Defends speed limit regulations, D 16, 8:1
12/16/29 George Bernard Shaw appears today as the champion of England's much-abused speed limit for automobiles which the government's new road-traffic bill proposes to abolish. Writing in The Sunday Observer, Mr Shaw admits that, as a motorist of twenty-one years experience, he breaks the law every time he drives, but he insists some speed limit should be retained.
"A speed limit cannot be observed in daily practice and is not meant to be so observed," Mr Shaw asserts. "It is a devise for enabling the police to halt and mulct motorists in those cases of inconsiderate driving which fall short of driving to the public danger or are not grave enough to deserve the more serious penalties attached to that offense.
"All discussion as to whether this or that speed is dangerous - whether a motor bus traveling at 34 miles an hour cannot hurt anything but will become murderous and destructive at 35 - are quite idle. Under circumstances which occur every day a motor bus or any other vehicle traveling at less than 50 miles an hour is an obstruction and a nuisance. Under certain other circumstances which also occur every day, a speed of 20 miles would justify a magistrate in suspending the driver's lisence for life.
"A motor vehicle, like any other heavy object, is dangerous the moment it begins to move. The common assumption that a steam roller or motor bus if driven carefully over a baby at 2 miles an hour will not hurt it, while a sport car, which at 60 miles an hour or so becomes supercharged and attains the velocity of light or thereabouts, will mangle and slaughter the same baby, is erroneous. An intelligent baby would prefer the sport car. Safe motor cars are imaginary, as are safe wheel barrows, guns, skates, kitchen boilers or razors. But they can be made safe enough to be tolerated when they are under the control of intelligent considerate and able-bodied persons.
"What is to be considered is not the conduct of cars but the conduct of drivers. No expert fears a well-driven car, however fast. All fear an ill-driven car, however, slow."
Mr Shaw sees an unintentional discrimination in the new bill's proposal to abolish the speed limit for private cars - the "rich man's car" - while retaining the old speed limit for buses - "the poor man's car." He says the roads have never applied the lesson the railroads learned when they began to abolish grade crossings. Mr Shaw suggests a vast program of bridge building at crossings as a means of relieving unemployment.
The road-traffic bill will be debated in the House of Commons tomorrow.
Advocated changes in Brit politics and govt, in closing Fabian lecture, D 15, XI, 8:1
12/15/29 You have all seen me throughout this course of lectures sitting on the platform listening very attentively to the ladies and gentlemen who have gone before me and who have been adumbrating as well as they could the course of events in the next ten years. One thing that I noticed about all of them was they all assumed that what was going to occur in the course of the next ten years was going to occur with our existing political machinery and in our existing culture.
If you are going to make any great change in society, you must devise political machinery which will make that change, and if you want to introduce that political machinery you must produce a culture which will approve of, which will tolerate and even vote for that particular change.
Yet I heard no allusion to this at any of the previous lectures. All the lecturers were looking forward to very considerable changes, but they all seemed to assume that the machinery would be the same and that the culture would be the same. As far as I can remember, if any words dropped from them on the subject, it must have been during these brief periods when I found they were getting a little too abstract and I took the opportunity to slumber for a few moments, so I may be unjust to them.
New Political Machinery
I just want shortly to give you a very rough sketch of the machinery which we want to bring us up to date at the present time without any reference to the next ten or even fifty years. We shall want, of course, an extension of League of Nations diplomacy - diplomacy practically in the widest sense, to be dictated through the League of Nations. And the powers must treat the League of Nations seriously. So far, until about a year ago, they never pretended to do so. They set up the League of Nations and made speeches about it, but when any serious question arose they never thought of going to the League of Nations. They set up conferences of their own, and sometimes, as in the case of Mussolini, they did not confer, they shot.
That sort of thing cannot go on if you are going to have a tolerable world to live in. Your diplomacy must be conducted by the League of Nations. But you still have a Foreign Office. Is the Foreign Office going to be the ridiculous backstairs business in which every ambassador of a foreign power comes and exchanges little notes and interviews with the Foreign Secretary, all behind one another's backs, and everybody doing what they can to get the better of each other? I suggest no such thing should be possible, that our Foreign Office should not communicate in that way with separate ambassadors, but that there should be a council of ambassadors who will transact business in one anothers presence and with their cards on the table. Of course they will say, "Impossible! Did any one ever hear of such a thing?" I reply, "No, they did not, and see the mess you are in in consequence! Had you not better clear it up?"
Then you want a great many Parliaments. Going on with this rotten, crazy old thing you have got is impossible. You want a Commonwealth Parliament, a Parliament which will deal with the whole of the British Commonwealth as a whole. You then want a British Federal parliament which will deal with the British details. Then you want a national Parliaments. You have got one in Ireland, in Ulster, in England, but you will also have to have one in Scotland. But one is not enough. I think you will want at least two and probably three. You want a political Parliament, an industrial Parliament, and even that may not be enough.
Regional Parliaments
Then you want regional parliaments. You cannot go on with your parish councils and rural and district councils and town planning, when as a matter of fact you want not the town but the whole province planned, the whole watershed of a river. Perhaps in England alone you will want about ten regional parliaments, and working beneath them you ought to have bodies of say three capable district commissioners, the sort of thing they have in Ireland, where, of course, the first act of the Irish Free State was to throw over all the democratic stuff you had given them, and get the thing into businesslike hands. But you want district commissioners who would work with parish councils, district meetings if you like. They should have to meet representative bodies of the citizens in order to know what the people wanted.
But there you have a whole scheme of bodies, and you want, of course, the proper men for them. How are you to get the men? I do not want them to pass examinations, that would be no use at all for what I want. What I want does not seem possible, though I am not sure we might not make an advance in the direction. I propose a panel system by which persons could be submitted to some kind of test, not an examination by asking them a lot of questions out of books, but that their natural capacity should be tested, either by testing their blood or secretions, or testing their electronic vibration by Abraham's Box or radiology, or some sort of scientific process, so that they could be classified according to their political and other capacities. One man, for instance, might be one of the very few men capable of diplomacy, that is to say, world politics; another man might be in the very rare position of being capable of finance.
Panels for the Parliaments
Then we should want another panel for men who have the capacity for one of the Parliaments I have sketched. You might want a man for the Commonwealth Parliament, another for the Federal Parliament, and another for the National Parliament. Of course, it is unfamiliar to you to think of a man requiring any sort of capacity in order to be in that body. But it is desirable that they should know a little more than how to read and write, if, indeed, they all do know how to read and write; we have no guarantee at present that they do.
But if we had this, there might come a sort of sense into democracy, because you do want to allow people to have some choice, some power of election. If you give them the power of election they have at present they will elect the most awful people. I will not mention living instances, it would be too unkind, but when you remember one of the most popular persons in English literature was Titus Oates it will give you an idea what it comes to. Election would be a perfectly safe process if you had your panel system. Democracy under those conditions, and I do not see under what other conditions it is possible to get a satisfactory working of this method of allowing people to choose your governing bodies, would be quite safe.
I do not want you to go out of the room without any notion what sort of machinery should be substituted, but I think all those, or something like those reforms I have mentioned will have to be introduced. It is the creation of this new machinery which is certainly the most urgent work of the next ten years.
A New Culture
Now to deal with the great question of culture, which ought to have six lectures all to itself. At the present time, the culture which is predominant in this country, which is the culture of the governing classes, and through their example and influence filters right down from the institutions in which they are brought up to the elementary schools, is what I might call the robber-baron morality, I will not say of the Middle Ages, hardly even as advanced as that, but really the early feudal systems. It goes on in a gentlemanly way for some time, but nationally there are the most horrible outbreaks of ferocity which the Middle Ages could not surpass.
In my lifetime, there have been such incidents as Amritsar in India, the Black and Tan episode in Ireland when Dublin was bombarded, and more than a square mile fo the city was smashed to ruins, a pure piece terrorism, quite unnecessary, and yet the thing was done. And a thing that amused the inhabitants very much was that the authorities, after having done this, plastered up recruiting posters on the ruins and said, 'Irishmen, remember Belgium.'
Look at the recent government, which began by declaring they would stop up the Nile and starve Egypt because they were drunk with their victory at the election and irritated because the Sirdar had been assassinated. It was not even an intelligent threat. It only made England ridiculous in the eyes of the world, and at the end of a week they had to climb down abjectly. Nobody except people with that curious mixture of robber-baron and schoolboy morality could have thought of such a thing.
Then because they thought the Russians were low people they broke into the offices of the Russian Government in London and did not find anything. But it is not use complaining, it is only part of the culture that we instill. I hope you will understand the Russian remedy. When the Russians did carry through their revolution, and there was no democratic nonsense about it, they had to reconstruct, and they had the sense to know what we have not the sense to know, that the whole future of the State they were setting up would depend on the culture, in the sense I have been using the word, the education of the child from the beginning - their lessons, their morals, their manners, their religion.
