak of himself (his favorite subject) as he really is and not at all like some one who believes that Duval is never more happy than when he is reposing unknown and asleep for all eternity under the Arc de Triomphe.
The Poet in His Automobile
"And Duval says to himself: 'Certainly, this Bernard Shaw understands me not at all, because, I, I am not this common object, the average Frenchman. But I am satisfied to hear him speak to this fool of a Dupont. That will do him good.
"Provincial, indeed! That is just the word for this pig of a Durand who passes his evenings in that old retreat of octogenarians which we call the Theater Francais! Say what you like about Shaw, I say the rascal knows his people. For, indeed, what is a Frenchman? The universal porter, the sheep that everybody shears, the ass crushed under all the burdens of Europe. One billion and a half of francs to pay annually to the English! A billion and a half, monsieur! ! ! Just for having saved their lives. The next time let them save themselves. We'll make the Boches a present of them.
"We sent that cunning Caillaux to speak with them as a past master of finance. But how they spun him round, those Churchills and those Chamberlains! Behold, what it is to be a Frenchman! Personally, I have had enough of it. I shall say to my children: Be English, Boches, Jews, negroes, be devils, but do not be French. The thought of being obliged to pay a billion and a half makes me insane, and to behold Bernstein, the Jew, in his automobile, exploiting my pleasures in order to accumulate his plunder! The Jews come from Syria, don't they? Druses! That's what they are, Druses! Druse, Moor, Riff, it's all the same: Jew. And the Jew always speaks of glory, of country, because he wants to devour all Paris, all France, all the world in order to become a millionaire. Oh, I know this Bernstein to the core. He has done things.
"My only secret is that I know him, and he knows that Duval knows it. Moreover, I try to give him something which he can believe, although it may irritate him at first by its strangeness, which will presently pass. Follow my example, dear brother, and you will have a success like mine, although the Boulevard may stone you to death.
Bernstein's Last Word
And Bernstein rejoins: "So, brother, you have discovered that I am a Jew and you do not hesitate to spread this troublesome news in the French press! Ah, it is not without result that you have delved into my past for the last two months. And there is my automobile, which you point out to the fury of the crowd.
"Dear and illustrious brother, would I question your fidelity to the Socialist doctrine, with your notorious greediness, your immense fortune? You shrug you shoulders, and with reason. No, I will not follow your example. But your letter was sublime - the Druses, Durant, M Joseph Caillaux, et al.; it was superb.
"You only undeceived me on one point: I had known you by your account of yourself, so teeming with abandon and simplicity. Now you reveal the immensity of your vanity, your inflexible contempt, the hard material of which you are composed, so very different from our own pliable mud. And I was taken by it, impressed. You are Shaw, the book of 120 francs, you are the mark of gold. Not without sadness, I thought, whatever is done with my work or with myself the Giant is going to decapitate us with the snap of his irony, with the breath of his contempt!
"Not thus, however. When faced with a simple critical study, alert but courteous, behold you so different, so human all at once. Shaw, so human! You call on all the world for help. You denounce my Semitism to the Nationalists and my nationalism to the others. I have the habit of these things; my race, Bernard Shaw, has already been invoked against me. (And in better style). Examine my dossier, dear Socialist, multi-millionaire and anti-Semite!"
12/5/25
Worse for Being in the Right
That anybody should be commended for giving good advice to the present Russian Government is doubtful. It can be recorded, however, that George Bernard Shaw, in an article sent by him to the Pravda of Leningrad and printed here by The New York American yesterday, does tell the Soviet authorities of certain mistakes and of the changes in policy which they must make if they would avoid doing worse than waste their energy and money as they did recently in England and constantly are doing in many other countries.
Of course, Mr Shaw takes the attitude of the candid friend in lecturing the Soviet Government, and he will not be the less pleased because what he says will cause much pain in Leningrad and Moscow. He has only derision and contempt for the Third International, which he neatly describes as "that quaint resurrection from the dry bones of 1861, masquerading as the ghost of Marx." Everywhere its activities are harmful to the communistic cause, he declares, and its recent achievements in England have been the overthrow of the Labor Government, the repudiation and expulsion of the Communists by the British labor unions, and the getting into jail of a dozen young Communists who were ignorant and innocent enough to do the silly bidding of the Third International.
All this is quite true, but the disasters listed will keep nobody awake except possibly Mr Shaw, who likes to pose as a Communist of a sort. After scrapping the Third International, he tells the rulers of Russia, they should entrust their dealings with other nations to real diplomatists, working in accordance with the established diplomatic rules.
Ridicules Moscow "Reds" in statement on Communist trial in London, D 4, 5:1
12/4/25
GBS has issued another rebuke to
Moscow "Reds" discussing the recent trial of 12 communists
in a message to Pravda. Shaw said: "The condemned
communists had advice from Moscow. The advice was silly advice."
He proceeds to declare that the advice had the effect of forcing the
labor party in parliament to disavow the communists and the powerful
protection of the official opposition in the house of commons was
thereby withdrawn from them. "The government immediately
pounced on its prey. And the leaders of the communists are now in
prison for a year. It is because the advice of Moscow produced
this result because it could produce no other result and because it
was unnecessary and mischievous in its result that I call the
advice silly."
Picture on new brand of German cigar, N 22, IV, 18:3;
Outlines views on life in idealistic Socialist State, N 27, 19:2
11/27/25
Picturing life in an idealistic Socialist State, George Bernard Shaw wound up the Fabian Society's annual popular lecture course tonight by declaring the standard day would be four hours' work, eight hours' sleep and four hours for drinking, dressing, undressing and a little resting. That would leave eight for leisure. The first postulate of the Socialist, said Mr Shaw, is that everybody must have the same income; for a person to get a penny more or less than his fellows would be a crime. He declared every child should receive a communistic education, and defended birth control and divorce, asserting that marriages were happy only by the method of trial and error. He also advocated a new Western Religion.
Claims credit for Locarno treaty; says Chamberlain 12 yrs behind time, N 13, 6:4
11/13/25
GBS, invited by T. P. (Tay Pay) O'Connor to attend a nonparty dinner on 11/20 in honor of Foreign Secretary Chamberlain, has made a characteristic reply. A postcard received by Mr O'Connor reads: "No. Really. The dinner should be for me. It was I who proposed a Locarno Treaty in 1913 and again on New Years Day in 1914, when it might have prevented the war. What use is it now when all the mischief is done? However it is greatly to Mr Chamberlains credit that he is only 12 years behind me instead of 50."
Gives bail for Communists arrested on sedition charge, N 5, 12:4
11/5/25
The Countess of Warwick, GBS, Josiah Wedgewood who was a member of the labor cabinet and AJ Cook secretary of the Miners Federation today were added to the list of sureties for the bail of the 12 communists recently arrested on charges of inciting to sedition. The 12 defendants were committed for trial after a hearing in which they entered pleas of not guilty.
Art by J Pennell; por, N 1, IV, 1:1
11/1/25
George Bernard Shaw was one of the first men I met in London in 1887. I forget how or where I encountered him - I think at William Morris's so-called Socialist meetings at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith.
In the Summer we were in lodgings at 36 Bedford Place - that perfect street of boarding - lodging houses, with statues at either end in their squares, and the surgery with its red lamp on one side. The quiet street was given over in the day to hurdy-gurdies, cress sellers and cat's meat men, and British working men who chanted that they "'ad no work to do-o-o," and German bands, and the man who plaintively asked in song, "Who'll buy my sweet lavender?" in between the tinkle, tinkle of the muffin man, as they walked slowly up and down.
In the evening the German clerks came home from studying British affairs in the City, and all day there was a continuous arrival and departure of tourists and provincials, taking and leaving lodgings, in four-wheelers, followed by touts running behind to fight for the baggage, carry it upstairs, and, if they did not steal it, fight the owners for tips while cabmen and servants looked on and bobbies looked away.
Every house was alike inside and out, with the same number of chimney pots on the roofs. Each had the same number of stories, the same number of windows, all with the same signs of apartments in them, the same sort of Old Masters in the darkhalls, the same drawingroom floors and the same bed-sitting rooms upstairs. Each emitted the same smell of gas and cooking when the same dirty-faced slavey opened the door and called the landlady, who was always the same sad person in widow's weeds.
Only the lodgers were different. We had the real Duke of Marlborough and a Spanish conspirator, whose secretary ground a music box for him all day; and Ellen Terry would come to see some members of her very numerous family, with Gordon Craig and young Irving and others in a carriage, and then every one rushed to every window and stayed there as long as she was in the street.
Anyway, Shaw, who lived near by, used to drop in and talk of his brilliant future and vow he would achieve it. He was then living his vegetarian way on a pound a week and announcing he would become famous. He had just written Cashel Byron's Profession, the only book of his I have ever read, and that because he gave it to me, though once later I heard him read Candida at H W Massingham's, and that was enough for me.
Soon The Star, the London evening paper, was started, "Tay Pay" was editor, an English Irish politician name T P O'Connor, with his rooms on the roof of the newspaper building, and Shaw was made the art critic. I suppose it was writing on art that gave him the idea that he was an authority on the subject, but to this day he does not know the difference between a photograph and a painting, though he prefers the photograph, and all his art notions are based on the photograph, as his art writing prove and his portrait of himself by himself shows.
We were always arguing about art and criticism. Of one of our talks there is a little note in an old notebook of E's.
"Tuesday, Nov 1, 1887 - In the evening supper with Fisher Unwin, Mr and Mrs William Archer were there. Mr Stevens of the Trust Society and The Leisure Hour, and, later, Shaw. About 11, just as I put on my wraps to come home, J began a discussion with Shaw about the art criticism of today and they never stopped until the clock struck 1. Shaw told him, 'The trouble with you, Pennell, is that you haven't any scientific theory of reasoning; you're like the man who doesn't know anything about boxing and you give a hard hit when and where it be least expected.' And J told Shaw, 'The trouble with you, Shaw, is that you know nothing about art and, therefore, your criticism is damned rot.' Going off at a tangent, Shaw assured us there are but three original men in English literature, and, strange to say, their names all began with the same letter - Shakespear, Shelley, Shaw. Fisher Unwin and I sat and looked on. We couldn't have got a word in edgewise had we tried."
Shaw did not keep to art criticism long - there was not enough advertisement in it for him, so he went in for music, calling himself Corno di Bassetto - for, as he said, he was going to blow his own horn until it was heard. I might quote another of E's notes made four months later:
"Tuesday, March 6, 1888 - To the Museum. Met Shaw just as I was leaving and went to the cafe with him. He is very anxious that The Star should get J to write its weekly Art Notes. He thinks it a shame that the rare man who has original ideas of his own should not have the chance to express them and declares it provokes him when The Pall Mall asks J to write about cycling and not about art."
It was just after this I became "Artist Unknown" and over that name which I used, wrote my opinions. Shaw got me the post - I think I was the only artist he knew - but I succeeded in getting rather well known and in and out of endless scrapes, from a threatened libel action with the family of Marie Bashkirtseff to a threatened thrashing by Walter Crane. Neither, however, came off. But I drew all the London art world to the paper and dragged it into endless controversies.
I wanted, like Shaw, to become famous, and I believed I could bring art to the people by what I said. I remember telling this at the time to Bob Stevenson and his laughing, as if it were an excellent joke. I was wrong, he assured me. Art was a luxury for the rich alone.
It was an amusing staff on the paper under the later editorship of H W Massingham - the real editor. The nominal editor was almost always in prison, mainly owing, I believe, to the views of his contributors. Among them were A B Walkley, who made such a noise in the theater that he was taken up by the Times; Arthur Symons; Richard Le Gallienne, who, we always maintained was not sure of the sex of his own name; and Clement K Shorter; though far the most important person on the paper was Captain Coe, the sporting man. The paper was to elevate the masses, but Coe had no interest in anything save "finals," and they were what appealed to the people, and for his articles they bought the papers, not to any extent for ours.
At that time, if I was going to bring art to the people by my writing, so was Morris by his preaching, and we haunted the Hall at Hammersmith next door to Morris's and sometimes went with the elect into Kelmscott House, where Shaw always was. Those were the days of demonstrations and the appearance of John Burns and Annie Besant and, later Keir Hardie, who also were going to save or raise the down-trodden, but by speeches and procession, especially talk - always talk in Hyde Park, on Tower Hill, or at the Fabian Society - and then by the big meeting in Trafalgar Square which ended in a riot, with Cunninghame Graham as the hero and the martyr, getting the troops out and having the Riot act read. I saw it all from the windows of the old National Liberal Club.
Shaw was coming to the meeting with a deputation from Bloomsbury, at the head of it naturally, but he said they walked too fast and he found himself at the tail. Then, the first thing he knew, there was a police charge and the procession turned, he still at the tail, with the police gaining; but, said he, "I soon was at the head again and stayed there, for I ran home faster than any of the rest."
But he did come off, as he has let all the world know. There was nothing which would make him talked about he did not do, getting hissed down in cycling meeting, getting laughed down when he tried to form a Borough Council, getting lost and announcing that he was lost; and so, finally, he arrived on the staff of The Saturday Review and then into the theater and world-wide fame, if it is fame, as he says it is.
Shaw followed us to the Adelphi, for we invented that Quarter, though we lived first in Buckingham Street, with Pepys and Humphry Davy, in Etty's studio. But we made the Quarter in our time as others had in theirs, and Fisher Unwin came in and we moved to the Terrace and were there joined by Galsworthy, Temple Thurston and the chef of the Savoy - and what a crew! We did not exactly invent it, for Hardy and Black also had had chambers and rooms before us, and Garrick a house before them.
Barrie Enters Scene
Our Adelphi Terrace windows looked right into Shaw's, and we could see how he did his hair and what he would have for dinner, and here were awful rows between his German cook, who, according to gossip in the Quarter, became Swiss during the war, and our French Augustine.
Once E wrote an article in The Atlantic and there was something in it Shaw did not like, or rather the German cook did not like, and so she stuck the magazine, opened at the article, flat against her kitchen window to let us know she had seen it.
Another day, so we were told, Barrie, who then lived under us, wanted to show Shaw to some guests he had to lunch, and he fired a roll from his dining table through the open window on to Shaw's table, and his guests saw Shaw and heard him, too, when he came to his window.
But the finest things happened when the suffragettes, who filled the building, got on our roof one day to protest. A ceremony to dedicate a bust of Wilfred Lawson was going on in the gardens below, and the ladies, some real ones and the rest quaint, lit a fire of alcohol up there to heat hot-air balloons, and I heard them and went up and smashed the balloons and put out their can of alcohol, and then locked the door and sent for the police. And they never again went on the roof where nobody was allowed to go, because the lightest step across it sounded like thunder in our rooms underneath.
But Shaw and I parted when he said he loved, and backed up, the electric tea sign on the shot tower across the river, which ruined the night, though I made it quite pictorial, as my mezzotint proves. I told Shaw in the papers, where we talked, that I was glad to know what he really liked. That hurt - and for years I would only see him going out in his jeaggers to preach socialism from the tail end of his sixty-horse power Mercedes car. But he got over it and he was, with John Burns - who, too, knew all about everything - almost the last man J saw when I left London in the war.
And now he has sent me his photograph of the bust by Rodin and photographed it himself. Shaw is not at all bad when he forgets to preen and prattle, only he rarely forgets. But he said in a recent letter to me: "I am mad about prohibition now that I know you would prefer England wet to America dry. Scotland is still wetter than England, in every sense." The letter was written from Aberdeen.
Shaw can be really amusing when he does not try to be; when he does not pose and is just Shaw, expatriated, transplanted Irishman.
Lr from A D Marsh on controversy with H A Jones, O 25, VIII, 14:5
10/25/25 Poodle And St Bernard
Your article on Henry Arthur Jones's "Mr Mayor of Shakespear's Town" was very interesting. In life it seems always the same: the little growls at the big, as in this case, the poodle barks at the St Bernard (Shaw).
Ada G Marsh
Assails General Medical Council, lr to London Times, O 23, 6:1
10/23/25 Bernard Shaw makes in a letter to The London Times today an attack on the General Medical Council, the body which in England controls the practice of medicine, and asks that the practitioners upon it be replaced by representatives of the general public or disinterested hygienic science.
He tells how he himself was cured of a displacement of the bones by an American doctor of osteopathy, and uses the case of Dr Axham as the text of his appeal. Dr Axham was a regularly qualified English doctor who went to investigate the wonderful cures attributed to Herbert Barker, then known as a "bone setter." He found the cures were not exaggerated, but noted that patients suffered terrible agonies under the treatment, since Barker, as an unqualified man, was unable to use anesthetics.
Though realizing he would incur the anger of the General Medical Council, Dr Axham thought it his duty to offer her services as anesthetist. The result was that, as he was acting as an assistant to an unqualified practitioner, the General Medical Council found him guilty of "infamous conduct" and deprived him of the right to practice medicine.
Herbert Barker, for the cures he effected among war wounded soldiers, received the honor of knighthood and obtained practical, if irregular, recognition of his skill; while Dr Axham, now a very old man, being deprived of his means of livelihood, has been in considerable financial straits.
Mr Shaw writes: "The difficulty about Dr. Axham does not seem to be understood. Dr Axham did his great duty as a member of a profession devoted to the relief of human suffering by every means within the competence of a physician and to the encouragement and aid of every extension of those means. The public has benefited by his action and owes him its protection, yet it has allowed him to be stigmatized for his services as guilty of infamous professional conduct and struck off the register.
"This striking off will not hurt him nowadays, when unregistered practitioners are at a heavy premium because they have mastered modern techniques of which registration guarantees ignorance, but at 87 he is past practicing, and the stigmatism is deeply felt and justly resented by him.
"Meanwhile Sir Herbert Barker, whom he was one of the first to recognized as a great manipulative surgeon, has been knighted in public recognition of his eminence at the instance of four famous surgeons who petitioned the Prime Minister on the subject. The General Medical Council holds they were guilty of infamous professional conduct in which they were abetted by the King, but it does not act on its view because the King and his advisers are not so helpless as Axham was.
"Only by continuing the victimization of Axham can it make its opinion quite clear and intimidate every registered practitioner who would like to follow his admirable example. Obviously it is useless to appeal to the General Medical Council, but what about the really responsible bodies who are supposed to represent the nation in the matter - the Privy Council, the universities and the Government?
"It is they who in gross neglect of their duty, in spite of the plain provisions in the act for public and scientific representation, have thrown control of the professions, including powers which no political ruler in the civilized world now enjoys or would dream of claiming, into the hands of practicing doctors, with the inevitable result that the Council has become a trade union of the worst type - namely, a type in which entry to the trade and the right to remain in it are at the mercy of the union.
"Not only is the type the worst, but in this particular interest it is at the crude stage of preoccupation with professional earnings and sullen defiance of public opinion which produced the Manchester and Sheffield outrages in the working class."
Mr Shaw points out that the General Medical Council is, however, not a trade union de jure and is a constitutioned authority with the first duty of securing for the public the advantages of the latest developments in medicine and surgery. "It has," he continues, "become in effect a trade union solely through the carelessness or superstition of the controlling bodies representing us poor laymen, who are so vitally interested, as patients, as well as disinterested scientists.
"It seems hopeless, however, to make people understand this. My own efforts to call attention to it result only in what I must call editorial imbecilities to the effect that I am 'down on doctors' and that every quack would have to be registered if Sir Herbert Barker were registered, which is about as sensible as saying that because Brahms was made a Doctor of Music without doing curricular exercises in counterpoint, the universities are logically bound to confer degrees on all our street piano men.
"As a matter of fact few persons can have had more better doctor friends than I. Indeed that is why my utterances have been so well informed. But they may not speak for themselves, whereas I, being free, open my mouth without being ruined or stigmatized as infamous, and can act occasionally as the mouthpiece of the gagged profession.
"Leaving that aside, I have my own interests and grievances as a citizen. My wife suffered from laming traumatic dislocation for eight years. Thanks to the obsolete training maintained by the General Medical Council, registered surgeons were unable to correct it. They did not pretend to. Their final verdict was 'You must go to Barker.' But the General Medical Council said, 'If you go to that blackleg you shall howl for it as we will ruin any man who dares administer an anaesthetic.' And in fact the operation, which was completely successful, was performed without anaesthetic, though I hasten to add that this was the effect of my wife's curiosity rather than of any serious difficulty in circumventing the trade union.
"Later on in an accident I displaced one of my own bones rather badly and again, though nothing could exceed the kindness of the registered medical gentlemen on the spot, they were unable to replace it for want of perfectly well known technique which every qualified surgeon should have at his fingers' ends. It took me ten days to get to Birmingham where an American doctor of osteopathy, also classed as a blackleg by the General Medical Council, set me right after seventy-five minutes of skilled manipulation. Had the process been an unbearably painful one, which it fortunately was not, any anaesthetist saving my pain would have done so under penalty of being rattened as the terms went in Sheffield to the extent of being deprived of his livelihood.
"No wonder I am overwhelmed with requests from medical societies in all the medical schools of London to lecture to them on the situation. But I have nothing more to say than I have already said often clearly enough and I simply dare not use the language that the ablest leaders of the profession pour out on it. All I assert is that if the constitutional authorities will only do their duty by getting rid of practitioners from the General Medical Council (save as assessors in case of need), and replace them with representatives of the public and disinterested hygienic science. Axham will be reinstated almost automatically and the conquest of Harley Street by the unregistered, now in active progress, may be checked. For there is really nothing unregistered practitioners do that cannot be done by registered ones if only they are apprenticed to the techniques of today instead of to those of centuries ago."
Makes no reply to denunciation by H A Jones, O 21, 22:8
10/21/25 Henry Arthur Jones's attack upon him leaves G. B. S. imperturbable and smiling. He has no intention, so he says, of making a reply to the vigorous denunciation of him made by Mr Jones in the latter's remarks to the Mayor of Stratford-on-Avon and he professes that his friendship for his critic is and will remain unchanged. "Mr Jones and I," he says, "are the best of friends. Everybody knows my views and everybody knows his views. I leave to the public to judge which is the saner of us two. It is true Mr Jones is always at it. So am I. We've been going on like this for years. But I wish he wouldn't do it."
Denounced in book by H A Jones as England's foe, O 20, 9:1
10/20/25 A slashing, stinging denunciation of George Bernard Shaw is made by Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, in a little volume soon to be published under the title "Mr Mayor of Shakespear's Town." Mr Shaw was the chief guest at a Shakespear festival at Stratford-on-Avon last April, and the book is in the form of a letter to the Mayor of that town questioning the qualifications of the Irish playwright for such an honor.
Mr Jones describes his book as "a search into the pretensions of Mr Bernard Shaw to be received by the English people as a teacher and leader of thought in these perplexing and dangerous days," and he emphasizes that while he feels deep and just anger, deep and just indignation, he has no personal malice against Mr Shaw. The extracts from the book here quoted will be published in The Daily Mail tomorrow:
Mr Jones suggests that the Mayor and his fellow-townsmen were entirely ignorant of Mr Shaw's history when they invited him, and he quotes Mr Shaw's own expressed opinion of Shakespear as follows:
Quotes Shaw on Shakespear
"With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so utterly as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his. It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him."
Mr Jones's principal indictment, however, relates to Mr Shaw's attitude during the war. "Of Mr Shaw's utterances about England before the war," he writes, "I will ask you to show me those that do not breathe contempt and hatred of this country and misrepresentation of her policy."
Dealing with Mr Shaw's activities in those fateful days, Mrs Jones says:
"During the first battle of Ypres I was in New York. There in Flanders was our thin, broken line of soldiers, straining beyond mortal endurance to stop the Germans from breaking through to the Channel ports. In that hour of England's desperate extremity you honored guest at Shakespear's feast was spitting ridicule and slander upon your country and damming back the gathering tide of American sympathy with our cause."
Half way through the war Mr Shaw visited General Headquarters in France at the invitation of the War Office, and Mr Jones describes this as a fatuous violation of decency, patriotism and common sense. He also accused the Irish dramatist of "encouraging and fermenting" the strikers during the great railway strike to 1918 and of making the statement to the United States a week or so before the Washington naval armament-reduction conference that "Lloyd George was then supreme in England and was preparing for war with America."
Recalls Praise of Lenin
"Let a hostile movement be started against England on any pretext in any part of the world," writes Mr Jones, "and Mr Shaw will sanctify and approve it. If he lives till he's as old as Methuselah he shall still be found backbiting England. Yet for the vilest, cruelest, most malignant, most murderous tyranny the world has ever known, Mr Shaw has nothing but sympathy, admiration, praise and support. He hails Lenin as the greatest statesman of Europe and has no doubt his statue will be set up here by the side of Washington's.
Again Mr Jones quotes Mr Shaw as saying: "It is only the English that require more than normal life to attain wisdom. The Scotch, Irish and colored races already possess it. The Englishman alone has not adult intelligence."
Of this Mr Jones has to say:
Compares Shaw to Blowfly
"As a blowfly returns to settle upon some wholesome body and will not be brushed away, so does Mr Shaw return to settle upon the fair name of England and putrefy it in the nostrils of the world.
"Oh, we poor dolts and noodles of Englishmen, who have given to the world its loftiest poetry and its richest literature! Oh, we poor dullards and dunderpates, who made for mankind their greatest discoveries and inventions! Oh, we poor loobies and boobies who have been the chief wrestlers and conquerors of the secrets of science! Oh, we poor numskulls and boddydobbies of Englishmen who have given canons in wise government to all nations and have humanized and civilized a quarter of the globe!
"Hear him, hear him, Mr Mayor of Shakespear's town! Hear Mr Bernard Shaw proclaim to the world that we Englishmen who have done all these things for mankind have an intelligence that is lower than that of the colored races whom we have ruled and raised and redeemed from savagery.
"Is there any calumny against England and against Englishmen, is there any sinister word or charge against England, that Mr Shaw will not publish? We find him in the darkest hour of the war bragging that he will take the conceit out of England. We find him after the war, when England is loaded with debts and harassed with internal seditions and foreign perplexities, we find him at such an anxious moment the same impish, irrepressible Bernard Shaw, vaunting the same foolish brag and pitiable ambition to make England sit up."
Reverting to the Shakespear festival Mr Jones suggests that the Mayor of Stratford-on-Avon might circulate extensively the fact that hospitality to Mr Shaw was given inadvertently and in ignorance of his antecedents. He adds: "Some tasteful tablet explaining the adventitious and burlesque nature of the whole affair might be fixed on the wall over the place from which Mr Shaw spoke."
Students of St Andrew's Univ want him as rector, O 16, 18:4
10/16/25 The students of St Andrew's University have agreed to nominated George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy for the rectorship of the university in succession to Rudyard Kipling, whose term of office expires today. Nominations are set for Oct 28 and the election for Oct 31.
Mentioned in ed on selection of Lord Rector of Univ of Glasgow, O 14, 24:5
10/14/25 Lord Rectors and Their Critics
The Scottish universities have had many famous Lord Rectors. From Macaulay and Carlyle to Barrie, the list is long and eminent. The office is largely honorary, yet elections to it are often exciting. And as in the case of the English universities, the decision is more often dependent upon party feeling running high than upon the precise merits of the various candidates.
Recently a great effort was made to elect Lord Asquith Chancellor of Oxford. Scholars and jurists of note urged his name. Political opponents like Lord Birkenhead sheathed their party swords in order to advocate the choice of a man who both by scholarship and public service well deserved the honor. But Oxford is now at the Tory end of the swing of the political pendulum and rejected Lord Asquith in favor of the Conservative Lord Cave. Not even in the Parliamentary representation of Oxford does the best man always win. It will be remembered that when Thackeray had a passing ambition for public life, he stood for one of the Oxford seats in the House of Commons. Meeting his opponent in the course of the canvass, Thackeray had a few friendly words with him and took leave, saying: "Well, may the best man win." The other replied, with a ready wit which he is said never to have displayed again: "Oh, I hope not." Anyhow, Thackeray was beaten.
Into the election of the Lord Rector at the University of Glasgow, Bernard Shaw has characteristically flung himself. Having heard of the "wild men" of Glasgow, he seems to have felt irresistibly drawn to join them. Over the various candidates for the Lord Rectorship he squirts his usual vitriol. Mr Austen Chamberlain is so dull that he certainly ought to turn out the winner, unless he suddenly "betrays cultural interests." For Mr Sidney Webb, the best thing that Shaw can say is that "he is the only man I ever met that was qualified to be universal Alderman." If Shaw could have his way, Mr G K Chesterton, with all his faults and follies, which Bernard Shaw cruelly enumerates, would be chosen Lord Rector of Glasgow. One reason given is that he has "by sheer literary force taken the position in London created in the eighteenth century by Dr Johnson, and left vacant at his death until the accession of G K C."
This may be genuine friendship and admiration or it may be simply admirable fooling. As Shaw himself has warned us, you never can tell. But some new author of imaginary conversations ought to try his hand at inventing one in which Dr Johnson, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, should express his opinion of Chesterton. Of some of the latter's political and theological writings the doctor would probably be ready to say, as he did of certain works of his own day: "I had rather praise them than read them." He might be tempted also to repeat concerning the gigantic Chesterton in some of his ultra-paradoxical moods, "He flounders well." But of the Father Brown stories and of the gravely fantastic novels, it is hard to fancy even Dr Johnson speaking ill.
Gives permission for Washington Sq Players to produce his plays, O 12, 21:3
10/12/25 George Bernard Shaw recently granted Randolph Sommerville, director of the Washington Square Players, permission to produce Fanny's First Play, Missalliance, Getting Married and How He Lied To Her Husband. Professor Sommerville's company appears at the New York University Playhouse, 100 Washington Square, where for six years it has been building up a repetory of modern classics. Last Summer it presented Shaw's You Never Can Tell, and Candida, both of which will be retained.
In granting a contract Shaw wrote Sommerville that "the fact that your actors are not paid in no way touches the distinction between amateur and professional work. Many actors in London not only do not get paid but actually pay for the privilege of appearing on the stage." The professor's company is formed of students or former students at New York University.
Extracts from Theater Guild notes showing correspondence on production of plays, S 20, VIII, 2:8;
Is preparing a book on Socialism and Capitalism for women, S 4, 24:2;
Art by A Henderson, The Universal Shaw, S 13, VIII, 2:6
9/13/25 When I began to write about Shaw, more than twenty years ago, he was virtually unknown to fame. When people thought of him at all, which was seldom, they thought of a ghastly little celebrity dancing in a vacuum, a comical jack-in-the-box ludicrously popping up at intervals to cry himself and his wares. But in reality Shaw took the theater seriously; and I took Shaw seriously. He made a violent assault on the citadels of dramatic tradition; I made a violent assault on the citadels of critical tradition. We were both laughed at for our pains - the one for his effrontery, the other for his credulity. For my part, it was a conflict to the death with the Clement Scotts and the William Winters of the day. Shaw's own dramatic criticisms, as well as his plays, constituted, as he confesses, a "siege laid to the theater of the nineteenth century by an author who had to cut his own way into it at the point of the pen and throw some of its defenders into the moat."
The real inauguration of the new movement in England was the production of Ibsen's A Doll House on June 7, 1889, by Mr and Mrs Charles Charrington. Soon the intellectual minority, headed by Shaw, was demanding "the foundation of a theater which should be to the newly-gathered intellectual harvest of the nineteenth century what Shakespear's theater was to the harvest of the renaissance." But the Independent Theater, founded by J T Grein, got off badly with a production of Ibsen's Ghosts, which provoked howls of condemnation and bedlamite gibberings from the critics and public alike. At the end of 1892, when it appeared that this courageous effort was doomed to disaster for lack of native dramatic talent, Shaw stepped to the fore with a foolhardiness well-nigh inexplicable - as he knew nothing whatever of playwriting. "I had rashly taken up the case," he explains, "and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence." For that foolhardiness posterity will be durably grateful.
On Dec 9, 1892, Shaw's Widowers' Houses was produced at the Royalty Theater, Dean Street, Soho. It created a furor. The Socialists and independents in the audience applauded furiously; the ordinary play-going first-nighters hooted with equally vehement derision. The play was described as a "daring attack upon middle class society," which for the moment focused public attention upon its author. Grein wrote: "Bernard Shaw is one of the men who deserve to be called to the boards; and I trust that the result will prompt him to persevere after his first fairly successful effort." But Shaw's effort - in the form of two "unpleasant" plays - met with hostility and failure. After writing The Philanderer Shaw saw its "impossibility"; and Mrs Warren's Profession, which he wrote next, a cold-blooded study of prostitution, was recognized as even more "impossible" - since it could not pass muster with the Lord Chamberlain, or Queen's Reader of Plays. So Shaw, "like another Fielding," as he says, closed his career as "playwright-in-ordinary to the Independent Theater."
In 1894 his "pleasant play, Arms and the Man, was produced at the Avenue Theater, through the patronage of Miss A E Horniman. Although the play received many encomiums and ran from April 21 to July 7, the loss to the Avenue management for the season is said to have been not far from £5,000. And now in turn all of Shaw's plays, one after another, failed to win the great public - although attracting the admiring attention of a very small group of advanced playgoers. Candida first presented to Charles Wyndham, was refused, and when Cyril Maude asked to see it, with reference to producing it at the Haymarket, Shaw complied with his request by writing You Never Can Tell.
Sir Henry Irving proposed to produce Shaw's play, The Devil's Disciple, at the Lyceum, but the project was never carried through, although the heroine of the play is a portrait of Ellen Terry.