Accordingly, they said, there is one absolute condition. No person who has ever been at the Russian equivalent of an English university or an English public school shall ever be allowed to get into contact with a Russian child, even if for the first years we have to go on with scavengers as professors and teachers, with men who have to learn tonight the lesson they are going to teach tomorrow.
University Men Excluded
I have no hesitation in telling you if some strange accident upset everything in this country, and made me a dictator, the first thing I should do would be to say, No man who has ever gone from Eton to Oxford, from Harrow to Cambridge, from Marlborough to Sandhurst, shall come within a mile of an English child if I can possibly help it.
We must get rid of this culture; we must get rid of it from the beginning; we must get it out of our elementary schools. Certainly that is one of the things that is before the Minister of Education. The one thing Oxford does teach efficiently and throughout is the Oxford mentality. There is not a single one of the other things it teaches that cannot be learned better without going to Oxford, but to get that mentality you must go to Oxford, and they will get it into you with the most extraordinary success.
Secondly, one of the first acts of an intelligent government would be to make a law disqualifying graduates and undergraduates of our universities from all public employment, making them ineligible for election to any public body, and in particular disqualifying them for the post of teacher.
People who are brought up on the Bible as we are at present are unfit to manage a modern whelk stall, much less a great Commonwealth. As you all know, I do not suppose anybody has fought harder against materialism than I have; nevertheless, that sort of materialism which the Russians are now teaching in their schools is far better, even at its hardest and worst and narrowest, than deliberately teaching children lies which everybody knows to be lies.
G Wells int on Shaw; new book discussed, D 15, 28:1
12/15/29 The public that watches for the appearance of each new volume by George Bernard Shaw has not yet been informed of his latest work, it was learned yesterday from Gabriel Wells, bibliophile and rare book dealer, 145 West Fifty-seventh Street, who returned Friday on the Bremen after nearly a year abroad.
When the new work by Shaw, which as yet has been seen by only a few of his friends, will be given to the public, Mr Wells was unable to tell. But he said it was a study of the life and art of the late Ellen Terry, eminent English actress, and was being withheld at the advice of friends as "too revealing." A few copies of the work have actually been printed.
While in London, Mr Wells, who owns many Shaw letters and several manuscripts, made a number of visits to the playwright. Mrs Shaw is now selecting letters by her husband in the collection of Mr Wells for publication.
Few persons know the extreme kindness and generosity of Mr Shaw, in the opinion of Mr Wells. "It was said of Robespierre that he loved all mankind except those he knew personally, and of Clemenceau that he loved France but disliked the French," Mr Wells said. "It is the other way with Shaw. Although he is cynical about people in general, he is trustful and loyal and almost affectionate to people he know. I don't think I know a more kind-hearted man."
Shaw's whole technique, according to Mr Wells, is having "no mental reservations." He makes enemies because he says what he thinks - "the things other people think but won't say." Mr Shaw revealed to him, Mr Wells said, that the model for the waiter in You Never Can Tell was an eminent British statesman and Cabinet Minister.
After one of his visits to Mr Shaw, Mr Wells said, he remarked on leaving: "I'm afraid you will never let me come back. I have stayed too long and talked too much."
"Not at all," the playwright laughed. "I'm that way myself."
Presentation of Apple Cart barred in Dresden, Germany, D 14, 5:3
12/14/29 The prohibition of a performance of George Bernard Shaw's new play, The Apple Cart, at the Stattheatre here was created the greatest surprise, especially among Democratic and Socialist circles, on behalf of whom the Prime Minister, Dr Buenger, is said to have issued the prohibitory decree.
Dr Buenger held the play might hurt their republican feelings. The two parties insist, however, that neither of them had ever raised any objections against the play and that they are at a loss to understand the motive of the Prime Minister, who is at the same time Minister of Education and Culture.
S Botzaris, painter, loses autographed por of him, D 13, 36:6
12/13/29 A young sculptor, whose great-grandfather was Marcos Botzaris, hero of Greece's fight for freedom against Turkey, has come to this country to give his first art exhibition, but because of an accident here he will not be able to carry out the joking advice which he received from George Bernard Shaw.
Several years ago when the young sculptor, Sava Botzaris, was starting his career in London Mr Shaw granted his pleas for an opportunity to sketch him. When the drawing was completed, Botzaris showed it to the playwright and requested his signature. Smilingly Mr Shaw autographed the portrait and then signed his name on five blank sheets of the sketching pad.
"Copy the portrait on those sheets I have autographed," advised Mr Shaw, laughing, "and sell them to the Americans. They will pay more for my portraits if I autograph them." One of the sketches Botzaris did sell, but kept the four others for his exhibition here, which opens at the Fifty-sixth Street Galleries on Dec 30. Meantime he made drawings of other eminent Londoners and obtained their signatures.
Just before sailing for this country several weeks ago, Botzaris called on Mr Shaw to say good-bye. The playwright reached for his checkbook and drew a check for £60, which he presented the sculptor for passage money to this country. "You are young," Shaw said, according to the sculptor. "I want to give you this for good luck."
Views discussed in article on Fabians, pors, D 8, V, p 1
12/8/29 Before an audience that filled a large hall in Kingsway one night recently, a tall man with a big head, a thin voice and a dry humor introduced Professor H J Laski, who dealt with the House of Commons in a brilliant but very disrespectful manner and disposed summarily of the House of Lords by prescribing its abolition. The tall man was Lord Sankey, the Lord High Chancellor, who holds the highest judicial office in the kingdom and consequently bears the traditional designation of "Keeper of the King's Conscience." He was presiding at a lecture of the Fabian Society, which for nearly half a century has devoted itself assiduously to the task of abolishing - very gradually and gently and judiciously - the present social system.
Next to the Lord Chancellor sat a benign-looking patriarch whose black suit accentuated the snowy whiteness of his hair and beard. He sits there at all the Fabian lectures, and the last one of the series he delivers himself. On this particular evening he said not a word; but at the close of the lecture he leaned over the edge of the platform and helped collect the questions, written on odd-sized bits of paper, which were passed up from the audience to the Lord Chancellor, who carefully smoothed out each sheet before giving it to the lecturer.
This venerable revolutionary was George Bernard Shaw. He happens (incidentally) to be the most renowned of living dramatists, and as he sat upon the Fabian platform his latest play was being presented to a full house in the West End. But, as he himself has put it, he got his start in Hyde Park with a cart and a trumpet - that is, as a soap-box orator - and he likes the fact to be remembered. Shaw was an ardent Fabian long before he won distinction as a playwright; he still is a Fabian and he can seldom quite forget it, even when writing a play. He doubtless has devoted more time during the last fifty years to writing devastating pamphlets and to making Socialist speeches in all the corners of London than he has devoted to writing plays. One sometimes suspects that he wrote his plays largely for the purpose of attaching to each one a sort of Fabian tract in the form of a long preface, and he probably is actually more proud of his essays on Jevon's theory of value and of such chefs d'oeuvres as Fabian Tract No 116 (entitled "Fabianism and the Fiscal Question") than he is of being the author of Candida.
So this genial veteran sits in Kingsway Hall not as G. B. S. the successful dramatist, but as G. B. S., the successful Fabian - as one of the brilliant pioneers in a long intellectual and political tussle which has made it possible for a Labor Government to take office in Great Britain. Old Fabians remember the time, forty years ago, when Shaw was greeted with a rain of stones and bottles as he mounted his soapbox in London streets; today he sits beside the "Keeper of the King's Conscience" and thousands pay to hear him speak, while many come just to see him sitting there.
At the entrance to the hall a bookstall offers an array of books and pamphlets - of Kingsley, Owen, Morris, Ruskin, Bentham and Mill, even a book of Socialist songs. Among them is a volume entitled, "The Decay of Capitalist Civilization," written a few years ago by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, two of the most noted of the Fabians. Sidney Webb, the sage of British socialism, now sits in the House of Lords with the title of Lord Passfield and, as Secretary of State for the Dominions and Colonies, administers a good share of the empire - though his wife, a distinguished Fabian and scholar, who for decades has enjoyed a singular political influence, has declined the honor of becoming a mere peeress.
After forty-six years of patient, persistent pamphleteering, of debates and reports on all manner of social questions, the Fabians have at last come into power. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the British Empire is governed just not by Fabians. A former Fabian is Prime Minister and twenty members of the Fabian Society hold posts in the present government, eight of them being in the Cabinet proper. In the Fabian lectures this Winter, which were presented under the general title "Social Evolution: the Next Ten Years," one sensed an air of confidence which seemed to say: "The nest decade belongs to us and it is time to consider what we are going to do with it."