The Devil's Disciple, written in 1896-97, found its first production in the United States. It did not reach the stage in England until September, 1899, when it was produced for a short run of a few weeks at the Princess of Wales Theater, Kensington. In 1897 and 1898 Candida was produced in the English provinces by the Independent Theater, the part of Candida being taken by that talented interpreter of modern roles, Janet Achurch. In 1900 The Devil's Disciple was produced, not in the West End of London, but to the suburban audiences and in the provinces, by Forbes Robertson, supported by Gertrude Elliott.
The total result of all these efforts was almost nil so far as the great public of London was concerned. When Shaw fell out with Maude about the projected production of You Never Can Tell, then in rehearsal, in 1897 - a story most ludicrously told by Shaw - he permanently set back the clock of his career many years. Over a long period he now had recourse to the "sideshow theaters," the London Stage Society and the like.
William Archer, who said in 1893 that Shaw had no more "specific talent for the drama than for painting or sculpture," remarked a short time before his recent death that Shaw paid a heavy price for his break with Maude, since in falling back upon the "sideshow theaters" he was free to obey his every whim and was exempted from the discipline by which all the great masters of drama have profited - that of having to make their appeal "to a natural, unaffected, non-cliquish public." I cannot conceive of a more crass or erroneous observation, even by that humorous policeman of dramatic art. It is quiet true that Shaw sacrificed his chances, but he did it in behalf of independence and intellectual integrity. No conventional, dull, unthinking, fashionable public in England would ever have tamed the recalcitrant and free-ranging genius of Bernard Shaw. It was not until the United States and Europe recognized his brilliant and original qualities as a dramatist that Great Britain at last "came around" to Shaw.
The late James Huneker once claimed, in a letter to me, that he was entitled to the honor of introducing Bernard Shaw to America, in an article entitled "A Music Critic's Play," being a review of Arms and the Man in The Recorder early in 1894. On Monday, Sept 17, 1894, Richard Mansfield produced Arms and the Man at the Herald Square Theater, New York. This was probably the most notable performance of Arms and the Man ever given, the character of Mansfield being well suited to the unromantic, matter of fact, lightly cynical Bluntschli.
On Oct 1, 1897, The Devil's Disciple was produced for the first time on any professional stage by Richard Mansfield at Harmanus Blecker Hall, Albany, New York. This play won considerable popular and financial success in America, remaining for a number of years in the Mansfield repertory. In 1898 Shaw stated that The Devil's Disciple had drawn £25,000.
It must be pointed out that literary clubs and schools of acting had their part in the United States in acquainting the public with Shaw's peculiar gifts as a dramatist. In April, 1899, twenty-odd performances of Candida were given by the pupils of Miss Anna Morgan, gifted teacher of dramatic expression, at her petite theater in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. Later in the year a special performance was given by Miss Morgan's pupils for Mr William Archer, to his outspoken satisfaction. On Feb 16, 1899, a single performance of A Man of Destiny was give by the American Academy of Dramatic Arts at the Empire Theater, New York. Norman Hapgood, who liked the performance, said that this was a better one-act play, even from the theatrical point of view, than any written in a long time.
On May 1, 2 and 3, 1901, "costume recitals" of Caesar and Cleopatra were given at the Anna Morgan Studios for the Art of Expression, Chicago. Miss Morgan's school was a miniature American Theater Libre, and these performances were given, says Jeanette Gilder, "before select audiences, largely composed of the literary and artistic people of the town." On May 18, 1903, at the Broad Street Theater, the Browning Society of Philadelphia gave, as the eleventh annual dramatic performance in commemoration of the birth of Robert Browning, Shaw's Candida. The evening was a memorable one, and a prominent officer of the society informed me that the later professional performances by Arnold Daly in New York were, in his opinion, inspired by this performance by the Browning Society.
My first acquaintance with Bernard Shaw was made by attending, in the early Spring of 1903, a performance of You Never Can Tell at the Stude-baker Theater, Chicago, by the pupils of the Chicago Musical College School of Acting, under the direction of Hart Conway. I at once swallowed down at a gulp Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, published by H S Stone of Chicago; and, being a devotee of Ibsen, I began trumpeting Shaw's claim to greatness in magazines and periodicals of all sorts throughout the United States and Europe. Within a year I was writing Shaw's biography with his support and cooperation. The first book about Shaw to appear in any language was published in 1905 by an American, today by no means unknown to fame, who thus early also discovered the greatness of Shaw. This was "George Bernard Shaw: His Plays," by H L Mencken.
The beginning of Shaw's popular success in any country was inaugurated by Arnold Daly in 1903. "I felt as a prospector does when he strikes a big vein of gold," said Daly afterward in describing his emotions on reading Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. On a capital of just $350 he and his partner, Winchell Smith, on Dec 8, 1903, produced Candida at a sort of "trial matinee" at the Princess Theater, New York. Playing here, at the Bijou Theater, Carnegie Hall, the Strollers' Club and the Vaudeville Theater, afterward known as the Berkely Lyceum, Candida ran for more than 150 performances in New York City. The long, long battle was won; Bernard Shaw had at last won distinction as a popular dramatist.
During the early years of the century Shaw was slowly making his way in Europe. His Drei Dramen, translated by Siegfried Trebitsch, appeared in 1902, and soon afterward Georg Brandes was urging the production of these plays, Candida, The Devil's Disciple, and Arms and the Man, in Denmark as examples of the most advanced drama of England. The brilliant Austrian dramatist and dramatic critic, Hermann Bahr, enraptured by Shaw's plays, exclaimed: "Imagine my astonishment, my amazement, my delight, when suddenly I discovered before me English plays which comply with the highest demands of the French in both clarity and pliancy of form, and which for sheer intellectual acuteness and subtlety of mood, fineness of temper and grasp of human relations are excelled only by their power to transpose all action into the key of pure intellect.
And now began the production of Shaw's plays on the Continent: of Ein Teufelsherl at the Raimund Theater, Vienna (Feb 25, 1903), of Helden (Arms and the Man) at the Freie Volksbuehne of Berlin in the Spring of 1903; of Der Schlachtenlenker (The Man of Destiny) at the Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt am Main (April 21, 1903), and of Candida at the Konigliches Schauspielhaus, Dresden (Nov 19, 1903). Shaw's European fame may be said to have been inaugurated by Max Reinhardt and his company, the finished products of the "Schall und Rausch" Society. As a curtain raiser to Maeterlinck's "Soeur Beatrice," Der Schlachtenlenker was produced at the Neues Theater, Berlin (Feb 10, 1904), the part of the Lady being taken by the superb actress, Agnes Sorma, the part of Napoleon by Max Reinhardt himself. Candida was successfully produced at the Neues Theater (March 3, 1904), Agnes Sorma excelling even herself in her remarkable denotement of "la femme selon Titlen." Friedrich Dusel remarked at the time that with her Candida Sorma closed and crowned her season. From this time forward Shaw's success in the Germanic countries, if slow, was none the less sure.
Today Shaw is unquestionably the world's greatest living dramatist. His Candida is perhaps the most perfect play of the era; Man and Superman the most brilliant; Saint Joan the greatest. Shaw today ranks New York City as the world's theatrical center, because of the work of the Theater Guild; The Court Theater, London; the Birmingham (England) Repertory Theater and the New York Theater Guild give, not occasional productions, but Shaw Festivals. Bernard Shaw is the Richard Wagner of the drama, with New York as his Baireuth. He is at once wit and philosopher, satirist and dramatist; a Celtic Ibsen, a pure-minded Swift, a Puritan Voltaire, a Moliere of our days.
Mentioned in sp art on sanity of genius, Ag 30, IV, p 17;
Assails British Medical Council in lr to Irish Times, S 3, 27: 4
9/3/25 Bernard Shaw has taken a hand in a fierce discussion raging about the decision of the Irish Free State Government to emancipate Irish doctors from control of the British General Medical Council. In a long letter to the Irish Times, he writes:
"The Free State Government will, I hope, resolutely carry through its announced intention of rescuing Ireland from the disastrous control of that despised and self-disgraced trade union, the British Medical Council. At present unregistered practitioners in London charge and are willingly paid higher fees than the registered doctors because they have acquired modern technique, which the Council boycotts and persecutes.
"The most famous manipulative surgeon in England, knighted for his services though being unregistered, is denounced and ostracized as a quack by men of whom some, though registered as competent surgeons, are hardly dexterous enough to manipulate their own shoelaces. The Council avenges itself for this public slight of knighthood by threatening to repeat its old exploit of striking off the register as guilty of infamous professional conduct any registered doctor who acts as an anaesthetist to the knight, for its members are determined that if he dares to perform operations which are outside their technique, his patients, the public, shall howl for it.
"Students going up for examination have to conclude their preparation by being coached in obsolete surgical and clinical procedures because their examiners are hopelessly out of date. This is the body which is described in your columns as possessing the world's supreme medical charter, as having a high and international standard and as conferring on Ireland our present scientific eminence.
"The General Medical Council has about as much to do with science as the Miners' Federation, a much more enlightened and up-to-date body, has to do with geology and mineralogy. Even in the medical world, which is not the scientific world, it has no pre-eminence and in Europe and America it is a laughing stock.
"The medical profession in Ireland will lose no prestige by dissociating themselves from it. But now comes a very serious question: Will an Irish medical council prove any better? I answer certainly not if the Irish Government acts as stupidly and ignorantly in the matter as the English Government.
"In President Cosgrove's reassuring and sensible announcement there is one terrifying phrase, 'a self-controlled medical profession.' A self-controlled profession is a conspiracy against the laity. Of all professions on earth the medical profession, consisting mainly of private medical and surgical practitioners who have a direct pecuniary interest in making us ill, keeping us ill and mutilating us, is one that needs the sternest disinterested control not only in the common interest of the general body of citizens but in that of science."
Mr. Shaw's attack on the British doctors, especially his reference to a famous manipulative surgeon who has been ostracized by surgeons, has caused considerable stir in medical circles. The manipulative surgeon mentioned by him is recognized as Sir H A Barker, whose bloodless method of operation on displaced or malformed bones has been successful in more than 40,000 cases. His insistence for many years that the medical faculty should devote more attention to manipulative operations has not endeared him to those surgeons who favor the use of the knife.
Lrs on his debate with Belloc on religion, Jl 12, VIII, 12:1
7/12/25 To The Editor Of The New York Times: In the debate between Mr Shaw and Mr Belloc, I cannot say that either of them seemed particularly acute. But in his portion of the debate Mr Shaw gave a quotation and made an assertion which, quite apart from the question of evolution, merit some critical examination. Mr Shaw's quotation from Micah, explicitly, "What more doth thy God require of thee but to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" differs in substance very little from the common housewife aphorism, "If you live a good life, I guess it don't much matter what church you believe in."
Both these statements I suppose are true, yet in these complacent platitudes, or the easy interpretation of the first, lies a trick which would be sufficiently obvious were it not that the fashions of the time were so much in favor of them. Doubtless if one were able to do justice, love mercy to the practicing of it, and to walk humbly with God, little else would be required; but justice and mercy and humbleness are no easy attributes.
People talk about leading a good life as though it were a matter of familiar experience, yet in talking of it in this manner they show that they have led it very little and thought about it almost not at all. A good life is not a matter of Masonic degree or obituary notice or editorial comment. There is no outward standard of goodness. Such things as we have cognizance of are merely the sentient displays of talent. That relation between ability and endeavor which spells goodness is a matter only of internal knowledge.
Whosoever has examined his emotions in times of stress will know the surprising strength of cowardice, and envy, and greed, and avarice and all those feelings which we have chosen to call base. It is no thing of a casual hour to love mercy or do justice, much less to walk humbly with God. There is no sadder sight in the world than a man of note. When we hear a great poet slurring a colleague, or listen to a fine critic denouncing without qualification on the one hand, and asserting with less on the other, we may get some measure of the frailty on one man's effort. It may be possible for a man by his own effort, without the aid of a great tradition, to walk humbly with God, but I myself have never known one, and as far as I am aware there is no record of any such.
Mr Shaw attacks the Church for its trials for heresy, for its breaking on the wheel and for its demanding abasement before a priest with the Host. There may by no doubt that the Church has had ignorant men as its servants, that they have been fanatical in the performance of its instructions; there can be no doubt that the fact of ritual has at times risen to more importance than the spirit of it, and that corrupt men have at times used the Church for their own ends, but he who has seen the churches it has built or the pictures and statues it has drawn and carved, or read the books it has written and listened to the music it has created, will know that it has often taught men to love mercy and walk humbly with God.
Bigoted it may have been; cruel, complacent, slothful and corrupt; but great it has been also. I do not know whence has arisen this worship of subtraction. In the same volume that contains the Book of Micah is the story of Sodom, and in this story it was the one man who was good and not the number who were not evil that would have saved the inhabitants.
Certainly there have been shipwrecks due to captains who were dotards, yet few people use this as an argument for not crossing the ocean. No more are the faults of the Church an argument against it. It has done good. I presume it still may. I do not think any man, unaided, can walk humbly with God.
But besides the use of this passage from Micah, Mr Shaw asserts that we get tired of everything, that even great truths we want to have presented to us in a new way. I suppose this is true, yet it proves very little except our own feebleness. Certainly our fickleness should not be taken to disprove a truth; and if we want a new way, what good is this new manner unless the substance of the old be true?
I suppose we are tired of the Church; I admit that those who serve it are often bores. The teachings of the Founder have proved too much for us. We are fagged and out of breath, and ready to give up the race. A little courage, perhaps; a little urging of those dead thighs and sore calves and we may yet get there. Perhaps we are too done, perhaps we must stop. If we do, though, let us be honest and admit that we have quit, that our courage is not there and that the Kingdom of Heaven is not for us.
W K Gutman
To the Editor of The New York Times: Evolution has as many varieties as Heinz, the Russian Marxists with their Soviets, at one extreme, the much criticized Mr Bryan and some of the clergy at the other. Shaw said in his discussion with Belloc, as printed in The New York Times of June 28, that he didn't care twopence if all the churches crumbled and fell. That reads a bit like the Russian extreme, but it is only one of Shaw's usual phrasings, and he doesn't really mean it.
What do ordinarily sensible people tend to think? The religions that cluster around the bible are the only ones that lay stress on a God who can and does get into teaching contact with men. They are not the oldest religions. Before the days of Abraham men had religions. Were these then decadent or growing? Evolution is generally supposed to be a tendency toward completion, but is forbidden an interior intelligent source: like Topsy said, "I growed."
The question of how long ago it was that life began on this earth, of how long it is since men, as such, started, is comparatively unimportant. It is not when and where Eden was, but was there any Eden? Does God create and teach, and how?
Life on this earth had its first moments, for life as we know it is dependent upon temperature; too hot or too cold, and it ceases. Inorganic substances have wider range, but ferns, trees, birds, animals are particular, and demand heat or cold somewhere between the boiling and freezing points of water.
The outer world had to be fixed up before man could live there. The first chapter of Genesis says that God then created man in his image; which, in part, means that the home-builder on the prairie and the renter in the town get their desire and ability to start a home from the prearrangement that was put through in the early days of our little world.
Genesis and the rest of the Bible may have two sides - one toward man, the other from God.
As to teaching evolution in the schools, what kind of evolution is to be taught? Will it involve active denial of creation because some religious thinking is crude, a relic of teaching given centuries ago to unscientific people?
F. M. B.
Comment on Scopes evolution trial, Jl 10, 6:4
7/10/25 "Let America look to it and let the newspapers and pulpits of Tennessee rally to their duty, lest their state become a mere reservation of morons and moral cowards. They can put a stop to this monstrous nonsense in a single Sunday if they have the courage of the profession and no Sunday in America can ever be better spent."
On J Epstein's Hudson Memorial, Jl 19, IV, p 10;
7/9/25 Bernard Shaw, after "finding my way by an eloquently trampled path to a crowded railing," sat down and wrote: "It is evident that the Hudson memorialists, having collected what they could, were compelled to go to Mr Epstein and say: 'Please, sir, mother England wants four yards of your best monumental wall sculpture to put up in the park for one of her famous sons." And Mr Epstein solemnly delivered the four yards, which bear about the same proportion to what was needed as the Quaker's halfpenny of cloth to a suit of clothes. This is what comes of ordering a monument when you have only money enough to pay for a Christmas card.
"We get a monument to our national meanness in matters of high art. If it had been Wembley now! Next time, if we cannot afford to give Mr Epstein carte blanche, we had better get the job done in the Euston Road in a thoroughly commercial manner. I have a great deal of sympathy with the people who hate Mr Epstein's sample. Some of them feel the reproach and the inadequacy for which they innocently blame Mr Epstein. Some fo them do not like monumental wall sculpture, and are in the grievous position of people who want a fox-trot and have a Beethoven symphony thrust in their ears.
"Why should not these people, who have a perfect right to their own taste, have a bird sanctuary and a monument all to themselves: These is plenty of room in the park for both. It need not cost much. There is a process called photo-sculpture, with an establishment in the West End, by which very pretty reliefs may be made by camera.
"If Miss Fay Compton or Miss Gladys Cooper would pose on 'Rima' with a stuffed pigeon on each wrist, the artist who touches up the photo-sculpture could throw in a few swallows, a robin and a holly branch, and the result would be exactly what is wanted by the honest folk whose sense of beauty is outraged and mocked by Mr. Epstein's powerful proceedings. Why not please everybody when it is so easy?"
Likeness in stained-glass window to be dedicated in Ethical Ch of London, Jl 4, 10:8
7/4/25 George Bernard Shaw has joined the saints - that is, the stained-glass ones. The Ethical Church of London tomorrow will solemnly dedicate a stained-glass window on which are represented Pope Benedict XV, Saint Michael and Saint Joan of Arc, and Bishop Beauvais. Half way down is a three-quarter length portrait of Mr Shaw and next to him the late Anatole France. No one knows why Mr Shaw is there except that the title of the window is "Joan of Arc." Mr Shaw when asked his views on the unusual event replied characteristically, "You had better go and ask Anatole France. If you cannot get him then come and ask me."
Debate with H Belloc on "What is Coming?" sp art, illus, Je 28, IX, p 1
6/28/25 What GBS Said
I do not think that even the cause of charity justifies the Chairman making such a monstrous statement as that Mr Belloc and I are two men with regard to whom you never know what they are going to say next. If there are two men living on the face of the earth about whom you may be perfectly sure what they are going to say because they have said it so often before and never say anything else, it is Mr Hilaire Belloc and Mr Bernard Shaw.
Now, I have recently been indulging in an illness, and that illness was very greatly soothed by an extremely readable book by Mr Belloc, which consists partly of accounts of his cruising round the coasts of this country in a small boat. I am not quite sure whether he really has been in a boat in his life. But at any rate he has made his cruise extraordinarily fascinating. And when he got tired of describing the cruise, he expatiated in the way with which you are all familiar.
Now, with all these expatiations of every possible subject under the sun - on history, on Catholicism, and so forth (you know it all) - it is quite easy for me, instead of coming here as I had intended and saying that I knew nothing whatever about what is coming, and that I had no intention of debating or differing with Mr Belloc in any way, not to take advantage of my not only having read that particular book, but many others of Mr Belloc's, with very great enjoyment.
Having done that, I think I may be able to spend the next half hour - if it is possible for me to limit myself to half and hour - in doing my very best to provoke Mr Belloc, and say things that are most likely to bring him out in his best controversial form. I am not quite sure, however, that I shall be able to do this, because there is a very great deal of sympathy between myself and Mr Belloc, and the real part that we have played throughout our lives has been more or less the establishment of an entirely modern - I hesitate to say realization, but perhaps it is the shortest way of saying it - of dragging people down from old ideas to modern realities; destroying their belief in ancient systems, and trying to bring them down closer to facts.
Without Evolution, Pessimism
During our lifetime there has been a change in public opinion in the minds of the world, and that change is represented to us by the word "evolution." I should say, roughly speaking, that the world without the conception of evolution is a world in which men of strong minds can only despair, as Shakespear despaired. That is to say, they will have a conception of the universe which reduces it to something like the sea - always restless, always in motion, having violent fits of rage occasionally, but getting no further and doing nothing except steadily drowning a certain number of people - killing, killing, killing.
Men of strong minds, contemplating that kind of universe, become pessimists, like Shakespear. They talk about the world very much as Macbeth talks about it. If they happen to be of a naturally cheerful disposition, they may possibly be able to get through without it. But nevertheless they are in a world in which there is no hope; in which there is no future - there is nothing coming ; the world of which the Frenchman said: 'The more it changes, the more it is the same old thing.'
On the other hand, when you introduce evolution you may, for the moment, be in the desert of sin and misery; nevertheless there is a promised land before you, and when you reach that promised land there are always still other promised lands on the horizon.
There is noting more for you to do in the world, and nothing more for you to hope for, without you get evolution introduced. You get hope; you get something to live for. And I should say that if any two men could talk to you about 'What Is Coming?' they would of course, as honest men, say they did not know - but the man who is an evolutionist will say that he does believe there is something coming that is different from what has been, and higher than what has been, and which lives more intensely than before.
I am an evolutionist, and I am trying to put Mr Belloc in the position of not being an evolutionist.
Scientific Legends
It was not until the year 1790 that it existed in the world in non-metaphysical form. Before then it was the metaphysical theory, and was associated with a great number of legends, some poetic and beautiful, some horrifying. But nevertheless, in that year, it suddenly came out of the metaphysical stage and came into the scientific stage. It came down to earth, and came down at a time when the legends attached to the metaphysical theory - when the forms in which the metaphysical theory was taught - had become incredible.
Now I guard myself against saying that they were incredible or credible. I can only say that it is a matter of simple history that with certain forms of theory, certain bodies of thought, presented in a certain way, find quite ready credence among men - not by any means through the operation of their reasoning faculties, but possibly merely because they get tired of the old form.
They find that they are unable to believe the legends they believed before, and I think you may take it that in 1790, when evolution was, I should say, discovered - when it came out of the metaphysical form and came into the modern scientific form - at that time, also, all the legends attached to the metaphysical form ceased to be credible, and we attached to the concept of evolution a number of legends which we are pleased to call scientific.
When I am confronted with some of the older forms of the theory of evolution in its metaphysical form, I do not believe them. I do not tell you they are unreasonable; I do not tell you they are more unreasonable than many things I do believe. But I do believe the theory of evolution to a great extent, as it is now presented to us
Not "Natural Selection"
In the book of Mr Belloc which I have mentioned, the only reference he makes to evolution is when he speaks of Darwin's announcement. Well, there of course I am heartily on the side of Mr Belloc. It is a little hard on Darwin, but you will all understand by my insistence on the date, 1790, that when I speak of evolution I am not speaking of what Darwin called "natural selection." That was really a reaction against evolution. I should not call it Darwin's announcement because it is only an announcement in so far as it is presented as evolution. It is not evolution. But nevertheless a great deal of change and modification does occur in the world, and will occur, by the method of natural selection.
It is a chapter of accidents. But we will leave it on one side and come back to my point: that the modern man is the man who believes in evolution. And the reason that at this moment I am not enlarging on this with a sense of its typicality is because the movement against evolution in its modern form has suddenly taken shape in America.
A famous gentleman named Mr Bryan - a great American statesman, a man with an extraordinary sort of uplift and no discoverable brains of any kind, and one of those men which America alone seems to produce - has suddenly led a movement against evolution, and has called himself a "Fundamentalist," and has asked his followers to call him and themselves "Fundamentalists." He proposes to make it a criminal offense for anybody to acquaint children in the schools - and also, probably, adults in adult schools - with the theory of evolution in its modern scientific form.
There, of course, you get at once a strong difference between myself and Mr Bryan. And if I had Mr Bryan here instead of Mr Belloc, there would be no confusion between our ideas, and I would quite frankly tell him that what he called Fundamentalism I called Infantilism, in the pathological sense, and that I regarded the holding back of the knowledge of modern evolution from the children as a gross violation of the rights of children, and that I regard the desire to do that as part of the dogma of a blockhead.
America sends us our ideas as it sends us its cinema shows. And you will find that presently this controversy will come over here, and you will probably have British Fundamentalists as well as American Fundamentalists, and the issue will be joy.
Imaginary Desires
Therefore I want to say that if you compare that clear issue which could be debated with any possible issue that could arise between Mr Belloc - who calls himself a Catholic - and I - who am a Protestant - I think you will at once see that, somehow or other, the statement that Mr Belloc is a Catholic and I a Protestant means nothing at all. Whereas with an issue between Mr Bryan and my friend Professor Gilbert Murray, or any other exponent of modern evolution, there would be no doubt whatever in the minds of any audience, and they would at once see on which side they were.
Supposing we go on with these debates. Supposing we were able to take these debates to a country where the speakers were not known, and the public had no knowledge of their ideas. It would be part of your duty, Mr Chairman, to introduce the speakers.
Supposing, for instance, you had a debate between myself and Mr Belloc, and then a debate between our friends, Mr Gilbert Chesterton and Dean Inge. Well, what would the Chairman say? 'Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Hilaire Belloc, Catholic, and Mr Bernard Shaw, a Protestant - time!'
Well, at the end of the debate the audience would be extremely puzzled; and they would be equally puzzled at the end of the debate between Mr Chesterton and Dean Inge.
I think it would be far more amusing if the Chairman got up and said: 'Now, here are these gentlemen who are going to debate before you. They are men of marked opinions, they are leaders of thought in their way; and the fun you are going to have, ladies and gentlemen, is: At the end of the debate you will guess what denomination they belong to.'
Well, the debate would go on. You can imagine Dean Inge for instance - by way of giving them a lead as to what their opinions were - with his wonderful command of extremely trenchant language, explaining that representatives of the Protestant Church of England were to be recruited in future from men who seriously believed in the Thirty-nine Articles. Then in the next generation the Protestant Episcopal Church of England would consist of liars, bigots and fools.
The Audience Guesses
Then you would have Mr Belloc and Mr Chesterton, and they would talk on almost every subject imaginable - even on history. The Catholic view of history would be well represented: but the audience would notice that not the slightest allusion would be made to the Apostles' Creed, and they would be convinced that the speakers had never heard of it, and had never read that creed. On these facts the audience would proceed to guess.
What would the guesses be like?
I would say that instead of the guesses being, 'These two men are on the one side and these two men on the other,' the audience would lump all four together, and would come to the conclusion that the speakers were four roaring atheists. Then there would be a more cultivated guess, and that would be that they were four first-class intellectual play-boys. After that they would be called four disgruntled dissenters or dangerous firebrands, and so on. They would be all classed together, and none of them knowing but the one thing, and the audience would never class us as either Protestant or Catholic.
I take it that that means that these categories of Protestant and Catholic are now obsolete.
If we consider the history of the churches - the Protestant Church, The Catholic Church, and all the other churches, it appears to me now to be plain to everybody that whereas, there is a great ideal, an ideal which we call "the" Catholic Church, which we have always been striving to realize (a thing which one can only describe as being a communion of saints in the very largest sense,) we are certain of this, that there are many churches in the world, and they all profess to be realizations of that ideal of "the" Catholic Church. You have the Protestant Church. And I well remember as a little boy how puzzled I was when I discovered that the Protestant Church - the Episcopal Church of Ireland - occasionally described itself as Catholic, whereas I had always been brought up to believe that a Catholic was a person who went to hell.
Then you have the Roman Catholic Church, which also professes to be "the" Catholic Church. You have Islam (or the Church of Mahomet, if I may call it so), and that also professes to be "the" catholic church.
Churches Broken Down
All these churches claim to be "the" Catholic Church, and it is a historical fact that they have all broken down completely. None of them is really "the" Catholic Church.
What is destroying the Catholic Church is rationalism. It has always suffered from rationalism carried to the utmost extremity. If you want to get a religious precept, which is also as near to the Catholic precept as you can possibly get, go back twenty-five centuries or thereabouts, and you will find a man named Micah, a prophet, who says: 'What more doth thy God require of thee, but to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?'
I have a very high opinion of the prophet for saying that. And if only the churches could have been persuaded to believe in the prophet Micah, they would not be in the condition they are today. The Catholic Church interprets it in this way: 'What more doth thy God require of thee but to burn heretics and to break them on the wheel - men who do not do down on their knees when the Catholic priest passes in the street with the host in his hand?' The church of England says: 'What more doth thy God require of thee but to cut off the ears of dissenters?'
It is sometimes put forward - occasionally Mr Belloc himself has represented it so - that the conflict between the Church in France and Voltaire was a conflict between Voltaire and rationalism. Voltaire would never have troubled himself about the Church if it had been a mere question of dogmas; but what he objected to was that the Church Broke men on the wheel. It was such things as these which account for the Church being reduced to the position it is now.
Away From Rationalism
I suggest that one of the things that is going to happen in the future is that we are going to get away from rationalism. And we are going to be very much more tolerant of one another's faults. The questions really of interest to us are: 'Will the churches repent?' Will they adapt themselves to the growth of the human spirit, the march of the human soul? Will they cast aside and repent for their past and adapt themselves to what may be called the new attempt to realize the great Catholic ideal? Or will they stick in the old ruts and try and defend their conduct and each go on quarreling with the other and each trying to say that it is the only Catholic Church and not others?
I do not know. I think myself that they are at the tremendous disadvantage that I mentioned at the outset of my address, and that is that we get tired of everything. Even great truths we want to have presented to us in a new way. And also the churches have got themselves connected with an extremely tiresome lot of people.
Toward the close of the last century, if you wanted to get a body of men in Europe which was really responding to the time spirit, really trying to work out problems presented by the development of civilization, you would have found that the most hopeless was the Vatican and the most competent the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society of which I was a member. The difference between the Fabian Society and the Church was that the Church could never confine itself to saints. If the churches consisted of saints, and were really communions of saints, then they would hold their own.
Not Enough Saints
We speak of "the" church; there is no such thing as "the" church. The Church in the practical sense means that in every village and every town you have to have an official to baptize, marry and bury people; but unfortunately the Church has not enough saints to go round.
The Catholic Church has a few wonderful men. I know some of them, and I get on with them perfectly. But I also know what the ordinary average priest is like. I know what the ordinary rector is in a Protestant country, and so do you. We find that we have everywhere a little nucleus of saints: but the great mass of things which we call "the" Church is a church of people who are at best very tiresome, very snobbish, very stupid and often downright scoundrels. Therefore the world gets tired of them, and I am afraid that is going to bat the Church. We are tired of the parson and the priest.
Provided, however, that the theory of evolution is kept alive, and men march on to be super men, I don't care twopence if all the churches that ever existed crumble and fall. Our souls would still go marching on, as the American says.
What Mr Belloc Said
When I was young I heard a man who called himself a Bishop - he was not one, but called himself one - say a very wise thing: "When you speak in public, take care that you only have one idea, and that it is an idea familiar to the whole of your audience, and repeat it over and over again; say it in various forms; say you have said it, and then sit down." He added that if one did that the world would be at his feet.
I did not know, in those days, what it was to have the world at one's feet. But I know now. And I do not like it.
We do not know what is coming.
I have only one lesson, and that is: You do not know what is coming. You have no idea what the world is going to be like in 50, 100 or 200 years time. You do not know what you yourself will be like in a few hours from now. Something may happen to one, to change one altogether.
This is my thesis; that is all I have to say, and if you ask me how I can say it for the next twenty-four minutes, wait and listen.
Not What One Expects
For the first thing, let me put before you this very simple proposal. This thesis is pictured admirably by Mr Max Beerbohm in his collection of pictures, which most of you saw, in which he contrasted the man in his youth with the man in middle age. Go back, any one of you, to the time when you were young, at your twentieth year: ask yourself what you then thought of the world and what was going to happen to you. How did you look at things? Did what has actually happened correspond in any sort of way with what you expected? If it has, you must have been the victim or the beneficiary of very remarkable vision. In any other case I have ever known, I must own it has utterly differed.
The men I was with at Oxford - some sober, some drunkards, some intellectual, others not, but nearly all of them good fellows. I now see what position they have obtained - one with great wealth; the other with great notoriety; two or three in gaol, many dead, and the rest unknown but pursuing their miserable task of creating wealth for others under the system called capitalism.
I wonder how many of these if asked in 1982 what his position would be in 1925 would have given the right answer. One never knows what is going to happen.
Now, Mr Bernard Shaw quoted the name of Micah. I thought it was the name of a material of some sort; but that is due to the Reformation which has rather cut off man from the Hebrew folklore, and I had forgotten the name of Micah. It is very curious that of the many things that do come off in this world, prophecy is a thing that does not.
I made two prophecies during my life, and one of them came off. That is so high a percentage that I believe myself to be unique in my generation.
I prophesied during the war that the French advance would develop. It did not. I prophesied that Bulgaria would be the first to leave the war against us, and it was. When I put in an article that I prophesied this, they cut it out. It is the only prophecy that has ever come off.
Future Always Uncertain
"No one knows what is coming." I have come to tell you that, not to tell you what is coming, but whatever is coming is not what you think it is.
I was asked to come here to debate with Mr Shaw. I knew very well I should not debate. I knew my subject would be entirely different from his, but as I listened to Mr Shaw, I said to myself: "The man has a system. He believes in a thing called evolution (I gathered that before he had been speaking a quarter of an hour), and his mind is attuned to his audience.
I will here tell you a story which has nothing whatever to with what he said or with what I am going to say, but I am simply telling it to you because it happens to be about systems.
There was a very stupid young man stopping at a country house, and the woman of the house was reading some poetry by Lord Tennyson. And one phrase which she read out to him was: "Little systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be." He did not think the line was very beautiful, but listened very carefully. He thought the word "systems" was "cisterns"; and, being a rich young man, he was next week-end in another house; and one of the cisterns in the house went wrong; and, thinking to be smart, he made the remark: "Little cisterns cease to be,": which led people to remark: "Why, this man has made a joke, and we took him to be a half-wit."