The Fabians are the encyclopedists of British Socialism. They have done the library-grubbing and the manifesto-making for the Labor party. They have compiled carloads of statistics and drawn up hundreds of reports and programs. They have written books and electioneered and "propaganded"; they have made speeches on street corners, in trade-union halls, in slums and in drawing rooms; they have lectured and organized and entertained; they have strewn the British Isles with facts and arguments. They have devoted their superior talents and education to the double purpose of supplying the working classes with a reasoned program for the realization of their aspirations and of convincing the "brain workers" and the middle class generally of the desirability and practicability of "the reorganization of society by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit."
The Fabians have never been numerous. They were slightly more than two hundred in 1890 and they number only about two thousand today (most of them being listed in "Who's Who"). But their influence, thanks to their exceptional ability and industry, has reached far beyond the British Isles. Many an American student, in the last forty years, has come upon the "Fabian Essays in Socialism (edited by Bernard Shaw) and has been impressed by their scholarship and lucidity, if not convinced by their arguments. Never has the case for socialism been more effectively presented.
Though they wanted a completely reorganized society, the Fabians were not in a hurry. They knew it would be a long time in coming and were prepared to wait and to work for it in the traditional British manner. In practice they differed, and still differ, little from hardworking Liberals. So they named their society after Quintus Fabius Maximus, who knew how to wait when he was warring with Hannibal.
But this did not prevent them, in the beginning, from being gay and militant revolutionaries. Shaw, one of the gayest and most militant, has described the Fabian temper of the '80s and the transition it underwent in consequence of the Fabians' sense of humor and their British practicality.
"The Fabian Society was warlike in its origin," he said. "It came into existence through a schism in an earlier society for the peaceful regeneration of the race by the cultivation of perfection of individual character. Certain members modestly feeling that the revolution would have to wait an unreasonably long time if postponed until they personally had attained perfection, set up the banner of socialism militant, seceded from the regenerators and established themselves independently as the Fabian Society.
"We denounced the capitalists as thieves and, among ourselves, talked revolution, anarchism, labor notes versus passbooks and all the rest of it, on the tacit assumption that the object of our campaign - with its watchwords, "Educate, Agitate, Organize" was to bring about a tremendous smash-up of existing society, to be succeeded by complete socialism. And this meant that we had no true practical understanding either of existing society or socialism. Without being quite definitely aware of this, we yet felt it to a certain extent all along; for it was at this period that we contracted the invaluable habit of freely laughing at ourselves which has always distinguished us, and which has saved us from becoming hampered by the gushing enthusiasts who mistake their own emotions for public movements. From the first, such people fled after one glance at us, declaring that we were not serious.
"Our preference for practical suggestions and criticisms, our impatience of all general expressions of sympathy with working-class aspirations, not to mention our way of chaffing our opponents in preference to denouncing them as enemies of the human race, repelled from us some warm-hearted and eloquent Socialists, to whom it seemed callous and cynical to be even commonly self-possessed in the presence of the sufferings upon which Socialists make war."
So the Fabians, without departing from their principles, became sobered by experience. They soon ceased to bother about such ultimate and academic questions as the ideal currency for a Socialist State and plunged into intense study of economic theory and such timely subjects as unemployment, the eight-hour day, municipal ownership, public markets and poor-law reform. They became recognized authorities and nobody dared to say any longer that they did not know economics. If the Labor party, in its early days, wanted an expert report on almost any conceivable social question, it had only to send word to the Fabian Society, and Sidney Webb, who is almost omniscient in this field, would draw one up over night.
The Fabians continued to "educate, agitate, and organize," but they did so in their own way. While others were getting up unemployment demonstrations, they were digging in the library and sharpening their wits at debating societies. They founded the Hampstead Historic Club, which became a class for historic study, each student taking his turn as teacher. They delivered lectures and wrote tracts on all sorts of social questions.
Shaw has told how he "haunted all kinds of hole-and-corner debates and public meetings and made speeches at them." "Every Sunday," he says, "I lectured on some subject which I wanted to teach myself; and it was not until I had come to the point of being able to deliver separate lectures, without notes, on rent, interest, profits, wages, Toryism, Liberalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, trade-unionism, cooperation, democracy, the division of society into classes and the suitability of human nature to systems of just distribution that I was able to handle social democracy.
"All our best lecturers have two or three old lectures at the back of every single point in their best new speeches; and this means that they have spent a certain number of years plodding away at footling little meetings and dull discussions, doggedly placing these before all private engagements, however tempting. A man's socialistic acquisitiveness must be keen enough to make him actually prefer spending two or three nights a week in speaking and debating, or in picking up social information in the most dingy and scrappy way, to going to the theater or dancing or drinking, or even sweethearting, if he is to become a really competent propagandist."
If the Labor party, which is nearly twenty years younger than the Fabian Society, has at last been able to form a government, with the help of middle-class votes, it owes its success to a great extent to its middle-class allies, the Fabians, who have done such effective axe-work.
For the Fabian Society is eminently British, not only in its patient opportunism and its undogmatic practicality, but also in its class consciousness. Egalitarian though it be in its philosophy - Shaw going so far as to advocate absolute equality of income - the society is a strictly middle-class body and its members are "put up" and elected, as in an exclusive club.
The Fabians are professional men and women - writers, journalists, teachers (including numerous professors at Oxford and Cambridge), physicians, lawyers, former army officers, members of the higher ranks of the civil service and men with independent incomes. To many Continentals it is a mystery how such people can identify themselves openly with a Socialist movement without suffering socially or professionally. But in England they can and do. Their exclusiveness does not prevent their cooperating with the trade unions and the Labor party - of which the Fabian Society is a constituent part.
For the Labor party is not an exclusively working-class party. It addresses itself to "producers by hand and brain," and has thousands of middle-class members. Consequently it has at its service a good share of the intelligence of the nation. Numerous Liberals have gone over to the Labor party in recent years, notably the late Lord Haldane, Lord Arnold, Wedgwood Benn, Sir William Jowitt, Lieut. Commander Kenworthy and Arthur Ponsonby; and in Lady Cynthia Mosely and Oliver Baldwin, son of the Conservative leader. Labor has won recruits even from Tory families.
In no other country is there anything like the Fabian Society, a middle-class organizations led by some of the most gifted writers and speakers in the land, on the one hand allying itself with working-class Socialist movements, on the other hand "permeating the Liberals" and making converts among members of its own class. But in no other country is there so much tolerance and flexibility in politics, combined with rigid social traditions.
Hissed for fancied snub of Prince of Wales at Carnera-Stribling boxing bout, N 29, 10:3
11/29/29 The Prince of Wales and George Bernard Shaw divided interest tonight with Primo Carnera, the seven-foot Italian heavyweight boxer, at a ring show conducted under amateur rules for charity. A fashionable crowd of spectators was on hand.
Carnera held the spotlight when he prepared for the ring, unaware that the English have a rigid rule that boxers at amateur shows must be clothed above the waist. He said he had never fought in an undervest and never would, but finally agreed to go on when he received a private message from the Prince of Wales, who apparently was worried lest the big Italian might appear only in trunks before an audience which contained a number of society women.
There was some difficulty in finding a singlet big enough for the Italian, but he at last was clothed in one which was as tight as a sausage skin over his 285 pounds of muscle.
While some of the other bouts were in progress a messenger from the party of the Prince of Wales spoke to Mr Shaw, who vigorously shook his head. This incident was repeated twice, whereupon some suspicious members of the audience jumped to the conclusion that the celebrated author had refused to meet the Prince and began to hiss him. Later it was learned that what Mr Shaw had refused was a request from the Prince that he relieve the latter of the duty of presenting the prizes to the boxers.
Sends congratulatory letter to C B Cochran on London production of Silver Tassie, N 26, 29:2
11/26/29 Charles B Chochran announced the withdrawal of Sean O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie, on Dec. 7, after which the production and scenery will be shipped to New York for a presentation, despite the fact that it has already been produced there by the Irish Theater.
Mr Chochran has received a congratulatory letter from G B Shaw which reads: "There is new drama rising from the unplumbed depths to sweep the nice, little bourgeois efforts of myself and my contemporaries into the dustbin. If only some one would build you a huge Woolworth theater [all seats six pence] to start with O'Casey and O'Neill and no plays by men who had ever seen a five-pound not before they were 30 or been inside a school after the were 13, you would be buried in Westminster Abbey."