A friend, however, took him aside and corrected him. But even then he thought the word was "sisters." He went to a third house another week-end, where the hostess had just lost her little sister. He thought it an appropriate time to again quote these words: "Little sisters have their day; they have their day and cease to be." He was bundled out of the house.
Anything May Come
Mr Shaw has called up the picture of something he calls Fundamentalism. If you give up beer and wine, anything may come. It may be Mormonism. It may be anything in the world, but it won't be what you think today. Of that you may be absolutely certain. Whatever passing fad there is for the moment in the way of philosophy, it will not endure. You may say here I am prophesying myself. Quite true. I ought to put it differently. I ought to say that we so little know what is coming that possibly even the modern folly may continue for another hundred years. I cannot put it more strongly than that. Possibly you will still believe in a thing called progress, and high and lower. Perhaps a hundred years hence human beings in these islands will still be saying: "Though we do not believe anything, yet we are quite certain of this, although we have no dogmas, no one can deny the following."
If we could guess at the future, I take it there are three things which most men and a great number of women would like to know.
The first is "What is going to win the Derby next year?" A long way ahead, but there is plenty of money in it. Secondly: "When are we going to die?" Thirdly: "What will the weather be on a particular day?"
Knowledge Would Be Misery
Let me assure you that to know any one of those three things would lead you to misfortune. If you could guess what the weather was going to be like - to take the most important thing of the three - at any moment, you would be miserable, and the proof is that whatever weather you have, you are unhappy.
To take the second item: speculation. If you knew what others did not, you would make a great deal of money. If you wish to know the value of money you can read it on the faces of those upon whom it has been bestowed.
With regard to the date of death: The only people who have a reasonable certainty are condemned criminals, and they are not happy. If any one knew the date of his death, he would be perpetually reminded of it, saying: "On such and such a date I have got to die," he would think of nothing else. Mercifully, it is shut away from us.
I am perfectly glad I have not the least idea what is going to happen in any direction whatsoever. In any case although I am not certain, I am reasonably certain, that whatever does happen I shall soon be out of it.
I look forward to a condition in which there can be no question of the future or of the past. It is a happiness which some day shall by fulfilled which is called beatitude. When we have that we shall not be able to understand why men wanted to know what was coming.
Says he and every one else is mad, in appeal for funds for nerve training school, Je 22, 17:7
6/22/25 Bernard Shaw was once a nervous wreck. He admitted this on Saturday. It is a statement which will prove a great surprise to Londoners, among whom the question of Shaw's nerve has become almost proverbial. Shaw added that, although the nerve school for which he is appealing for funds cured his nervousness, he is still dangerous to the point of madness.
This assertion the novelist qualified with the declaration that everybody was mad. Appealing for funds to allow poor people to attend a nerve training colony conducted at King's Langley by Mrs. Archer, Shaw said he was one of her earliest students. Apropos of nerves he'd added most people were unfit to live with, as could be discovered by asking those who had lived with them.
"We are all mad, more or less," he added. "Why, if you knew everything about me I know about myself, you would rush out of the place and wonder why such a dangerous person was allowed to remain at large."
Shaw declared the war was a landmark in the history of nerves since it was the first which admitted fear. "Nelson, as a boy, was supposed to have asked, 'What is fear?' If he did he was swanking, as people were expected to do then. The word nerves was, in any case, a misnomer. A Frenchman would say of his wife 'she had a crisis of nerves.' An Englishman that she 'went off the deep end.' The Frenchman was less accurate because the phenomenon had nothing to do with the nervous system."
Doctors knew nothing about it, and were "getting so honest they did not pretend to do so."
Lr to London Times upholds J Epstein in controversy over memorial to W H Hudson, Je 17, 3:2
6/17/25 George Bernard Shaw today entered the heated Epstein controversy which has been raging in the press and on the platform here for some weeks, and, in a letter to The London times, comes out whole-heartedly on the side of the sculptor's Hudson Memorial.
Mr Shaw's letter followed a special visit paid to Hyde Park. "I found the way by an eloquently tramped path to the crowded railing where I confronted a very remarkable sample (I use the word advisedly) of great art in the monumental wall of sculpture which we rather feebly call a bas-relief. It was unquestionably the real thing, with all the power of stone, all the illusion of strenuous passion, even movement, that live design can give. But it was a sample ridiculously small.
"It reminded me of a Quaker cloth merchant of my native Dublin, famous for his imperturbability of temper. A young English officer, after making him take down every roll in his shop, at last selected a cloth and gravely said he would take a halfpenny worth. Unmoved, the Quaker cut the piece the exact size of a halfpenny, wrapped it neatly in a paper and handed it respectfully to the customer.
"It is evident that the Hudson memorialists, having collected what they could were compelled to go to Epstein and say, 'Please, sir, Mother England wants four yards of your best monumental wall sculpture to put in the park for one of her famous sons.' Epstein solemnly delivered four yards which bear about the same proportion of what is needed as the Quaker's halfpenny worth of cloth bears to a suit of clothes. That's what comes of ordering your monument when you've only money enough to pay for a Christmas card. We get monuments to our national meanness in matters of high art. If it had been at Wembley now! Next time, if we cannot afford to give Epstein carte-blanche, we'd better get the job done in Euston Road in a thoroughly commercial manner.
"I've a great deal of sympathy with the people who hate the Epstein sample. Some feel the reproach of its inadequacy for which they innocently blame Epstein. Some don't like the monumental wall sculpture and are in the grievous position of people who want a fox-trot and get a Beethoven symphony thrust in their ears. Why should not these people, who have a perfect right to their own tastes, have a monument bird sanctuary all to themselves? There is plenty of room in the park. Both need not cost much. There is a process called photo-sculpture, by which pretty reliefs can be made by a camera. If Fay Compton or Gladys Cooper would pose as Rima with a stuffed pigeon on each wrist, the artist could throw in a few swallows, a robin, a holly branch and the result would be exactly what is wanted by honest folk whose sense of beauty is outraged and mocked by Epstein's powerful proceedings. Why not please everybody when it is so easy?"
P Souday's comment on attitude of Paris toward his "Saint Joan," por, Je 14, III, 20:1
6/14/25 Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan achieved a great triumph in Paris, at the Theatre des Arts; as you know that play, which was produced in New York, I shall not go into the plot. Here practically all the papers praised it; for some mysterious reason the conservative and Catholic critics had expected irreverent jests on Joan of Arc, and were agreeably surprised by Bernard Shaw's veneration for our national heroine, whom before him, Shakespear had called the Saint of France. These same Right wing critics have forgiven the great Irish humorist his sarcasm, when he speaks of the Church and of the King Charles VII, who surely was far from being a great man, though he was not altogether a blockhead. In short, everything went off smoothly, and there was no discordant note in the universal admiration for this very beautiful, touching and substantial play.
Now, though I esteem highly Bernard Shaw's dramatic talent - of Pirandello, who has been compared to him - I must remark that his ideas on Joan of Arc are not quite as original as some people think. The first to conceive her in this was was Michelet, who looked on Joan as the shepherdess, the peasant girl, the incarnation of the people, inspired by patriotism, and saving herself in spite of the ill will of the great lords of the Church and of the lay world.
Bernard Shaw also owes much to Anatole France, who, in his two octavo volumes on "The Life of Joan of Arc," a monumental work of learning and rational intelligence, dwelt at great length on the antagonism between the holy warrior maid who communicates directly with heaven, and the formal theologians, in whose opinion all Christians must adhere faithfully to the tenets of the Church. It is this that Bernard Shaw humorously calls the Protestantism of Joan of Arc. Certain it is that mystics have always come very close to heresy. Thence the violent polemics of Rossuet against Fenelon and Mme Guyon, and more recently, the condemnation of modern immanentism by Pope Pius X. In an earlier age St Francis of Assisi barely escaped getting into trouble at the court of Rome.
It was not through any particularly criminal perversity, but in logical accord with their doctrines that Bishop Cauchon, the Grand Inquisitor, and the doctors of the Sorbonne had to condemn Joan of Arc. An unjust condemnation, but entirely regular, neither false nor treacherous, nor pronounced with the interests of England in view. The most that can be said is that the judges were nothing loth to be of service at the same time to the English and Burgundian party, with which they all affiliated. Twenty years later, when the French King Charles VII (whom Joan had crowned at Rheims), had finally regained his kingdom, it no longer seemed possible that he had been served and protected by a heretic; and other ecclesiastical judges therefore reinstated the Maid, four and a half centuries before the canonization that a prophetic character foretells in the last tableau of Bernard Shaw's drama.
Voltaire had already said that in another day she would not have been burned alive, but would have had altars erected to her. He, too, has turned out to be a good prophet. You may have heard that Voltaire insulted Joan of Arc. But no more than Bernard Shaw. In his heroic poem "The Maid," he permitted himself some liberties and pleasantries that shocked no one in the eighteenth century; and it was against the priests and the lords that his caustic shafts were directed.
The seventeenth century was not so enthusiastic over Joan. Chapelain, a sort of poet laureate and the most gifted of the wits, declared that the history of Joan very easily could be explained in a natural way. At that time belief in miracles was not yet obligatory, for Chapelain was a very good Catholic. Rossuet himself, in his "Compendium of French History," written for the use of the Dauphin, the son of Louis XIV, whose tutor he was, treats Joan of Arc rather briefly and without exaltation. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in "The Genius of Christianity," Chateaubriand does not mention Joan of Arc, though he enumerates all the glories and benefits of the religion whose self-appointed advocate he was against the encyclopedist philosophers.
As a matter of fact it was Michelet - the rationalist and republican Michelet - who originated the cult of Joan of Arc in two famous chapters of his "French History." Of course, Michelet did not believe in the miracles in the theological sense of the word. But in a philosophic sense he believed that she had in her something divine, that is, the purest essence of the popular and feminine soul. The Roman Church could not very well adopt this interpretation; but the canonization of Joan of Arc, and the reverence with which she is regarded, are actually the realization of Michelet's idea, though in another form.
In some respects Anatole France gives her a less important role. In his opinion she was not a great captain, and never a successful leader - it was the numerical inferiority of the English troops that brought victory to the armies of the French King. But he admits that Joan's intervention was none the less decisive, because both sides believed in her super natural mission. The French soldiers believed that God had sent her, while the English soldiers feared her as a witch. Yet while he establishes the facts with scientific objectivity, without Michelet's enthusiasm, Anatole France, too, bows before this sublime maiden.
There has appeared another book on Joan of Arc, which is receiving some publicity and is shocking a good many readers. The principal Catholic paper of Paris, La Croix, denounced it very indignantly. This although the author, M Joseph Deiteil, who is much more orthodox than Michelet, Anatole France or Bernard Shaw, believes that Joan of Arc cannot be explained in human terms, and proclaims his faith in the supernatural. So it is not for doctrinal reasons that La Croix hurled anathemas upon him. It is for reasons of propriety - and we must admit these are very strong, and will be shared even by ordinary free-thinkers possessed of a little good taste. While pretending to paint a natural and living Joan of Arc M Joseph Deiteil fills his book with singularly shameless, indecent and repulsive details. Imagine an ultra-naturalist novel full of more obscenity and filth than say, Emile Zola's "Earth." Zola at least has an excuse in his subject, which was in keeping with this nauseating realism. One expects to find dung in a novel dealing with peasants. But a figure of the purity of Joan of Arc is in an entirely different class; and M Joseph Deiteil's book, though not devoid of talent, is horridly offensive.
Objects to P Snowden's use of term "Communists" in connection with British agitators, Je 13, 4:6
(The Daily News, 12 June 1925)
"They are a very mixed lot, some of them so ignorant of political etiquette and void of British National self respect that they take money from Russia without thereby knowing they place themselves on a footing of our own secret service agents abroad whom we should certainly sack if they were silly enough to form societies for the purpose of showing their hands. Why the Russian government doesn't sack them if the money is really government money I cant imagine. If it is not government money then they are simply missionaries and should call themselves a society for the propagation of the apostle of Marx, according to the Russian Orthodox Church in partibus infidelium.
"Others, independent of Russia, are Labor Fascisti. Like Senor Mussolini and the King of Spain they are fed up with parliamentary shuffling and compromising and are for direct action, that is, the seizure of power by a coup d'tat by those who, like Senor Mussolini or the Spanish Military General Staff, can pull it off promising to rule by main force in the interests of the proletariat. Some of them are simple anarchists, primitive souls who having been convinced by their observation and experience that our parliaments and courts of justice are occupied mainly in robbing and oppressing the poor, conclude that the world would be a happy place but for our parliaments and policemen.
"Some are free and independent Britains (in theory) who without reasoning about it object to being governed at all. Some of them are men and women with intense pity for the suffering and the horror of cruelty. No matter what party they support they turn against it the moment it accepts power and responsibility because the party in the position immediately finds itself obliged to hang or imprison somebody and from that moment on they declare it has betrayed the cause of humanity. Some are communists credulous enough to believe that all people who call themselves communists are communists, a delusion almost as extravagant as that all people who call themselves Christians are Christians and even know what Christ taught.
"And then there are the political apprentice lads always against the political machine because it is so slow and because the capitalist
forces have such a knack of making it work their way. What sense is there in calling the left wing made up in this way "communist?" It is a darkening of counsel by words without wisdom."
On W J Bryan and evolution of man, Je 10: 1:6
6/10/25 Shaw told today what he thought about William Jennings Bryan's advocacy of fundamentalism. "Its part of the dogma of a block head," said Mr Shaw who was appearing in debate with Hillaire Belloc in aid of a London Hospital the subject being "what is coming?"
So much interest was aroused by the appearances on one platform of these noted writers that the promoters of the discussion had to engage the Savoy Theater and filled it to the top most gallery. Mr Shaw got round to Mr Bryan by discussing the word "evolution" saying that those who denied evolution had a conception of the universe like the sea:
"It was always restless and in motion. It was always surging but doing nothing except drowning a certain amount of people. It was killing killing killing. People who have no conception of evolution have no future but when you introduce the notion of evolution you have the promised land in front of you. There is always another land just ahead. The world is always growing better. A movement against evolution has suddenly taken shape in America. The great American statesman Mr Bryan, the sort of man only the United States can produce called himself a fundamentalist. He proposes to make it a criminal offence to teach in the schools the theory of evolution. Now there is a strong difference between Mr Bryan and myself. If he were on the same platform no agreement would be possible. What he calls fundamentalism, I call infantilism."
Recovering from influenza, My 16, 17:3;
N Y Univ students select him as favorite dramatist, My 17, 2:2;
Review of monograph by E Shanks, Je 7, III, 11:1
6/7/25 It is not altogether by accident that a reviewer finds himself called on to consider two recent monographs on Wells and Shaw within the limits of a single article. There exists what the scholiasts used to term a "nexus" between the two names. Vast as is the bibliography of either as a monument to industry, it is overtopped by the bulk of the comment that both have excited within the past twenty or twenty-five years. Mr Edward Shanks, in one of the studies under consideration, well remarks that in the inconceivable event of neglect and oblivion falling upon the Shavian plays and essays, the value to the student of the age through which he lived of a work to be entitled "George Bernard Shaw and His Times" would be unimpaired. To say the same thing for Mr Wells the ground of argument would have to be somewhat shifted. It is not without some reason that Mr Hillaire Belloc in an article published recently in Commonweal, can speak of him as "the typical spokesman in England and her colonies" for what he terms "the inferior camp" of thought - the men who "accept a hundred hard and fast dogmas which they read in print and believe to be scientific." Nevertheless, as a mere register of the successive disillusionments through which a mind can be led that thinks fast rather than hard, and with an irresistible penchant for the doctrine of human perfectibility, it is not sure that a similar biography would not be an even more valuable social document. In Mr Ivor Brown's study, as in Mr Shanks's, the student will find all the essential facts in handy form.
In their function of social criticism the two men have occupied an unusual position - one which it is not easy to imagine falling again to the lot of critics yet unborn or learning their craft. As citizens of a country in active revolt against all English conceptions whatever (his Hampshire origins are a matter of purely archaeological interest) Mr Shaw has from the very first availed himself of the advantages of his paradoxical status. The product of English culture, as he has never ceased to remind his traducers, he is uncommitted to a single one of its basic principles. Perfect familiarity with English problems has gone hand in hand with perfect detachment from any solution they might receive. He is not so much an Irishman, but, what is infinitely more valuable for his own purposes, a "West Briton." Dislike and mistrust of everything bearing the Anglo-Saxon label is a heavy birthright for the Celtic Irishman. But it is his to take or leave at will. Like an adventurer with two passports in his portmanteaux, he can avail himself, as occasion requires, either of his prejudices as a non-Englishman or his emancipation as a Protestant. His awareness of his strategic position has at times approached a sort of malign relish.
"Until Home Rule emerges from its present suspended animation I shall retain my Irish capacity for citicising England with something of the detachment of a foreigner, and perhaps with a slightly malicious taste for taking the conceit out of her."
Mr Shanks, who quotes this frank admission at the height of the war crisis in his present study, thinks it, with reason, a peculiar comment on Shaw's much-advertised boast of "normal eyesight." Only the naive, however, ever admitted the claim. Shrewd and penetrating as you will, the eyes which G B S has turned upon English life and English problems have always been rather bifocal than normal.
If the war with its emotions, and the seven years of resettlement following which have made Home Rule an actuality and translated so many a sustaining dream into drab reality, have intensified Shavian cynicism, they have also played havoc with Mr Well's dream of human progress through education. Mr Shanks, for a correct estimate of Shaw's background, reminds us that his intellectual atmosphere was the last decade of the last century, when "the word 'New' suddenly took on an enormous and electric significance. There was the New Woman, and the New Journalism, the new art of photography and the new sport of bicycling." Mr Brown, no less, would have us remember that the same epoch saw Wells emerge into popularity with the series of "scientific romances." "Wells is one of the first citizens of greater London: he felt its growing pains and cursed the absent (minded?) physicians who let the young giant shoot ungainly out of its clothes. Again: "If Wells was on the gallop, so, too, was science. Science, we may say, was the charger on which he rode, and it was moving very fast." True, it was the epoch of the Jameson Raid and Boer War, of Stock Exchange Imperialism and its prophet Kipling. But it was also an era of immense forces arrayed in the service of the ideal - of an overwhelming Liberal victory with Labor as its ally, when the author of a scathing study on poverty took his seat on Ministerial benches, when an Indian agitator was elected by an industrial constituency, when the revolt against women's disabilities was the rallying point for a host of vague dissatisfactions, when Grant Allen and the "Hill-Top" novelists were struggling with the limitations of Victorian prudery. It was an inspiring age to live in. Both men became its prophets and both have been affected by its bankruptcy through failure or through realization.
In Wells's case it is even more important to remember that it was the era of the County Councils, with its new schools and scholarships, and of the breaking down of the class wall built around the two big universities. The incident of the escape of youth, bred in a congealed mass of social prejudice and superstition, to a higher educational (and, incidentally, social) sphere by means of science, has been so frequently repeated in Mr Wells's novels that it has become almost a formula. It is the theme, to name only three of the larger novels of "The New Macchiavelli," "Tono-Bungay," and "The Dream."
To Americans, free by happy heredity from class barriers that it is conceived as a triumph to surmount, this stigma of social distinction is hard to understand. But there is evidence in both these studies that it acted upon both Wells and Shaw as a challenge and irritant at the outset of their careers. "Who own the wealth and opportunity?" Mr Brown conceives his Wells as asking. "The privileged possessing class. And what are they doing? They are at worst mere amateurs of horse and hound, at best mere fiddlers with the squalid intrigue of party politics." And Mr Shaw, in remembering his essay as novelist, can look back on early misdemeanors with a sense of subsequent advance. "Conceive me," he says, "as a person neither belonging to the world I describe nor wholly ignorant of it." And again: "My transcription of Oxford and Mayfair may nowadays suggest an unaccountable and ludicrous ignorance of a very superficial and accessible code of manners." What is unaccountable or ludicrous in ignorance of the social usages of a class into which one has not been born? Would any French or unspoiled American thinker feel called on to apologize for it? And, to turn to Mr Wells, would any Frenchman of American, at the apex of a career as social prophet, sum up his answer to life's problems, where they converge on the individual will in such desolating fashion as: "One ought to get one's living in some way not socially disadvantageous," or, "At the present juncture it is no use to risk freedom and culture."
Both phrases were uttered by Mr Wells in 1908 and it adds piquancy to recall that they are from a book bearing, of all possible titles, the imprint "First and Last Things." They are not quoted by Mr Brown, but possibly lay in his mind when he tells us that "it is permissible to see Wells, about 1900 and 1910, going through a black period, as Shakespear went through a black period in the first years of the seventeenth century." To the period belongs "The New Macchiavelli," with its abandonment of the democratic solution, its new insistence on the significance of the individual and of importance of flaws of character that may wreck his power for good. Chief of these, it is needless to remind readers of Mr Wells, was henceforth to be sex and all it ramifications. "The questing vision of the pioneer is made as nothing by the questing beast of sexual passion. The men who should be leaders of the New Republic become the slaves of desire." This growing concern with an accident that, in Mr Brown's words, "trips the leaders and snares the great elect is of the essence of tragedy, and we agree with him that it adds to rather than subtracts from, the dramatic value of Wells's later work.
But it "is permissible" to ask whether it leaves his integrity as social prophet unimpaired. There may have been great leaders of thought who were also great lovers. But, by and large, the world's big jobs are put through by men who accept the limitations and renouncements of their choice. To palliate a refusal to do so is only one concession the more to the disorder of society which Mr Wells at the beginning of his writing career set out in so far as in him lay, to remedy in becoming the advocate for hard cases he has not escaped the risk of being the advocate of unsound law. The process of soft thinking in his case since the sex era set in has been progressive. It led him, when the war had stirred the roots of his religious consciousness into such absurdities as "the soul snuggling up to God like a leveret to a tiger (The Undying Fire), and the vulgarity of recommending a new Christ in popular pictorial art with one hand torn away from the nails (God the Invisible King) or trampling on a broken cross.
One closes the studies on these two leading figures in contemporary English literature with a feeling that their message has entered the phase of anti-climax. Mr Shaw's art of the theater, like Mr Wells's art of the novel, is a thing beyond question. It is sufficient to record it. Yet, in closing his estimate of Shaw, the great dramatist in the province of thought, and as instanced by the famous "prefaces," Mr Shanks can write: "There is no doubt that if we look at him in cold blood, Mr Shaw gives as much evidence of muddleheadedness as of common sense. His desire to be always in the forefront of the movement, to be, in the words of Ramsden Roebuck, 'more advanced than ever he was,' often betrays his fundamental incapacity for logical thought."
In his summing up of Wells, the great story teller, Mr Brown is more merciful. "In his angry moods, Wells seems to go on exploding destructively and untiringly among the follies and foibles of the day among the literary leaders of our day he is definitely the most radio-active, a spinning atom of suggestion warmed by satiric fire."
To be "muddle-headed" after thirty-six years of satirizing the muddle of life and no more than "suggestive" after thirty years of exhausting its possibilities for change hardly seems the encomium a thinker would regard as a crown on a life of thought, or a teacher the reward for a "term of teaching."
Lr to T P O'Connor declining invitation to dinner in honor of Ramsay MacDonald, My 14, 14:2
5/14/25 T. P. O'Connor, M. P., who is getting up a dinner for Ramsay McDonald, invited Bernard Shaw among others. The latter today declined in the following letter: "Absence from town and a strong sense of humor will prevent me from accepting your invitation, in acknowledgment of the political eminence of Ramsay McDonald. Considering that the man has been Prime Minister of England, and cut a considerable figure in that capacity, I should have thought that his eminence would have been noticed. If the dinner is a success I suggest that it be followed by another, to acknowledge the piety of the Pope; yet another to emphasize the mathematical talent of Einstein, and finally one to call attention to the existence of milestones on Dover Road. If you could throw in a lunch to remind people that I am rather good at writing plays, all the better. These meals would have come in more handily, and I hope you will all enjoy yourselves very much."
Denies authorship of play, Trial of Jesus, says it is by J Masefiled, My 12, 3:6
5/12/25 Bernard Shaw has not written a play about Christ afterall, as was reported in the London newspapers. It appears that John Masefield is the author of the piece called the "Trial of Jesus," which was performed privately at the poet's house near Oxford. Mr Shaw said today: "You may take it once and for all that I am not writing a play. I have not written a play since "St Joan" and have no plans for writing another play. All this talk about "St Theresa" is just talk, and at the present moment I am writing a book on Socialism. It is much more important. They are always talking about me, but actually there is very little to be said but that people are constantly inventing things about me. That is my confirmed opinion."
When asked his opinion concerning Masefield's new play, Mr Shaw said: "Now, that is a tickling question, but I will write an article on Masefield's play for a small fee. I suggest £500."
Report that he has written new play entitled, Trial of Jesus, My 11, 17:3;
Por in review of Table-Talk of GBS, by A Henderson, My 3, III, 1:1
5/3/25 If it is true that wars are brought about by international bankers and armament makers in quest of profits, perhaps it is possible to prove the converse of the proposition. Perhaps it can be demonstrated that opposition to war comes from persons who stand to make money out of peace. If the economic interpretation accounts for the imperialist and the militarist, it might pay to inquire whether the economic interpretation does not often explain the pacifist. For such an adventure into the realm of human motive there is an excellent starting point the the latest volume of Shaviana. In March 1924, Mr Shaw and his American biographer were engaged in conversation at 10 Adelphi Terrace, London. It was just after the London premiere of Saint Joan, and Mr Henderson was curious about a number of things.
Henderson - Would you, then, may I ask, rank yourself as a "world dramatist"?
Shaw - No, but I am a world dramatist.
Henderson - Why?
Shaw - Simply because they play me with or without my leave, everywhere from London to Japan, both ways round, and at all the intermediate stations. It is a question not of merit, but of raw fact. My currency is as universal as that of Sherlock Holmes or "Charley's Aunt" or Mary Pickford or Bill Hart or Charlie Chaplin.
The validity of his claim, cannot, of course, be questioned. Shaw's audience is a world audience. His royalties come in, or ought to be coming in, from all the capitals of the earth. And from that it should be easy to argue, on the basis of the economic motive theory, that Bernard Shaw is a pacifist because war interferes with his business. More than once in his journalistic comments on the war, Bernard Shaw has alluded to his Vienna percentages from the Hofburgh Theater. In a conversation with Mr Henderson at Ayot. St Lawrence, the talk turned to the German currency collapse and reparations.
"The Germans [said Mr Shaw] found this a very convenient way of paying the war indemnities exacted from them. For instance, they owed me money for author's fees, and I had a handsome balance in the bank at Berlin. My money is so worthless that I can show you a note for 10,000,000 marks which I cannot lodge to my credit in Berlin because the bankers will not take account of anything less than billions. In other words, the Germans have paid the indemnity with my money and that of their other victorious creditors. The laugh is with Germany as far as I am concerned."
Obviously, Mr Shaw has been financially squeezed by post-war demonetization and by inflation at Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Petrograd and Rome and by post-war economic depression at Tokio and elsewhere. In this manner the economic argument might be employed to explain why Romain Rolland, Israel Zangwill, Anatole France and other writers of world fame are pacifist or near-pacifist. The case might be worked out in detail. We might show that the more cosmopolitan the author the more violent his opposition to war. It would be like the theory one stumbles across now and then which describes the steel industry as militarist and the textile industry as pacifist. The steel man is always wanting to open up new countries for railroads and bridges and to inculcate in the backward races a disturbing taste for knives, forks and automobiles, and so is productive of imperialism. The textile man is content to have the benighted races go on plowing and multiplying and consuming Manchester print goods. Similarly one might explain Bernard Shaw's pacifism in terms not of world brotherhood, but of world royalties.
The attempt will not be made on this page for two reasons. In the first place the writer does not believe in the economic explanation of war either for militarist Wall Street or for pacifist Bernard Shaw. I no more believe that Mr Shaw's outlook on war and the peace treaties has been shaped by his private interests as a world dramatist than I believe that J P Morgan & Co made the war and wrote the treaties. In the second place, a person finds himself wondering after G. B. S.'s Table Talk whether Mr Shaw can really be described as a pacifist and anti-patriot. It may be news to a good many readers, as it is to the present writer, that Bernard Shaw helped his own Government to win the war: and this not altogether in the Shavian sense that he exerted himself to strip the issues of the war, according to his own claim, of the mischievous lies with which they had been overlaid by the propagandists. Shaw, for instance, was ready to contribute a chapter to the King Albert birthday book issued in behalf of Belgian relief in 1914 under the editorship of Hall Caine. When The London Telegraph protested against the inclusion of the author of Common Sense About the War he published his appeal separately, and "when I read it over in proof I found that consistency oblige me to send in a substantial subscription myself." Shaw more than once made his contribution to propaganda:
"When the Germans told the Moors that I was a great prophet and that I had told Senator Beveridge that they were blameless in the matter of Belgium, Mason got on their track and told me I must play up. Accordingly, we produced an 'Epistle to the Moors' in a style founded on the New Testament, the Koran and Captain Burton's translation of the 'Arabian Nights,' which was much more to the point than the chatter about Belgium. What did the Moors care about Belgium? We convinced them that they had better keep quiet."
But far more significant than such specific services is Mr Shaw's own summary of his war attitude. Mr Henderson asks to what extent had Shaw attacked the Government during the war, and Shaw replies: "I protest I did not attack it at all." His one concern, as he goes on to explain, was that the diplomatists and militarists who brought on the war should not get the credit for having saved the world from the peril which they had themselves created. Hence it was necessary to expose the myth of an unprovoked war, a war of defense and a war to end war. Shaw proceeds:
"But I could not say very much: the danger of discouraging enlistment during the voluntary period and of weakening the national morale was too serious. I did not let myself go until the war was over, during the election of 1918, when I had a great oratorical campaign. After a speech of mine at Stourbridge a soldier said to me: 'If I had known all that in 1914 they would never have got khaki on by back.' My reply was: 'That is precisely why I did not tell you in 1914.'"
After this paragraph it is very difficult, indeed, to discern any essential difference between Mr Shaw and the patriotic tom-tom beaters whom he so cordially despises and detests. Like them, he subscribed to the argument that nothing must be done "to discourage recruiting," a phrase which has survived the war as the supposedly perfect formula of the militarist for coercing the individual conscience. Like the official recruiters and propagandists, he did not tell the young volunteer of 1914 the "truth" about the war because it might injure the nation's "morale," another favorite militaristic formula. But such conduct satisfies the definition of patriotism as most people understand it. You sink your differences in the interest of national unity and the common effort: you suppress your doubts for the duration of the war, but you retain your citizen's privileges once the war is over and won to tell your leaders what you think about them. If we take a glance at post-war history nearer home this is precisely what the great majority of the American people did. They stood solid as long as the fighting endured; they lost no time in flocking back to their party standards the moment the war was over, and in 1920 they told their war leaders what they thought of them to the extent of a 7,000,000 hostile majority.
To the extent that Shaw did serve his country during the war by somewhat unconventional methods, his own explanation would be, as summarized above, that he was looking beyond the war. He was preparing the ground for a squaring of accounts with the diplomats and militarists when the fighting was over. It was his way of saying: "Here, you, you have embroiled England in a war which I as an Englishman want to see won, but don't you flatter yourself that you are fooling me as to the rights and wrongs of this war or as to what is really at stake." But that is not the sole explanation of the Shaw war mind. One thing that dictated his war attitude, it seems quite obvious to me, was a pride of intellect which under the circumstances might be defined as a vanity of the intellect. There is discoverable a great eagerness on Mr Shaw's part to show the English Government and its propagandists that the idealistic and patriotic pap with which it fed the crowd would not go down with Bernard Shaw. And, on the other hand, he would show the English Government that Bernard Shaw could do his bit for England without feeding himself up on the hasheesh of violated neutralities and endangered democracies and German atrocities in Belgium. Perhaps there may have been a touch of extra vanity in reminding the English Government and the world at large that the man who fights for his country though he has his doubts is much more of a man than the simple creature who goes to war because he believes the Germans dines every day on the flesh of Belgian babies.
Now Bernard Shaw might be welcome to any amount of self-gratification he could thus derive if by implication he did not do a serious injustice to the intelligence of the great mass of common men who fought the war. What reason has he for assuming that the ordinary allied soldier was a fool and swallowed the official propaganda without blinking? What reason has he for believing that the average man in the trenches looked upon himself as an angel of light engaged in holding the line against the forces of Tuetonic might? The fact is, of course, that millions of men in the trenches were possessed with the same doubts that troubled Mr Shaw. Very few of the men at the front or at home really believed that Germans cut off the arms of women and lunched on babies. The masses of men who fought the war shared in the inescapable perplexities that present themselves in great emergencies and that are repressed because it is an emergency. The ordinary man in the allied ranks or at home had his mental reservations, but he kept quiet for the same reasons that Mr Shaw kept only partially quiet, because it would discourage recruiting, sap morale and delay the winning of the ar. If Mr Shaw is anxious to prove that he was not a boob during the war he succeeds in doing so. But neither was the average man in the war a boob. He knew pretty well the world in which he lived and died.