Dictatorship complex, N 24, III, 4:2
11/24/29 After several years of comparative quiet Mount Bernard Shaw has for some time been in a state of continuous eruption. Of this celebrated volcanic peak it is always difficult to say how much of its activity is the expression of a genuine inner convulsion and how much is fireworks of a high amusement and publicity content. The late Shaw outbreaks against democracy and in favor of the mailed fist and the man on horseback have been so sustained that one must assume they are in considerable measure sincere. The hearty endorsement of Mussolini which gave so much pain the Mr Shaw's fellow-Socialists has not been withdrawn, but on the contrary reiterated. His admiration for the Soviet methods of getting results has been placed several times on record. In his annual Fabian lecture he has just warned his countrymen that they are by no means immune against a Mussolini if they do not mend their ways. He looks about him and finds that most thoughtful people are "distracted by the sheer impossibility of getting things done."
It is odd the Bernard Shaw, whose life-work has been the promulgation of new ideas, should in this matter be getting all heated up about a notion that is being pretty generally discarded. One thing that thoughtful people have done in the last two or three years is to rid themselves of the dictatorship obsession. The fad had its greatest run about the year 1926. Germany was then only beginning to emerge from her troubles. Great Britain was faced with acute labor difficulties. France seemed headed for financial shipwreck. Then were heard prophecies that these sick nations were bound to go in for the fascist cure. The three leading nations of Europe refused to do so. They have managed to do so well without the dictatorship patent medicine that inevitably the bottled remedy has lost in reputation.
Even of Italy it was always open to argue that her progress under Mussolini was no more rapid than the normal pace of recovery elsewhere in Europe under democratic institutions. But then came striking demonstrations of democracy's capacity to deal even with crisis. Germany, a defeated and humiliated and economically prostrate nation, worked her way back to stability, prosperity and international prestige by plebiscites, elections, parliamentary party government and other discredited democratic methods. Great Britain met and conquered the menace of social revolution in the form of a General Strike without calling in a dictator. France pulled herself together on the very edge of bankruptcy and started out on an amazing boom through the efforts of no Napoleon, but, on the contrary, of a legalminded Premier operating with the very slimmest of parliamentary majorities.
Facts, even of such impressive dimensions as those cited, are not everything to Mr Shaw. But, in the present instance, it is not altogether a case of turning a blind eye on them. The point is that when he speaks of getting things done he has in mind the particular things he wants done. He wants socialism put over in England and elsewhere; and undeniably for the purpose of putting things over, the dictator - Fascist or Soviet - is a more efficient force than our slow-paced democratic agencies. The case for despotism is obviously unanswerable if it takes the form of saying that the despot is the most efficient agent for getting the things which the despot wants done. If you want the Italian people and the Russian peasants to go your way, cost what you will, you employ one method. If you believe that the British or French or German people for their well-being need leaders instead of masters, you employ another method.
Says Brit must reform Govt, in annual Fabian Soc lecture, N 22, 8:1
11/22/29 George Bernard Shaw tonight outlined new machinery of government which, he said, British democrat must adopt in the next decade if it would escape violent revolution or Fascist dictatorship. Speaking with unaccustomed solemnity in an annual Fabian lecture, Mr Shaw warned that the present methods of government had broken down and become intolerable in modern society. No governmnet will "get anything done," in his opinion, unless existing institutions are scrapped and new ones created.
He advocated, specifically, many Parliaments in place of one, a panel system for public election whereby all candidates would have to pass a capability test, and complete separation of "the Oxford-Cambridge influence" from the education of English children.
'We never believe that anything like the Mussolini or Pilsudsky dictatorships can happen to us," Mr Shaw asserted. "We imagine such things might happen to temperamental Italians or romantic opera singers, Poles or barbarians and Serbs, but never to the solid English. Yet I think most thoughtful people in this country are distracted by the sheer impossibility of getting things done."
The first step toward reform, Mr Shaw contended, should be the extension of the League of Nations diplomacy. "This country and other powers must treat the League seriously," he declared. The second step would be the transformation of the British foreign office.
"Is it to go on being the headquaters of backstairs intrigue, as it is now?" he asked. "I suggest there should be a council of Ambassadors who should conduct all their business in each other's presence with a foreign secretary.
"You must have not one but several parliaments. You want a common wealth parliament, then a British federal parliament. Then there must be national parliaments, including one for Scotland. And remember there must be trwo or three of each - political, industrial and more. You must have regional parliaments which would do away with the whole obsolete system of district councils, town councils and rural councils."
When Mr Shaw reached the subject of education he held up Soviet Russia as an example and accused the old English universities of developing "the robber baron mentality," which, he said, produced Winston Churchills and Lord Birkenheads.
"If some strange accident should upset this country and make me dictator, the first thing I'd say would be that not one man who has been from Eton to Oxford or from Harrow to Cambridge should be allowed to come within a mile of an English child. There should be laws disqualifying them from public offices, from public bodies and especially from the post of teacher.
"Who made the great war, anyhow? It was the people all over Europe who had the Oxford type of education." Some one in the audience asked Mr Shaw if he had ever gone to a university. With a flourish of indignation, but with a twinkle in his eye, he replied: "Of course I never did. Do you think I would have talked to you as I have if I had ever gone to a university?"
11/10/29 To the Editor of The New York Times: I am sure the majority of readers settle down expectantly to read when they come to reports in The Times of George Bernard Shaw's speeches, addresses and so on. And the one on democracy! How superlatively sound, phrase-artistic and vigorous! He prays us go home and think of it - think of what he says is his last word. Being a student of sociology, I did think of it and around it. Not in a masterful way, you understand, but perhaps usefully.
It is indeed a sign of progress to see Mr Shaw broadcasting thus on what I judge to be the true complexion of politics in England now. While he offered an extraordinary amount in the way of suggestions for improvement, I simply fail to comprehend how he came to overlook the factor of education. I believe he purposely avoided that word. Yet his very address is itself a terrific educational force, and in extension of the same principle lies, I believe, the greatest single factor, next to widespread voracious reading, in accelerating progress in sociology.
H L Shatford
Radio s on democracy, N 3, X, 3:1
11/3/29 Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses, your Excellencies, your Graces and Reverences, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen and fellow-citizens:
Let me illustrate what I mean by this. Suppose I were to talk to you, not about democracy, but about the sea, which is in some respects like democracy. We all have our own views of the sea. Some of us hate it, and are never well when at it or in it or on it; others love it. Some of us regard it as Britain's natural realm and bulwark; others want a Channel tunnel.
But certain facts about the sea are quite independent of our feelings toward it. If I say that the sea exists you will not contradict me. If I say that it is occasionally violent, dangerous and treacherous, you will not shriek out that I am an enemy of the sea, that I want to abolish the sea, that I am out to ruin our carrying trade and steal the sea. You will not ask me indignantly if I consider you inferior to a fish.
Well, you must be equally sensible when I relate some hard facts about democracy. Sometimes democracy is curiously violent, dangerous and treacherous, and those who are familiar with it as practical statesmen trust it least. When I say this you must not at once denounce me as a paid agent of Signor Mussolini, nor think of me as a Tory Diehard in my old age; not must you rise up in your places and give me three rousing cheers as the champion of medieval monarchy and feudalism.
All I mean is that whether we are democratic or Tory, whether we are communistic or Fascistic, we are all face to face with a certain force in the world called democracy, and we must understand the nature of that force. Our business is not to deny the presence of democracy, but to provide against its dangers as far as we can, and then consider whether the risks we are providing against are worth taking.
Irreverent Questions
As Mr Lowes Blakinson introduced democracy at the first of these broadcast talks it was no more than a long word beginning with a capital letter, which he knew most of us would accept reverently without asking questions. But we should never accept anything reverently without asking a great many questions - first of all, "Who are you? and secondly, "Where do you live?"
If I put these questions to democracy the reply is, "My name is Demos, and I live in the British Empire, the United States of America and wherever the love of liberty burns in the heart of man. You, my friend Shaw, are a unit of democracy. Your name is also Demos. You are a citizen of a great democratic community. You are a potential constituent of the parliament of man, the federation of the world."
After this I usually burst into loud cheers which do credit to my enthusiastic nature. Tonight, however, I shall say: "Don't talk nonsense. My name is not Demos; it is Bernard Shaw. My address is not the British Empire, the United Sates, and wherever the love of liberty burns in the heart of man; it is such and such a number in such and such a street in London. And it will be time enough to discuss my seat in the parliament of man when that celebrated institution comes into existence. I do not believe, further, that your name is Demos, or that you have any address."
You will notice that I am too polite to call Demos a windbag, a gasbag or a hot-air merchant. Nevertheless, I am going to ask you to begin our study of democracy tonight by considering it first as a big balloon, filled with gas or hot air and sent up on high, so that all the people of the county will be looking up at it while other people pick their pockets. It is true you can have a place in the basket, but only by throwing out somebody else. I think you will admit that the balloon as an image of democracy does correspond roughly to the actual fact.
Democracy and War
Now let us examine the subject a little further. Whenever a modern statesman has to find an excuse for something, for instance, a war, he usually declares that it is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. Abraham Lincoln, standing amid the carnage of Gettysburg, declared that all the slaughter of Americans by Americans was in order that democracy, defined as government of the people, for the people, by the people, should not perish from the earth.
Pick that famous peroration to pieces and see what there actually is inside it. Take the three articles of the definition. First, government of the people. That evidently is necessary. A human community can no more exist without a government than a human being can exist without a coordinated control of its breath and blood circulation.
Secondly, government for the people. That is most important. Dean Inge put us all right in his broadcast talk last Monday. He called democracy a form of society which means equal consideration for all. He added that it is a Christian principle, and as a Christian he believed in it. So do I. That is why I insist on equality of incomes, because equal consideration for one man with a £100 a year and one man with £100,000 a year is quite impossible.
Thirdly, government by the people. That is quite different. All the monarches, dictators, and Diehard Tories are agreed that we must be governed. But we repudiate this third part of the definition on the ground that the people cannot govern. It is a physical impossibility. Every citizen cannot be a ruler any more every boy can be an engine driver or a pirate king. A nation of governors or dictators is as absurd as an army of field marshals. "Government by the people" is only a cry by which demagogues humbug us into voting for them.
You ask, "Why should not the people make their own laws?" To that question I reply by asking another: "Why should not the people write their own plays?" The people cannot write their own plays. There are not a hundred men in the world who can write a play good enough to stand daily wear and tear.
If we cannot govern ourselves, what can we do to save ourselves from being at the mercy of those who can govern, and who may quite possibly be graspers and scoundrels? The primitive answer is that the people are always in a huge majority and we can, if our rulers oppress us intolerably, burn their houses and tear them to pieces.
That, however, is not satisfactory. Decent people never do it until they have lost their heads, and when they have lost their heads as likely as not they will burn down the wrong house. The judgment and the execution of a ruler, or a ruler's scapegoat, is an act which requires a high degree of political intelligence.
When we have what is called a popular movement, very few people taking part in it know what it is all about. I once saw a popular movement - people rushing through the street, everybody joining in the movement because everybody else was in it. It was most impressive; literally a popular movement. I ascertained afterward that it was started by a runaway cow. That cow had an important share in my education as a political philosopher. If you will study crowds and terrified animals you will learn a great deal of politics from them. Most Parliamentary elections are stampedes. The last but one election was a stampede - and the cow was a Russian cow!
One might suppose that democracy would act in the last resort when an autocrat goes mad and commits outrageous excesses of tyranny and cruelty. But it never does. Take two signal cases - those of Nero and Czar Paul of Russia. If Nero had been an ordinary professional fiddler no one would ever have heard of him, and if Paul had been a lieutenant in a line regiment no one would ever have heard of him. But when invested with powers over their fellow creatures these men went mad and did such appalling things that they had to be dealt with like mad dogs. Only it was not the people who rose up and dealt with them; they were dispatched quite privately by their own bodyguard.
On the other hand, take the execution of the unpopular brothers De Witt, torn to pieces by a Dutch mob in the seventeenth century. They were neither tyrants nor autocrats; the mob was on the side of the autocrats. We may take it that the shortest way for a tyrant to get rid of troublesome talkers of liberty is to raise a hue and cry against them as unpatriotic persons and leave the mob to do the rest, after supplying them with a well-tipped ringleader. Nowadays that is called direct action. The proletariat are never revolutionary and direct.
Democracy cannot be government by the people; it can only be government by consent of the governed. Unfortunately, when democratic statesmen make assurances to that effect they find that we do not want to be governed at all, and that we regard rates and taxes and death duties as intolerable burdens. What we want to know is how little government we can get along with without being murdered in our beds. The only rule in the matter is that the civilized way of getting along is the way of corporate action, not individual action, and corporate action involves more government than individual action.
Government used to be a comparatively simple affair, but today it has to manage an enormous development of socialism and communism. Our industrial and social life is set in a huge communistic framework of public roadways, streets, bridges, water supplies, power supplies, lighting, tramways, schools, dockyards, public conveniences of all kinds and employing a proud army of police, inspectors, teachers and officials of all grades in hundreds of departments. We have found by bitter experience that it is impossible to trust our mines, factories and workshops to private guidance. Only an elaborate code of laws enforced by constant inspection have stopped the ghastly waste of human life and welfare they used to cause when left uncontrolled by government.
During the war our attempt to leave the munitioning of the army to private enterprise led us to the borders of defeat and caused appalling slaughter. When the work was done in national factories it was at once successful. The private firms had to be taught to do it economically and to keep their accounts properly by government officials. Our big capitalistic enterprises now run to the government for help as a lamb to its mother. They cannot make an extension of a tube railway in London without government help. Unassisted private capital is getting left behind. Socialism, and communism is what we have already. Without government help all our private enterprises would drop like shot stags.
When Mr Baldwin tried to win the last election by declaring that socialism had been a failure whenever tried, socialism went over him like a steam roller and handed his office to a Socialist Prime Minister. Last month my friend, Dean Inge, repeated the statement. I have only one question to ask him: Where does he expect to go when he dies? Nothing could have saved us in the war but socialism and it is clear that only a still greater extension of socialism can repair the ravages of the war and keep pace with the growing requirement of civilization.
What we have to ask ourselves is not whether we will have socialism and communism or not but whether democracy can keep pace with the developments of both that are being forced on us by the growth of national and international corporate action.
A Choice Of Control
Now, corporate action is impossible without a governing body; it may be the central government, it may be a municipal corporation, the county council, the district or parish council, it may be the board of directors of a joint stock company or of a trust made by combing several joint stock companies. All these governing bodies are elected by the votes of the shareholders. If they have not actual laws, at least they have by-lays, and you and I, the consumers of their services, are more at the mercy of these boards and the company that they represent than we are at the mercy of Parliament.
Politicians who began as Liberals and are now Socialists have said that they were converted by seeing that the nation had to choose, not between governmental control of industry and control by private individuals, but between governmental control and control by gigantic trusts wielding great power but no responsibility and having no object but to make as much money out of us as possible.
Our government is having much more trouble with the private corporation at home, on whom we are dependent for coals and cotton goods, than with France or the United States. We are in the hands of our corporate bodies, public or private, for the satisfaction of our everyday needs. But what we do not all realize is that we are equally dependent on corporate action for the satisfaction of our religious needs.
Agrees With Dean Inge
The dean told us last Monday that our elections had become public auctions at which the contending parties bid against one another by promising a larger share of the plunder. That is perfectly true, though the contending parties do not venture as yet to put it exactly in those words. The dean's profession obliges him to urge his congregation - which is much wider than that of St Paul, for it extends across the Atlantic - always to vote for the party which pledges itself to go furthest in enabling those of us who have great possessions to sell them and give the price to the poor. Now, this must be done by the government or not at all.
Take my own case. I am not a young man with great possessions, but an old man, paying enough in income tax and super-tax to make the dole for hundreds of old-age pensioners. I advocated this plan strongly, as a good Christian, before I had any income worth taxing. But I could not do it until the government raised it for me. I could do nothing by myself. What could I do? I could rend in war bonds to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and invite him to cancel the part of the national debt they represented, and he would undoubtedly thank me for my patriotism; but the poor would not get any of it. The payers of income tax and super-tax would save by it. I should have made the rich richer and the poor poorer.
No Escape From Wealth
I could burn all my share certificates and enable the companies to write off the capital indebtedness they represent. But the only result would be a bigger dividend for the other shareholders. No doubt also I could sell my war bonds for cash and throw the money into the street to be snatched up. But it would be snatched up by the poorest but by the best fed of the scramblers. Besides, if we all sold our bonds and shares - and Christ's advice was not addressed to me but to all who had great possessions - the result would be they would all go for nothing, the Stock Exchange would be all sellers and no buyers.
Accordingly, any spare money of mine is invested where I can get the biggest interest and best security and make sure that it goes where it is more wanted and gives the greatest amount of employment. Any other way of dealing with my spare money would be foolish and demoralizing. But the result is that I become richer and richer, and the poor become relatively poorer and poorer. So I cannot even be a Christian except through government action, and neither can the dean.
Now let us get down to our problem We cannot govern ourselves, yet we see that if we vest others with the vast powers which are necessary to an absolute monarch or dictator they go more or less mad, unless they happen to be quite extraordinary and ordinarily unobtainable persons. If we resort to a parliament of superior persons, they will abuse there power for their own benefit.