It is my conclusion, then, that Mr Shaw did not sin as greatly against his own country as his enemies would have us believe; he was a good enough patriot. But he did sin against his fellow-countrymen and his fellow-men by succumbing - not to put too fine a point on it - to intellectual snobbery. It is an intellectualist state of mind which has by no means disappeared. It is continually manifesting itself in the exaggerated stress laid upon propaganda as the force that guides the actions of the common man. History, for this point of view, becomes only the record of things that are constantly being "put over" by the clever few on the stupid many. The war is "put over." The peace is put over. The masses always believe what the Government tells them to believe and always do what the international bankers tell them to do. The worst enemies of democracy would thus be found among the radical intellectualists who visualize democracy as a stupid Caliban with mouth ever agape for propaganda. It is a political and social philosophy which brings Mr Shaw into the strange company of our own Mayor Hylan. He, too, believes that everything that happens in life is "put over" by the Interests.
Ed on his expression "Shakespear and I", Ap 27, 16:5
4/27/25 "Shakespear and I"
If time seems to have softened Bernard Shaw's tone when speaking of Shakespear, it is only in seeming. Whereas twenty years ago he proclaimed his Julius Caesar "better than Shakespear," he now admits a fraternal equality. "For some years," he says, "a strong conviction has been coming over me that Stratford-on-Avon is my birthplace," and he lays down the laws of dramaturgy in terms of what "Shakespear and I" do. But only those will feel a difference who are solemnly shocked or moved to a boisterous derision. Those who perceive beneath the jokester's mask the keenly critical mind of Shaw will realize that the essential man is unchanged.
In one way at least Shaw's Caesar is manifestly better. He is the hero, not the villain, of the show. Doubtless Shaw knows, what very few do, how it came that "the mightiest Julius" seemed to the Elizabethan a tyrant and the idealistic Brutus admirable if futile. Shakespear was intensely interested in problems of civil government, being intimate with the group of liberal Englishmen who colonized Virginia and gave it a free Constitution. He lived at the fountainhead of that stream of aristo-democratic thought which flowed through Richard Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" and James Harrington's "Oceana," to be shunned by Oliver Cromwell, and finally gathered to a head by George Washington and his fellows in the great reservoir of the Constitution of the United States. Shaw sees in Caesar only a richly human man - amused, interested and touched in his mellow if disillusioned middle years by the life-greedy flapper queen. Neither dramatist has given us a full and rounded portrait of the conqueror statesman, but Shaw has at least portrayed a man delectably, imaginatively human. That, doubtless, was all he meant by his jocular and provocative boast.
It is as a critic of the drama qua drama that Shaw is at his best. "London is the place," he says, "where they cut two-thirds of Shakespear's plays without the critics noticing the curtailment and render the rest absolutely unintelligible." The theater should exist not for actors or for scenery or for society but as "a place for plays." Thus administered not only Shaw but Shakespear becomes possible. So he has been prime mover in behalf of a Shakespear National Memorial Theater. According to Archibald Henderson's recently published Table Talk With G. B. S., the prospect is not bright. "Well," said the table-talker, "after many years of struggle we have had one subscription. The solitary sportsman who gave it was a Hamburg gentleman. When Germany recovers from the war, we may get another move on Nil desperandum."
Yet despair finds a foothold in our Guild Theater current production of Caesar and Cleopatra. Far from confining itself to "the length which Shakespear and I use," namely, three and a half hours, it drags from eight until midnight, thanks to its pseudo-Shakespearean scenic investiture. In this respect also Shaw seems destined to a fellow-feeling with him of Avon.
R Somerville, director of Washington Sq College Players of N Y Univ is negotiating for broadcasting plays, Ap 19, X, 15:1;
S on anniversary of Shakespears birth, Ap 24, 10:6
4/24/25 "Shakespear and I," was a phrase used by Bernard Shaw. In proposing the toast he began by warning the audience, "For some years a strong conviction has been coming over me that Stratford-on-Avon is my birthplace. The prosaic fact is I was born elsewhere. The place where I was born I called my country until I conquered this one. London is entirely hopeless from Shakespear's point of view. London is the place where they cut 2/3 of Shakespear's plays without the critics noticing the curtailment and renders the rest absolutely unintelligible.
"London, in short, is the place where there is a continual struggle between people who regard the theater as a resort of fashion and people who think the theater should be a place for plays. The latter section is always getting the worst of it. If you go to a London theater and find the acting manager in a state of wild enthusiasm, you will find he is boiling over not because his great actor or actress is giving an exceptionally magnificent performance but because Lord Somebody or Lady Somebody has been in the stalls the prior night. The correct length for a play is 3 1/2 hours, the length Shakespear and I use. Anybody who does not get a play of that length has not got a fair market value for his money."
On radio and theater, Ap 4, 20:1
4/4/25 George Bernard Shaw is one of those who believe that the theater is threatened by the radio. He writes in The Playgoer: "All I can say is that if I could see and hear a play from my fireside I would never enter a theater again. I shall not prophesy, but I again remind our managers that theater-going is very dear, very inconvenient and horribly stuffy and promiscuous.
Unless they can overcome these disadvantages by the overpowering fascination of good plays, good acting and theaters that are like enchanted palaces instead of hotel smoking rooms, broadcasting will knock them out."
Text of message read at birth control conf, por, Mr 29, IX, 6:1
3/29/25 I cannot attend the conference in March next; and if I could I doubt if I could say anything that I have not already said. But two things have happened here lately that may interest you. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, in finally deciding against Dr Marie Stopes, has taken the old ground of simple taboo. Dr Stopes won on every other point. In spite of the attempt of the Judge who tried the first hearing of her case to interpret the Jury's verdict in her favor as a verdict for the defendant.
Four lords, three of them over 80 - that is, men who would have been superannuated many years ago if they had been the ordinary civil servants have boldly decided that all references to the reproductive organs are obscene. This takes us back to the eighteen-seventies, when Huxley produced what was ranked as the modern classic textbook of physiology without mentioning the forbidden subject of reproduction.
By this the lords have fortified their position impregnably. There is no arguing with taboo. If people regard reproduction as an obscene subject, or a funny subject (and they are usually the same people), there is nothing more to be added; nothing remains but to live them down, and to be particularly careful meanwhile not to waste time, life and money in appeals to the law, which is always fifty years out of date.
Probably these same ancient lords, if somebody had accused Dr Stopes of indecent exposure because she wears a modern dress which leaves her ankles visible, would have found her guilty without a moment's hesitation. I am now an old man myself, and I assure you I never knew that women, as distinguished from little girls, had ankles until I was taken to the pantomime and found that the fairy queen had not ankles but knees.
The shock I received at about 6 years of age, when, without any warning, I went into our drawing room and saw a woman without a crinoline, probably produced a complex which psychoanalysts may be able to trace in my works to this day.
Questions Of Room, Not Food
The second notable occurrence is the discovery that there is not room in London for all the people who want to live there. The streets which used to be merely crowded are now choked. This has a certain bearing on birth control. As you know, I have always treated with contempt the notion that the earth is on the curves of diminishing return in the matter of food. That capitalist explanation of poverty ought-not to impose on a rabbit, fertile as rabbits are. The fact that productive labor is being crushed by the burden of parasitic labor (to say nothing of parasitic idleness) has no bearing on the food question. The question of room is far more important. We could feed ourselves if we were as crowded as gannets on the Bass Rock; but life would be intolerable under such conditions.
All cities are now frightfully overcrowded; and the dispersal of their population over a reasonable acreage might possibly produce a population question. Some day we shall have to ask ourselves, not how many people it is possible to have under Bass Rock conditions, but how man people it is comfortable to have. If uncontrolled fertility does not keep within this limit we shall have to fall back on controlled fertility.
The Amoeba And The Man
However, that is a speculation as to what might or might not happen after socialism had effected the redistribution of income, which is the most pressing necessity of today.
Meanwhile, birth control should be advocated for its own sake, on the general ground that the difference between voluntary, rational, controlled activity and any sort of involuntary, irrational, uncontrolled activity is the difference between an amoeba and a man; and if we really believe that the more highly evolved creature is the better we may as well act accordingly.
As the amoeba does not understand birth control it cannot abuse it, and therefore its state may be the more gracious; but it is also true that as the amoeba cannot write it cannot commit forgery; yet we teach everybody to write unhesitatingly, knowing that if we refuse to teach anything that could be abused we should never teach anything at all.
Message read at opening session of internatl birth control conf in NYC, Mr 26, 18:1
3/26/25 "Birth control should be advocated for its own sake, on the general ground that the difference between voluntary, rational, controlled activity and any sort of involuntary, irrational, uncontrolled act is the difference between an amoeba and a man: and if we really believe that the more highly evolved creature is the better we may as well act accordingly. As the
amoeba can't understand birth control it can't abuse it and therefore its state may be the more gracious, but it is also true that the amoeba can't write, it can't commit forgery, yet we teach everybody to write unhesitatingly, knowing that if we refuse to teach anything that could be abused we should never teach anything at all."
Comment on effect of radio on theater, Mr 21, 4:3
3/21/25 "If I could see and hear a play from my fireside, I would never enter a theater again," was the ambiguous appreciation of broadcasting vouchsafed by G. B. Shaw in response to the inquiry whether he thought broadcasting of plays would doom the theater to extinction. The playwright, though he did not offer any suggestion for adding the advantage of sight to the delights of wireless audition, was quite ready to use broadcasting as a stick to beat the theater managers.
"I shall not prophesy," he said, "but I remind our managers that theater going is very dear, very inconvenient, and horribly stuffy and promiscuous. Unless they can overcome those disadvantages by the overpowering fascination of good plays, good acting and theaters that are like enchanted palaces instead of hotel smoking rooms, broadcasting will knock them out."
Quoted in ed on men's clothes, Mr 15, II, 6:3;
Back to Article Index
Report that he will write no more plays, Mr 2, 15:1;
Replies to statement crediting him with intention to write no more plays, Mr 3, 21:4
3/3/25 GBS is not satisfied with a statement crediting him with the intention of writing no more plays. He said today: "I haven't made up my mind. Besides, I may die. People occasionally do at my age." Mr Shaw went on to explain that his reply to Archibald dePear concerned only an Irish play for the Irish Players Company: "I said the younger writers were best for Irish plays and perhaps for all other plays. I know there are some people who would welcome the news that I had decided to give up writing plays, but I may yet write half a dozen. Then we shall hear them say, 'My God!'"
Contract with producers of Candida, Mr 1, VII, 1:7
3/1/25 Consider, for the moment, the returns that are pouring in upon Mr Shaw these days for a play written some thirty years ago. The play, of course, is Candida, and Mr Shaw's percentage of the proceeds these weeks is customarily a little over $1,800. Mr Shaw's contract is a peculiar one in the case of this production - it calls for 10 per cent. of the box office takings so long as those takings do not exceed an average of $1,500 a performance ($12,000 for an eight performance week), but should the receipts go beyond this, Mr Shaw's percentage then becomes a flat fifteen.
It has been the misfortune of the Actor's Theater, to date, that most of the weeks have just topped $12,000. Mr Shaw thus receives his $1,800 and over; if the figures would obligingly drop just a bit below twelve thousand the producers would save some $600 weekly. The customary playwright's contract calls also for a rising percentage varying with the box-office trade, but with the increased percentage operative only over the few final thousands, instead of applying to the full receipts. But Mr Shaw, of course, is Mr Shaw, and any producer who does not care for his terms is always quite at liberty to produce some one else's plays.
In the case of The Wild Duck the Actors' Theater finds itself obligated not at all to the estate of Henrik Ibsen, for this play has outrun its copyright. American copyright runs for twenty-eight years, and, if memory serves, may then be renewed for another fourteen. The Wild Duck, by these calculations, seems to fall just outside the pale.
100th performance of Saint Joan given in Berlin, F 28, 4:3
2/28/25 The hundredth performance of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan was given last night here with Elisabeth Bergner in the title role. Shaw's record affords one Berlin newspaper an opportunity to point out that plenty of Berlin theatergoers still admire the serious drama despite the trivialities flooding the local stage. Another hopeful sign, it says, is the popularity of the Italian dramatist Pirandello, whose works, notably "Six Characters in Search of an Author," have reached a total here recently of fifty performances.
Learns the tango while at Madeira, F 13, 21:2
2/13/25 Bernard Shaw, who has been undergoing a sunshine cure in Madeira, has been taking tango lessons, according to Funchal dispatches, and is returning to England in much improved health as a result of this exercise, bathing and excursions. Shaw says, however, he has written more during his stay in Madeira than in any equal period heretofore. He completed a play which will appear shortly.
Report that Soviet Govt had barred production of Saint Joan denied in Russia, F 7, 17:2
2/7/25 The story published in London recently and cabled to New York that the Soviet Government of Russia, in revenge for George Bernard Shaw's criticisms of its leaders was about to stop his play, Saint Joan, was not true, despite London's joy in Mr Shaw's supposed discomfiture.
Saint Joan, which was first produced here three months ago, is still running regularly. Alexander Talroff, director of the Kamerny Theater, who produced the play, assured The New York Times correspondent today that no attempt was ever made by the authorities to prohibit the play, either before or after Shaw's famous letter on the Bolshevist leaders. He added: "There was practically nothing eliminated from the original text except a few phrases which might convey the impression of a miraculous nature in certain events."
Ed, A Static Revolutionist (on views of W Archer), F 6, 16:2
2/6/25 Static Revolutionist
Having known Bernard Shaw for forty years, the late William Archer wrote an article on his "psychology" - one of the last things he penned. Comparing him to Voltaire, whom he somewhat resembles as critical essayist, iconoclast and dramatist, Mr Archer points out that, whereas the great Frenchman half unconsciously revolutionized his generation and an entire world, "Shaw, a professed revolutionist, will revolutionized nothing." The paradox of his career is "the extraordinary disproportion between his fame and his influence." Few men have "made so great a noise and so little mark."
To be a real force, a revolutionist "must either have an effective insight into things as they are, or, if he sees them awry, must do so by reason of a common and popular obliquity of vision." To Shaw, or so Mr Archer says, the factual world does not exist. He lives in a world of a priori self-evident truth of his own construction. "Voltaire's mind was a plane, undistorting mirror; Shaw's is concave, convex, corrugated, many-faced - anything you like, except plane and objective." His philosophy is a mere restatement, mildly exaggerative, of the leading thought of his time. Many years ago, when it was the custom to speak of Shaw as a weathercock of ideas always pointing against the wind, as a mad Irishman with a shillalah ready for every pate in Donnybrook Fair, Gilbert Chesterton characteristic-
ally exalted him as the one man of his generation whose ideas and anim-
osities had remained fixed. Mr Archer admits this, but finds in it a damaging accusation.
On the point of psychology, Archer is right. And Chesterton is half right. But why drag in psychology - and Voltaire? Surely the time has come to forget what Shaw says he is and consider what he is. As a revolutionist he is the most intellectual of our writers of comedy, and one of the most amusing. As a shillalah-man he is perhaps the most versatile and sympathetic creator of character in modern drama - and, at his best, one of the most richly colored and poetic. No one has made us laugh more heartily or half so intelligently. As to the few basic human passions he has little knowledge or sympathy; but what dramatist has given us a more sensitively and deeply divined gentlewoman than Candida or Lady Wayneflete, a more finely and vigorously felt man of genius than Marchbanks or Caesar? Whereas, Voltaire as a dramatist is merely formal. Shaw has created a world all his own, a world of exquisite refinement and enduring delight. Mr Archer admits, though with a rather parenthetical effect, that, "mere whimsicalities apart, there is hard and solid thought behind his every utterance," that, "it is always presented in clear and sometimes truly luminous form." The same can be said with even greater truth of his observation of character - a dramatist's real stock in trade.
The true bill of indictment against this proclaimed revolutionist is not that he is a fizzle and a dud, but that he has somehow sufficient vitality to get between Shaw the man and Shaw the artist. For in all but a few of the plays there is a deal of the modern equivalent of bombast, of sound and fury signifying nothing toward the development of truly dramatic idea, or of character and situation. From Arms and the Man to Joan of Arc the Shavian repertory, considering each play as a whole, is mainly disproportioned, distorted, lopsided. It shows us a Donnybrook Irishman forever beating himself on the head.
Quoted in sp art by H Callender on low intelligence of today, Ja 25, IV, p 13
1/25/25 Hearing that Margaret Fuller, after due consideration had decided to accept the universe, Carlyle remarked, "Gad, she'd better!" Those who have re-examined the question in the light of the new evidence of recent years have felt themselves under no such compunction. So far as the human element of it was concerned, they have been free to accept or reject. And in the retesting applied by a good many who possess some qualifications as judges the race at large has flunked badly. We have been catching it from right and left, so to speak. For among the critics giving us a rather low intelligence quotient, as the psychologists would express it, are both conservatives and Socialists, as well as reactionaries in the strict sense of that term - that is, those who would have us return, if we could, to the eighteenth century or the Middle Age.