Our dilemma is that if we cannot govern ourselves we need to be governed and to control our governors. But the best governors will not accept any control except that of their own consciences, and as we are apt to abuse any power of control we have our ignorance and passions are constantly in conflict with the knowledge and wisdom and public spirit and regard for the future of our best qualified governors.
But if we cannot control our governors, cannot we at least choose and change them if they do not suit? Let me invent a primitive example of democratic choice. It is always best to take an imaginary example, because no one can then be offended. Imagine we are the inhabitants of a village and have to elect somebody for the office of postman. There are several candidates, but one stands out conspicuously, for he has frequently treated us at the public house, has subscribed a shilling to our flower show, and he is also able to pose as a victim of oppression by the squire because his late father was one of our most successful poachers. We elect him triumphantly, provide him with an office, a suit and a badge and a red bicycle and give him the letters to deliver.
But not much has been thought about his duties, and it now occurs to him for the first time that he cannot read. So he hires a boy to go round with him and read the addresses. The boy is concealed in the lane while the postman goes to the house, delivers the letters and takes the Christmas boxes. In course of time the postman dies, with a high reputation, and we again elect an equally illiterate person, but by this time the boy has grown up and has become an institution. He presented himself to the new postman as an indispensable feature of the postal system, and finally becomes recognized and paid by the village.
Here you have a picture of the Cabinet Minister and the Civil Service Department over which he presides. It may work well, for our postman may be a capable fellow and the boy who reads the addresses be incapable of doing anything else. But this does not always happen, and whether it happens or not, the system is not a democratic system; it is a democratic illusion, the boy is master of the man, the person elected to do the work is not really doing it, he is a popular humbug, he is merely doing what a permanent official tells him to do.
That is how it comes about that we are now governed by a civil service which has such an enormous power that its regulations are taking the place of the laws of England, though some of them are made for the convenience of the officials without regard to the rights of the public. How are these officials selected? Mostly by educational tests which nobody but an expensive school youth can pass.
What control have we? The vote? Well, when an election approaches two or three persons of whom I know nothing write to me soliciting my vote and enclosing a list of meetings, an election address and a polling card. One of the addresses reads like an article in The Morning Post with the Union Jack above it. Another is like a series of extracts from The Daily News and The Manchester Guardian. A third, more up-to-date and much better written, convinces me that the sender had it written for him at Eccleston Square, the headquarters of the Labor party. There is perhaps a fourth which contains apparently some of the early English of the communistic manifesto of 1848. I have no guarantee that any of these documents are written by the candidates. They convey nothing to me as to the character and political capacity of those from whom they are supposed to emanate. Even the half-tone photographic portrait does not tell me their age, for the portraits have generally been taken twenty years ago.
If I go to one of the meetings I find a schoolroom packed with people, who find election meetings funnier and cheaper than the theater. On the platform there are a few men who have worked hard to keep politics alive in the constituency. They ought themselves to be the candidates, but they have no more chance of such eminence that of possessing a Rolls-Royce car. They move votes of confidence, but as the man is a stranger to them and everybody else, how can any one feel any confidence in him? They prompt the candidate when questions are asked, and when he is completely floored they jump up and say, "Let me answer that, Mr Chairman." The old catch words and shibboleths are turned over, and nothing has any vitality in it except the vituperation of the opposite party, which is nothing but an exhibition of bad manners. If I vote for one of these gentlemen, and he is elected, I am supposed to have exercised the right of government of myself and for myself and by myself. Do you wonder that the dean cannot believe in such democracy? If this is democracy and liberty who can blame Signor Mussolini for describing it as a putrefying corpse?
What I should like is a real test of the candidate's capacity. Shortly before the war a doctor in San Francisco discovered that if a drop of a candidate's blood could be obtained on a piece of blotting paper it would be possible to discover within half an hour what was wrong with him physically. What I am waiting for is a drop of candidate's blood or a lock of his hair which will enable us to say what is right with him mentally. We could then have a graded series and not allow any person to undertake public employment unless he were in the appropriate panel.
A Method Of Rating
At the lower end of the scale there would be a panel of persons qualified to take part in a parish meeting. At the higher end there would be a panel of those qualified to act as Foreign Ministers. At present not more than 2 per cent. of the population would be available for the higher panel. But there would be no danger under such a system of electing a postman and finding that he could not read or write. My choice would be more restricted than at present, but my power to choose as between one candidate and another would be as wide as is possible in the present state of affairs. Voting and counting should be done by machinery. I should be able to touch a button and the machinery would do the rest.
Pending this, how are we to go on? The best we can with the sort of government we have? Our present system of parliaments is obsolete in a modern State. We need two or three central parliaments and several regional ones to correlate the work and maintain contact. But no system will by of any use except in the final resort we have good consciences and good public spirit on the part both of the government and the voter.
We are prevented from being good citizens and our governors are prevented from being good governors by all sorts of personal interests and prejudices. The fact is, we have been badly brought up, not as citizens should have been brought up. We must set to work to bring up our children to be better citizens than we are. There is one country that is doing it and that country is Russia. That is my last word. Pray go home and think of it.
Int printed in Theater Guild Magazine quotes ideas on sound films and training of actors for them, O 27, IX, 8:1
10/27/29 GBS believes in talking pictures. He told GW Bishop, in an interview printed in the current issue of the Theater Guild Magazine, that he could not imagine any provincial theater audience being satisfied with a £50 touring production when a £50,000 talking picture is being shown in a cinema. "People won't accept third-rate actors when they can see and hear 'stars' on the screen," said the bearded man with the ready wink.
Mr Shaw also told Mr Bishop: "A new race of artistic producers who know good work from bad in the talkies, and don't prefer the bad, must be evolved and placed in control of sound pictures. Furthermore, all patentees of apparatus should be drowned, shot, sent to St Helena, or otherwise effectively excluded from the studios the moment they demonstrate the practicalities of their inventions."
Mr Shaw was asked whether he did not think that the flesh and blood actor would still be demanded by audiences. "No doubt," replied Mr Shaw, "but not the same actors. The sooner that is realized the better. The ordinary actor - as such - is unsuitable for the talkies. The technique is quite different. Movie acting is mainly the art of not moving, as I discovered when I made my first picture. The first result was ludicrous and then I realized that I had to master a new method of moving. In order to produce a natural picture of myself I had to act in quite an unnatural way. The screen magnifies and intensifies, and the clever movie actor knows this and does not appear on the ordinary stage. Mary and Douglas prefer to remain as the glorified beings that have been magnified by the camera. To see them as they really are would be like looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. When the talkies came along the movie actor rushed in and, on the whole, was found to be a failure, for although he knows technically how to move he knows next to nothing about the voice. For the new medium we shall have to breed a race of talkie actors who have mastered the technique of moving and talking."
"Will you then allow your plays to be made into talking pictures?" Mr Shaw was asked.
"Not until I am satisfied that there is a producer who also knows his job. I may then write a play especially for the talkies, although I see no reason why The Apple Cart, for instance, should not be produced exactly how it stands."
Mr Shaw was then asked if he had seen any color films. His answer:
"Although one or two have been fairly satisfactory, I do no believe that there is any general desire for color. People are used to black and white.
"I have satisfied myself by a successful personal experiment that it is possible to reproduce dramatic dialogue such as I write, the effect being as convincing as when spoken from the stage. It has been established already that stage action can be reproduced effectively on the screen.
"Stage vision can be reproduced in monochrome, and the absence of color is not only pardoned by the audience, but forgotten. The likelihood of the present two-color and three-color attempts at chromatic photography becoming reasonably truthful may therefore be left out of the discussion.
"Plays and operas can, in view of the foregoing propositions, be successfully reproduced as talkies (or singies) as soon as the following conditions are fulfilled: That companies of performers who have mastered the special technique of motion, speech and song required for reproduction by instruments which greatly magnify them and intensify them (neither our movie stars nor our stage actors are qualified in this way as such - in fact are disqualified) be available. That a race of artistic producers who understand the new techniques involved by magnification and who know good work from bad when they see it and hear it, and who don't prefer the bad, be discovered and placed in control of the originating performers."
Remark about gentlemen calls forth definition for G Wells, lr, O 27, III, 5:4
10/27/29 To the Editor of The New York Times: It is not at all surprising that Bernard Shaw should throw defiance at the term gentleman. He detests pretense - anything that stands in the way of the thing itself. "I am not a gentleman. I am far beyond that," he is reported to have said. What he could have meant was that he was not a gentleman in the devalorized sense of the term. What, then, is a gentleman? To say that a gentleman is a man at his truest is to beg the question.
There are three elements which go to the making of a gentleman: Regard for self, regard for others, regard for authority. A person who is undignified is not a gentleman; a person who is overbearing is not a gentleman; a person who is disloyal is not a gentleman.
Were I called upon to offer a handy, serviceable definition I would put it thus: A gentleman is a man who knows his place. Learning does not make a gentleman, or title or affluence. They help but do not make. A sense of fitness is necessary. I have known of sportsmen, M P's, peers, even distinguished scholars and church dignitaries who were not gentlemen. On the other hand, I have met with taxi drivers, butlers, barbers and waiters who struck me as being gentlemen.
Why did the people of Wiesbaden speak of the departing British soldiers as an army of gentlemen? Because they were not going about the town as if they owned it - they knew their place.
Gabriel Wells
Tells students Americans are becoming red Indians, O 26, 9:6
10/26/29 George Bernard Shaw, according to The Daily Express, gave some stinging answers to questions from a large party of American students at a London hotel today. A girl student asked: "Is there any hope of civilizing America? Mr Shaw replied: "Americans are a barbarous people and are returning to red Indian life. Your figures and faces are changing and your complexions get redder and redder. You treat your women like squaws and you are going back to feathers."
Mr Shaw told the students that America had become the center of the universe because of Britain's war debt and that while Britons and Americans openly abused each other there would be no danger of war between them.
"But when dislike is concealed, look out," said Mr Shaw darkly. He warned the students that if they left London without seeing his Apple Cart they would be received with contempt in America.
Professor Maphis, on behalf of the students, adds The Express, thanked Mr Shaw and expressed a hope that he would some day learn more about Americans by visiting the United States. "All Americans worth anything come over to see me," replied Mr Shaw indulgently.
Plot of proposed play centring about Unknown Soldier outlined; feature article; por, O 20, V, p 3
10/20/29 "If you had to describe G. B. S. what would you say of him?" The question was fired at me across the luncheon table in Mr Shaw's apartment at 4 Whitehall Court, London. Mr Shaw slightly raised his bushy eyebrows and riveted his keen blue eyes upon me. Not because he was particularly interested in what I or anyone else thought of him, but probably because he was interested in gauging another's embarrassment. I hesitated. The other five at the table waited. There was nothing to do but speak out.
"I should call him the most fearless, most tenacious and most delightful old killjoy on earth," I replied, and was immediately pounced upon by Mrs Shaw. Every word of that description is true. He is fearless; he is so tenacious that he will put through - usually to a successful conclusion - any task he undertakes; he is certainly delightful and, if ever a mortal man was a killjoy that man is George Bernard Shaw.
He is no killjoy in the sense that he would ram his own ideas or ideals down another's throat. He is not his brother's keeper and cares not a rap whether your tastes are in opposition to his or not. He never asks approval and rarely gives it. He abstains from wine, tobacco and flesh, but at his table you may feast upon chops or chicken, if you wish, and have your rations of alcohol and whiffs of nicotine. His outlook upon life is cheerful enough and his wit sparkling enough without the artificial buoyancy produced by spirits. He needs not cigar or pipe or cigarette before he can collect his thoughts and weave them into something worth while.
He is another sort of killjoy. He can knock into a cocked hat nearly every conceivable idea which originates in any head other than his own long, gray one; and very frequently he exercises that ability. You may pat yourself on the back in the belief that you have thought out or stumbled upon some great idea. You may tell it to Mr Shaw with the utmost modesty or with a brave certainty or even a touch of braggadocio; or you may send it to him. It makes no difference. Your idea is of scant worth and, provided always that Mr Shaw thinks the matter worthy of argument, he will marshal an array of facts before you which will - unless you are a very stubborn person - convince you that you were, are and will be everlastingly wrong. There is no light anywhere for you; no health in you. You grope in darkness and your clever ideas are mostly tommyrot to fence your soul from real thought.
Mr Shaw has been called the most astute publicity seeker on earth. He is not. It is the other way around, for publicity seeks him. Publicity hounds his steps and camps at his front door - so much so in fact that when he lived at Adelphi Terrace he had to erect a barrier of iron spikes in order to keep the curious-minded at bay. Otherwise, as likely as not, his door would have been battered in. If he seeks the isolation of a rare island in the Adriatic or a quiet spot on the Italian lakes, the interviewers and photographers dog his footsteps. One of his hardest jobs is escaping publicity.
Mr Shaw's whimsicalities are like lead to the leaden-minded. When he announces - as he did a short time ago over the radio - that it was George Bernard Shaw calling the universe, people mistook his sense of humor for conceit. When he said in one of his Fabian Society lectures that Bertrand Russell was a very clever man, the cleverest man he knew with one exception (the exception was obvious from the twinkle in his eye), he was again at the receiving end of the criticism of laughterless folk.
He is as full of the devil as any imp of 73 could be. You can, if you watch his expression closely, see and hear him laughing up his sleeve at people who do not know how to accept him. He bedevils his friends and his enemies alike. But he does not like any one else to bedevil his friends. I saw him come to his feet with a bang one night when some one asked Miss Rebecca West, who was speaking, an impudent question. "G. B. S." did the silencing before Miss West knew what was going on. When he tells his audience that England will soon be but a small star in the American flag many of his hearers have a conniption fit - to produce which was precisely his object.
G K Chesterton wrote an article in which he was facetious about Kipling, Wells and Shaw. He called them the tripod on which the dying nineteenth century laid its telescope to peer into the twentieth - or something of that sort. He said this triumvirate prophesied about the Seven Seas, the Seven Planets and the Seventh Heaven and that none of their prophesies came true. I sent a copy of this article to Mr Shaw before it was published and he wrote on the margin:
"A superb article, as usual for Mr Chesterton, too, but a little like the Three Musketeers with D'Artagnan left out. History will group Mr Chesterton with the three of us, but will observe that though his views are, on the whole, fairly distinct from those of Mr Kipling, they are hardly distinguishable from those of Mr Wells, and practically identical with mine, although his intellectual amusements are too fantastic and unscrupulously wayward for us. Some day he will be 'saved'; and then he will adopt the familiar prayer by confessing 'We have believed those things which we ought not to have believed; and we have left unbelieved those things that we ought to have believed, and there has been (occasionally) no health in us.' - G. B. S."
Mr Shaw's tenacity is astounding. His recent book - An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, gives the seal to his stick-to-itiveness if such a seal were needed. This book began as a letter to his sister-in-law. As a letter it will rank as one of the longest ever written.
Mr Shaw's sister-in-law was asked to make an address on socialism. She accepted. As might have been expected she wrote to Shaw asking him to give her some pointers for her talk - some of his views on the subject. Mr Shaw started a letter in reply. He wrote at considerable length only to discover that he had barely scratched the surface of the subject. He then wrote that the subject was too big to be covered in a letter and compromised by sending some books on socialism. But he was not satisfied. He was bent upon writing that letter - and whatever he is bent upon doing he does. He wrote it and it came to something in the neighborhood of 150,000 words!
When he told me the story of the inception of An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, I suggested that the book would probably be dedicated to his sister-in-law. But his original plan was to make the first edition large enough only to obtain copyright in the principal languages and to include one extra copy for his sister-in-law. That probably meant a first edition of ten volumes or less. It also meant that his sister-in-law would possess one of the rarest first editions in the world. I believe he changed his mind and finally dedicated the book to the woman whose letter had inspired such a lengthy reply and so much labor.
Mr Shaw is undoubtedly the most fearless writer and critic of his day. He will tackle anything anywhere at any time and, most probably, be returned the winner. He does not stoop to make a great hullabaloo over some triviality. He likes to fight something, his own size, something worthy of his fine mettle. When he goes gunning he picks out dangerous game, strikes hard and shoots straight with a flat trajectory. He will tackle a King or a Cardinal with more zest than he would small fry.
But there is one shining exception to his well-known fearlessness. I do not even intimate that he is afraid, but he has a certain keen sense of the limits to which even George Bernard Shaw may go to taunting public opinion.
Mr Shaw has a play in mind and does not write it. It would never be played in his lifetime and any publisher would hesitate to stir up public antagonism and indignation by printing it.
One afternoon I asked Mr Shaw if he had seen a certain French play written around the tomb of the Unknown Warrior buried under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He had seen it and considered it excellent. He added that he had in mind the writing of a play to be built around the tomb of Britain's Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey. He would tell me the outline of the play, but I must not write it. Since then he has relented and not long ago when I ran into him at luncheon at Lord Astor's country place, Cliveden, where Shaw was staying, he told me he had no objection to its being told.