Pessimistic Prophesies
For example, Nicholas Murray Butler and George Bernard Shaw both have about given us up. Agreeing in philosophy, morals and politics at as few points as any two living men, they unite at least in this. Both think it highly probable that, considering its present needs, the human race possesses an intelligence far too feeble to do it much good. The pessimistic prophecies of Dean Inge of St Paul's Cathedral, known since the war as 'The Gloomy Dean," are now rivaled by those of the Dean of Columbia University and the Dean of the Fabian Socialists.
After asking the question, 'Can men learn' Dr Butler, in the manner of cross-word puzzle publishers, waited a few days to give his answer. It was that the task of education appeared 'quite hopeless.' In Dr Butler's recent utterances there is the bold generalization and the air of assurance that for nearly thirty years have made Mr Shaw's pronouncements resound in a community eager for such intellectual thrills as he took great glee in providing. While President Coolidge assured the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the present generation was eager to encourage science, Dr Butler expressed the conviction that "the extensive and intensive study of natural science, now carried on over more than a full generation, has made no impression whatever upon the public mind."
Mr Shaw's despair of mankind, presaged in almost everything he had written before, became definitive in Back to Methuselah. Having for forty years offered himself as political tutor to his fellow-citizens, he reached the conclusion - as expressed through Conrad Barnabas, the biologist of the play - that "it is now absolutely certain that the political and social problems raised by our civilization cannot be solved by mere human mushrooms who decay and die when they are just beginning to have a glimmer of the wisdom and knowledge needed for their own government."
The issue is acute because of what Mr Shaw calls"the diabolical efficiency of technical education," which has caused "powers of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence" to be placed "in the hands of romantic schoolboy patriots, who, however generous by nature, are by education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs and sportsmen, to whom killing is an accomplishment." The human mushrooms must live longer, say 300 years at least, in which time they may learn better.
In this very science that draws Mr Shaw's wrath we have placed a bland and innocent faith. 'We trust ourselves to you,' said Mr Coolidge to the scientists. 'The future of civilization is well-nigh in your hands.' Are we using our coal and oil too rapidly? Don't worry. Science will find a better fuel. Are our forests disappearing? It's all right. Science will supply some substitute. The Germans have led us to believe that nature has made nothing that science cannot duplicate or improve. Even its "diabolical efficiency" in annihilation is encompassed and sublimated by the new faith. If science does not abolish war in a more rational manner, won't it at least make war so horrible as to be impossible?
Our Sense of Wonder Dulled
Mechanical science has showered upon us so many marvelous toys that our sense of wonder had become dulled, as the sensibility to human tragedy was dulled by the war. We still go through the behavior of amazement when airplanes circle the globe or a physicist tells of splitting an atom, but it is largely an automatic response. We take scientific wonders as a matter of course. Somebody would have to communicate with Mars or fly to the moon and back to give us such a thrill as went over the world with the news of the invention of the locomotive or the telegraph.
Why shouldn't science, with it ascending series of new and more or less useful contrivances, of revelations in the realm of pure knowledge, go on indefinitely expanding? Why shouldn't what Graham Wallas called our social heritage pay dividends forever? Many take it for granted that it will. J B S Haldane, in his essay "Daedalus," unrolls a future in which science will do a variety of new things, from providing power and light almost without cost to introducing a method of external and painless human reproduction called ectogenesis. C H Douglas and A R Orage have lately expounded for readers of The New Age a system of credit by which goods might be sold at less than the cost of manufacture, apparently on the theory that technical efficiency will increase indefinitely so that you can capitalize today the inevitable economies of tomorrow.
"But the doubters have increased - as one might except in view of the debacle of the last decade. If most of them have stopped short of the Butler-Shavian extreme, they have at any rate suggested that the "glad confident morning" of applied science was waning, that there was serious question as to the soundness of the naive faith that the more machines we had the better off we should be.
Samuel Butler's utopia, Erewhon, had long since outlawed machinery in defense of humanity, its victim. Perhaps Mary Shelley, in writing "Frankenstein," had a similar idea of the menacing potentialities of mechanics. The American Adamses, Brooks and Henry, who in their generation maintained the family's distinction, suspected early in the present century what Shaw and many others point out today.
In "The Theory of Social Revolutions" Brooks Adams found that capitalist society had developed such excessively specialized types of mind that there was unprecedented need of the administrative or generalizing mind" - that is, one that might offset the "diabolical efficiency of technical education." Henry Adams, whose prolonged pursuit of an education was simply an effort to comprehend the changed world that physical science had brought into being, referred ominously in his 'Education' to the 'new avalanche of unknown forces which required new mental powers to control.' Ralph Adams Cram, who, like President Butler, turns with nostalgia toward the Middle Age, wrote mournfully in 1917 that 'Democracy has achieved its perfect work and has now reduced all mankind to a dead level of incapacity where great leaders are no longer either wanted or brought into existence.'
Sidney Webb, reading the horoscope for the benefit of the Fabian Society a year ago, interpreted the rise of dictators like Mussolini and Primo de Rivera as signifying that the ruling classes had lost confidence in their superior ability and that statesmen were unequal to their burdens. Harold G Moulton of the Institute of Economics, in a study of reparations, supported this view to the extent of saying that the demand for an indemnity from Germany, couple with the refusal to encourage the exports by which alone she could pay, was 'the supreme inconsistency of the age.'
Bertrand Russell contends that with all our labor saving machinery we work harder and undergo greater nervous strain today than when the social wealth was much smaller. Secretary Hughes, speaking at Brown University, also emphasized disadvantages of our elaborate mechanical equipment, concluding that we were being deprived of the leisurely reflection necessary to wise leadership. James M Beck, Solicitor General of the United States, addressing the American Bar Association in 1921, asked whether 'the increase in the potential of human power through thermo-dynamics' had been accompanied by a 'corresponding increase in the potential of human character.' He thought not and attributed the growth of crime to the disparity between increased leisure and the ability to use it intelligently.
Wells and Chesterton
Dr Butler's question as to the ability of education to keep pace with scientific advance was put by H G Wells at the time of the Washington conference, "It is a race," he said, "between education and chaos."
Suppose civilization, as we know it, did break under the wright of its complexity. G K Chesterton, for one, would not be altogether down hearted. In a recent essay in The Illustrated London News he made such a relapse appear almost alluring. The prospect encouraged him to feel that there was a chance "for humanity to become human," as in the sixth century.
There seems to be an uncommon tendency to look backward for a more nearly golden age, even in this presumably not yet mature nation. Dr Butler calls for another Abelard. Mr Shaw goes to Methuselah for a model. Secretary Hughes laments the passing of the more deliberate habit of the period before the industrial revolution, while Mr Chesterton contemplates almost joyfully the possibility of a collapse that would force more primitive living.
Int by H I Brock; por, Ja 25, IV, 3:1
1/25/25 George Bernard Shaw in the second year of St Joan is not in the least satanic to look at. On the contrary, he presents the agreeable likeness of a mild and benignant elderly gentleman, with beautifully kept white hair and beard, and altogether the very pink of neatness. If he were not so natty he might almost seem patriarchal. In his blue eyes is a light which glitters and shines but does not warm. His tweeds are of admirable cut, his feet are small and fastidiously shod. His collar matches his shirt, his necktie harmonizes with the tweeds, and as he sits in a comfortable chintz covered chair in front of the fire, he rubs his long hands and chuckles every now and then as he talks.
As to the talk, it flows on about the things that interest him. It cannot be diverted to the things that do not interest him - however much they interest his interlocutors. That is the way the most celebrated knocker-about of heads in the world, the devil's advocate of the English-speaking dominions, seems when you meet him in his pleasant rooms in 10 Adelphi Terrace. The particular room where he sat has windows that look over the Embankment Gardens toward London's twin of our Cleopatra's Needle (which was actually hit by an airplane bomb during the German air raids) and the Thames' shipping. There are little silver and ivory elephants over the mantelpiece and rather queer pictures. There are signed photographs of other great men, including Sir James Barrie, whose lodgings are just across the street; there are many books, quite a lot of knickknacks, a piano of severe cottage architecture. But there is nothing in the least Shavian as the world would count it Shavian - nothing except Rodin's bust of Shaw himself. Or perhaps it is Epstein's. The
fire burns cheerily and the sun tries to struggle through the remnants of the fog into the windows toward the river.
Outwitted a Cold
Mr Shaw remarks that he's had a cold which ought to have kept him indoors. On the contrary, he has gone out into the fog to address a meeting on the outrageous conduct of the Government in coercing the Egyptians - and the fog has cured his cold. He rubs his hands with satisfaction at having outwitted the cold in this unorthodox manner. As for the proceeding of the Government in regard to the Egyptians, he wonders what the Americans think of that. For his part, the British ultimatum addressed to the Egyptians finds in his mind no adequate parallel except that of the Austrians in Serbia after Serajevo.
Mr Shaw has a great deal to say upon that matter of the Egyptians consequent upon the assassination of Sir Lee Stack. What he pounces upon and will not let go of is the illogicality of holding a Government responsible for a murder committed by one of its citizens. On that principle (he says) the American Government might be held responsible for the murder of Abraham Lincoln - or the British Government for that of Sir Henry Wilson.
The Egyptian matter had already ceased to be news, but Mr Shaw was as eager about it as ever. The subject has by now receded still further into the distance, which robs events of the first fine flavor of interest. It served, nevertheless, as Shaw pursued it and worried it with the persistence of a terrier engaged with a particularly choice rat - it served to exhibit the manner of the man, and his keen delight in a debate, even in the reminiscent aspect of a debate in which he had been able to confound the enemy with brute logic, whatever else had happened. Mr Shaw went over the then recent encounter between himself and The Morning Post - especially to his own part of the exchange - at considerable length. And he enjoyed every word of the recital, and rubbed his hands with glee.
It was - if you choose - the master of fence rejoicing unashamed in the fine temper of his blade and his own neatness and dispatch in parry and thrust. Cecil Chesterton once said a thing about Shaw, who had exercised his tongue among the Fabians for years before he became a playwright, or even a celebrity. Chesterton, who had himself been a Fabian, said that Shaw was the best debater he had ever heard. He added that Shaw's instinct of the dramatic was so sure that he could make a debate - a mere exchange of words - more dramatic than other men could make a duel with swords to the death or the murder of a beautiful bad lady by a jealous, virtuous lover.
Touching upon that aspect, Shaw himself remarked when it came to the discussion of St Joan that it was no trouble at all to write a play. Either you had the trick in you or you hadn't. If you had, all you need do was to take the material and go to it. It would arrange itself. It naturally became a play. As for the play of St Joan of Arc, it would have been written long ago if people had only been content to take history and the persons of that particular bit of history as they found them. There they were - and they were as dramatic as they were real - as real as they were dramatic.
But before Mr Bernard Shaw had undertaken to put the Maid Of Orleans on the stage the people would have none of the real Joan and none of the real history in which she was set. The result had been (here perhaps emerged a gleam of the old Satan) the - well, the sort of thing Julia Marlowe once played. Incidentally (said Shaw) there were still people who would have none of reality. And it wasn't only about a cherished legend such as Joan's. There was Great Catherine of Russia - whose pretensions to liberality and culture he had punctured, while he had exhibited her as a very clever, managing, able and amorous woman - not without a certain tigerish charm and a bitter humor. He had lately been reproached with having maligned Catherine. To that charge he declined to plead guilty.
He got upon politicians - by reversion again to the matter of Egypt - which happened at the moment to be the King Charles head in his cosmos. There was "my friend MacDonald," for instance, who had set a regrettable example to the weaker brethren in the faith in the affair of the gift motor car. Though Shaw held MacDonald himself quite absolved of turpitude in the case, the argument of bad precedent was a perfectly fair one. What was not fair was the assumption that a Socialist who happened to be Prime Minister of England, so that his duties took him about a great deal, and to whom speed and dispatch were important, that a Socialist ought not to have a motor car. Yet that assumption had been generally and very stupidly made. Even the Commissars in Soviet Russia had motor cars. They had to have motor cars. Not less did Socialist Prime Ministers need motor cars.
In spite of the fall of the Government in which they had had so important a part, Mr Shaw said - especially in the light of the action of the Conservative Government in the matter of Egypt, he asserted it emphatically - the Socialists were the only people in England who had sufficient training in public affairs to understand economic and political questions and deal with them intelligently. All the others - in which group must necessarily be included the Government presided over by Mr Baldwin, the Government responsible for the ultimatum to Egypt - all the others were mere amateurs.
They either came to the job from the top as amateurs or they came from the bottom as amateurs. But whether they came from the top or the bottom they had made no proper study of public questions.
The Socialists, on the other hand, had made a study of both. They had made it their business for years. In the question why, after all their study, these well-grounded men had not made a better practical shewing in the actual conduct of government. Mr Shaw did not at the moment permit himself to get entangled.
As everybody knows. Mr Shaw has recently added to his other laurels the reputation of being an accomplished artist in the radio field. A London publisher, with the aid of his own cherished "set" (with which he was quite able to get Pittsburgh and even Springfield, Mass), heard Mr Shaw read Flaherty V C. He was not only entranced with the Shavian diction and delivery - which is really admirable - but by the extremely agreeable manner in which Mr Shaw sang Tipperary. He said it was a pity Mr Shaw did not sing all the song instead of only one line of it. Previously he had known the author of The Perfect Wagnerite only as a musical critic, now he was quite prepared to accept him even as a musical critic.
All this was called to Mr Shaw's attention. But again he refused to be entangled in a subject of such vast extent. In short, he would not talk either about himself as a radio artist or about the radio as an instrument for the dissemination of plays. He did say, however, that it was a waste of his time and a misapplication of his energy to write anything but plays. There were subjects now and then upon which, for the subject's sake he felt bound to speak, or was tempted beyond his power of resistance to write. But as a mere matter of business, that sort of thing was, for him, bad business. Playwriting was very much more profitable. Very smilingly and urbanely, Mr Shaw presented himself as a business man - not as an apostle or even as a devil's advocate - or disciple.
The Visitor Dismissed
He rose and stood with his back to the fire. He was very sorry that he must catch a train for the country. Even though the fog cure had unorthodoxically removed his cold, London was no place to be in for the week-end. Mr Shaw - as one would have him - is a man of precision. At precisely 11 o'clock he had appeared in the pleasant, firewarmed room into which the visitor had been admitted after passing the formidable spiked barrier upon the stairway which forbids entrance to the Shavian castle. At precisely 12 o'clock he escorted the visitor to the top of the stairs and helped him into his coat.
For every moment of that time he was urbane, kindly, conversational, easy and entirely natural. If there is a Shavian pose, there is none of it visible in Mr Bernard Shaw of No. 10 Adelphi Terrace. If he can write like the devil, he can talk as simply as any man, and take as simple a pleasure in saying what is on his mind, even to an inconsiderable but interested stranger. In fact, it doesn't seem to matter whom Mr Shaw talks to. He addresses his conversation not to a person or individual but to an intelligence, which applies the courteous assumption that the visitor has at least that. Because the conversation is addressed to an intelligence, not to any particular caller, there can be no sense, even in a stranger, or being strange. The whole effect is that of coming into a place where you have been before - or may have been - and talking with somebody with whom you probably talked some time last week.
It is a curious effect - considering that there is no warmth in Mr Shaw thus casually encountered; but I can find no other figure which so adequately describes what a meeting with this extraordinary, expatriated Irishman is like.
Theater Guild to present cycle of plays, Ja 17, 12:3;
Report that slap at Zinovieff has caused Soviet Govt to stop run of his play, Saint Joan, Ja 6, 1:2
1/6/25 The political bureau of the Russian Communist Party had instructed the Soviet theatrical censorship to bring to an end the run of the Russian version of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan at the Moscow Kamerny Theater.
"This beau geste of the Kameneff-Zinovieff clique," say The Morning Post's Russian correspondent, "is the reply to Shaw's disrespectful remarks about Zinovieff & Co. in his letter to the Moscow Isvestia. The production of Saint Joan at the Petrograd Alexandrinsky State Theater has been canceled. In order to mislead public opinion abroad and to conceal the fact that the withdrawal is really suppression, it will officially be announced that owning to the failure of Saint Joan to attract the public, the play will be removed from the repertory of the Kamerny Theater."
Lr from J F Cullen on his failure to visit Amer, Ja 4, VIII, 19:5
1/4/25 Shaw and America
Bernard Shaw has never visited this country and has never truly stated his reason for neglecting us. It would seem that great authors, as well as humbler scribes, ought to take an interest in strange peoples, especially when easily accessible, yet here we have one of the greatest writers of our time apparently not interested in studying at first hand the greatest nation, so far as wealth and power is concerned, that the world has ever produced, a nation that seems to be marking the turning point to a new and better civilization. There must be a very strong reason compelling Mr Shaw to deliberately deprive himself of the intellectual delights that would surely be his portion were he to spend a few months with us. Is it possible that he suffers from the drowning complex?
J F Cullen