So, since my lips are unsealed, I may give a brief outline of Bernard Shaw's unwritten play. The scene is London 100 years hence. Again the world is at war - the most devastating war of all the ages. The most diabolical contrivances for snuffing out human life are being employed on all sides. England is in a terrible state. She is engaged in a desperate struggle for her very life. Her situation grows more and more serious daily. She is much more perturbed than she was at the peak of the submarine activity in the last great World War of 1914-1918. Things are black, desperate. The war is practically lost and the British Empire is doomed to go the way of Assyria, Greece, Rome and Carthage. Battles on land, sea and in the air are lost. Nothing seems able to stem the tide of disaster. England, for the first time in her long history, is panic-stricken. Even the great Napoleon's dictum, "England loses all battles except the last one," does not comfort the people.
Conference upon conference is held to discuss ways and means to avert the threatened doom. There is no solution. The foe is as implacable as was Cato with his Carthago delenda est. Britain is face to face with dissolution after a thousand years of building an empire.
The King - whoever the King happens to be 100 years from now - realizes the utter hopelessness of the situation. He listens to his Ministers and knows they are hoping and talking against hope. So, in his despair he turns at last to the final resort of desolate and despondent men - to prayer.
He calls together the princes and princesses of the land, the Cabinet Ministers, the Lords and the Commons and the Privy Councilors and all the other high officers of State, and tells them they are to meet at Buckingham Palace and march with him to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, there to implore divine guidance in their dark hour, for kings still turn to God in their anguish and despair.
Buckingham Palace has changed but little from what it is today. It is still that uninteresting, cold gray pile. Before it still stands the pompous Victoria memorial. The Mall is the same dignified but colorless thoroughfare. Although airplanes and dirigibles have proved battleships and cruisers as obsolete as the Macedonian phalanx, the Admiralty Arch is still called the Admiralty Arch and the country is still full of Admirals - Admirals die harder than other men and England was founded upon sea power and England clings to the belief that whatever was good enough for grandfather is good enough for me.
It is a typical overcast, somber day in London when all the high dignitaries of the land - including many ladies, for ladies are very prominent in politics a century hence, and in the Cabinet there are several ladies - gather at Buckingham Palace. The great open spaces before the palace are filled with wounded men, widows and orphans. Slowly and solemnly and silently the great folk emerge from the labyrinthine solitudes of the palace. They are all there in sad array - King and Princes, Ministers and Councilors, Lords and Commons, Generals and Admirals and Air Marshals. His Majesty is in the vanguard leading them on a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Slower than any funeral march they trudge with bowed heads and contrite hearts and fearful misgivings toward Westminster Abbey.
As they approach all are dumfounded to see, the Lord Jesus Christ sitting on the tomb. They prostrate themselves before Him. Christ, in a very matter-of-fact way, asks, "Gentlemen, what can I do for you?" the King rises to his knees and begins to pray. The Princes, Ministers, Lords and Commons come to their knees and bow low in reverence. Christ listens to the King's prayer, then, seeing the Dean of Westminster Cathedral among the King's followers apologizes to him for the intrusion. Having heard enough of the King's prayers Christ remarks: "I will see what can be done," and forthwith vanishes. Immediately the tomb is opened and out steps the unknown soldier of 100 years ago. He is not in uniform, and none of the many decoration pinned upon him are anywhere in evidence. He is in a shroud and seems utterly bewildered.
At this second miracle the King, Princes, Ministers, Lords, Commons, Privy Councilors and others all bow low before the spirit of the unknown soldier. Again the king begins a prayer:
"O spirit of the unknown soldier of a hundred years ago, we have come before your tomb in this dark hour to implore divine guidance, to plead for a return of your noble spirit which animated all our people in the great war of 1914-1918. Send your spirit into the hearts of the aviators in the sky, into the hearts of the sailors in the submarines, into the hearts of the soldiers wherever they may be. We today have lost the ancient English spirit and can no longer fight with our backs to the wall. We can" -
The spirit of the unknown soldier breaks into the King's prayer. "Where am I?" he asks, rubbing his eyes and looking all about him in mystification. The King bows low. The Princes, Ministers, Lords, Commons and all the noble company bow low before him. Again the King speaks: "You are in Westminster Abbey, enshrined in the hearts of our people." Again the King launches into prayer and once again the soldier interrupts:
"Westminster Abbey? Hearts of the people? In what city am I?"
Once again the whole noble company bow low before the soldier, and the King lifts his head proudly and exclaims: "In Westminster Abbey, the heart of the empire, in the city of London."
A faint smile crosses the soldier's face. He looks down upon them more in compassion than otherwise.
"What fools you are!" he exclaims. "I am a German soldier and should be buried in Cologne Cathedral."
The curtain falls.
Says Oxford and Cambridge Univs should be abolished and educ decentralized, O 16, 4:2
10/16/29 George Bernard Shaw told an audience at Plymouth today that Oxford and Cambridge ought to be done away with. "Let no citizens of Plymouth, or anywhere else be persuaded to send their sons to either of them," he said. "The thing to do with these unvenerable institutions - in spite of the beauty of their buildings - is to raze them to the ground and sow the foundations with salt. There are several public schools, generally regarded as nurseries for Oxford and Cambridge, and they might share the same fate. We must replace them by local universities, and decentralize education."
Mr Shaw was opening the residential hostel presented by Lord Astor to the University College of the Southwest - a local branch of the University of London.
Correspondence will be sold, O 15, 8:3
10/15/29 Some of George Bernard Shaw's brightest correspondence will be sold at Sotheby's next month with the only written contract he ever had with J E Vedrenne, who produced his plays in London a quarter of a century ago.
One letter describes how Mr Shaw sang at a Salvation Army demonstration in Royal Albert Hall with the intention of boosting his play Major Barbara, on which he was then engaged, in 1905.
"I stood in the center front row and sang 'When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder" as it has never been sung before," he wrote. "The Times will announce my conversion tomorrow. What other author would do that for his management?"
S on democracy, 1st over radio, O 15, 8:2
10/15/29 Bernard Shaw, broadcasting for his first time at a British broadcasting company studio tonight, spole on democracty and began:
"Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses, your Excellencies, your Graces, your Reverences, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen - and fellow-citizens."
He asked "why don't the people make their own laws? You could ask another question by saying "why don't the people write their own plays?" It is easier to write a play than make a law, but there are not a hundred people able to write a play good enough to stand wear and tear.
"I am an old man, paying enough in income-tax and super-tax to provide for hundreds of unemployed and old age pensioners. I would not have the slightest objection to this; on the contrary, I advocated this principle strongly for a long time before I had any income to tax. But I cannot even be a Christian except through government action."
Another point was, "our present Parliamentary system can no more do the work of the modern State than Julius Caesar's galleys could do the work of a modern engine."
Refuses to write drama for radio use, O 13, X, 19:8
10/13/29 George Bernard Shaw, noted British dramatist, when asked recently by a radio director to state the sum for which he would write a drama for radio use, cabled a reply: "Four billion dollars might be sufficient, but that is not a contract."
Attends annual luncheon of Critics Circle; s, O 12, 7:1
10/12/29 George Bernard Shaw today broke one of his strict rules - namely, never to have anything to do with dramatic critics - by going boldly as the guest of honor to the annual luncheon of the Critics Circle. It was not, however, such a serious violation of his rule as it seemed, for Mr Shaw was not here in the capacity of dramatist so much as critic.
He was in a retrospective mood and told how he happened to become a critic in the most casual way. T P O'Conner, Mr Shaw said, made him musical critic more that forty years ago because what Mr Shaw had written up to that time on other subjects was ruining Mr. O'Connor's paper. So Mr Shaw did not say much about lay writing today and the most vivid reminder that that is his present job was in the personnel of the men and women at the tables.
There were present enough actors and actresses who had appeared in Shaw plays to make up casts for all of his productions. The 'American Ambassador' was there - not General Dawes, who now is half way across the Atlantic homeward bound, but Mr Vanhattan, who as American Ambassador in The Apple Cart will show up on the stage in New York in the course of this Winter with his proposal that America annex England.
Shaw Is Center Of Attention
Cedric Hardwick, who as King Magnus in The Apple Cart and Edith Evans, who as Orlanthia in the same cast, roll on the floor in each other's arms at the Queen's Theater six evenings and two afternoons every week, sat at separate tables at the luncheon and never looked at each other. In fact, Miss Evans never moved her lorngnette out of the line of vision of Mr Shaw's face, even when she was eating.
It is not only audiences that worship this cynical Irish dramatist but stage folk who people the world which he creates.
Next to Mr Shaw himself as the luncheon hero was R C Sherriff, author of 'Journey's End.' He said that when the fate of his play was hanging in the balance a year ago last Summer, he was advised to send his manuscript to Mr Shaw to get his opi