The Diaries of Beatrice Webb: All the Truth about Bernard Shaw E-Book

Beatrice Webb

• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 293

Beschreibung

The book contains all known so far 151 aphoristic entries in the diaries of Beatrice Webb about her lifelong friend, Nobel laureate and Oscar winner Bernard Shaw written between 1893 and 1943 and edited by a leading contemporary Shavian Vitaly Baziyan. Beatrice Webb's keenest observations about the greatest Irish dramatist Bernard Shaw represent an important source for the study of British cultural, social and political history. They help to get a clearer picture of world-renowned playwright as well as other celebrities of his time. Here are some aphorisms from Beatrice Webb about Bernard Shaw: 'He imagines that he gets to know women by making them in love with him. Just the contrary. His stupid gallantries bar out from him the friendship of women who are either too sensible, too puritanical or too much 'otherwise engaged' to care to bandy personal flatteries with him. He idealizes them for a few days, weeks or years, imagines them to be something utterly different from their true selves, then has a revulsion of feeling and discovers them to be unutterably vulgar, second-rate, rapscallion, or insipidly well-bred. He never fathoms their real worth, nor rightly sees their limitations.' 'One is so accustomed to GBS's vanity and egotism. One used to watch these faults leading to all sorts of rather cruel philanderings with all kinds of odd females.' 'His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity, delight in being the candle to the moths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity. And he is mistaken if he thinks that it does not affect his artistic work. His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationships, the lack of the sterner kind of humour which would show him the dreariness of his farce and the total absence of proportion and inadequateness in some of his ideas, all these defects come largely from the flippant and worthless self-complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women. For all that, he is a good-natured agreeable sprite of a man, an intellectual cricket on the hearth always chirping away brilliant paradox, sharp-witted observation and friendly comments. Whether I like him, admire him or despise him most I do not know. Just at present I feel annoyed and contemptuous.' 'He is self-complacent—feels himself one of the world geniuses and is mortified by the refusal of his generation to take him seriously as a thinker and reformer.' 'G.B.S.'s dogmatic conclusion is that Socialism consists of two ends; equalisation of incomes and compulsory labour.' 'He has the illusion that he is and must be right, because he has genius and his critics are just ordinary men.' 'He is a delightful companion for an outing, always amusing and good-tempered, sufficiently exasperating in argument to avoid tameness in companionship—the curse of the comradeship of the old. He is a delightful raconteur—a perfect gossip, elaborating by witty exaggerations the life-stories of his friends into human comedies, and sometimes into inhuman tragedies.' 'GBS complains of hordes of journalists who dogged his steps as false publicity. "The great majority of those who crowd to see me have not read a word I've written, and those who have don't understand, or disagree with my message to mankind." All the same, he enjoys it and rides triumphant over the mob of pressmen, attracted by the force, not of his message, but of his bewitching personality, the world-wide glamour of it.'

Leseprobe

The Diaries of Beatrice Webb: All the Truth about Bernard Shaw

Edited by Vitaly Baziyan

Copyright © 2021 Vitaly Baziyan

All rights reserved

The book contains 151entries in the diaries of Beatrice Webb about her lifelong friend Bernard Shaw written between 1893and 1943 or all known so far diary entries relating to Bernard Shaw respectively, and two letters to Beatrice Webb in connection with Bernard Shaw’s resignation from the New Statesman. Sources of this collection are prior publications The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Volume Two, 1892-1905 “All the Good Things of Life”; Volume Three, 1905 – 1924 “The Power to Alter Things”; Volume Four, 1924 – 1943 “The Wheel of Life” published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts; Beatrice Webb’s American Diary published by University of Wisconsin Press; Beatrice Webb’s diaries, 1912 – 1924 and Beatrice Webb’s diaries, 1924 – 1932 published by Longmans, Green and Co Ltd, London.

On 12 February 1943 Beatrice Webb [née Potter] wrote in her diary: “Kingsley Martin [Editor of the New Statesman] and Raymond Mortimer here for tea and talk. K.M. [Kingsley Martin] was most affectionate to the aged Webbs. Raymond Mortimer is an attractive and successful literary journalist—cultivated, has travelled widely and is today working in the foreign department of the B.B.C. and Ministry of Information. He has come down with K.M. because he was a great admirer of My Apprenticeship—he and Kingsley Martin wanted me to contribute extracts from my diary about Bernard Shaw. I told them that would be undesirable. Our relations with GBS had been those of warm friendship and courteous co-operation, but nearly all the entries in the diaries were about our brilliant friend’s troublesome antics, his queer dealing with current events and contemporary personalities, and were, in a sense, mainly critical. Sidney [Webb] and he had co-operated and he had always been most generous in his appreciation of our work. He was a great dramatist, but whimsical in his dealings with other men. I preferred to abstain from any quotation from the diaries until both the Shaws and the Webbs were no longer living personalities....”

This time has now come. Beatrice Webb’s keenest observations about her long-standing friend and a great dramatist Bernard Shaw are available for readers and represent an important source for the study of British cultural, social and political history. They help readers to get a clearer picture of world-renowned Irish playwright who won The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925 “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.” Bernard Shaw also won the Oscar in 1939 for Best Screenplay and Dialogue for his role in adapting his play Pygmalion for the screen.

Beatrice Webb’s punctuation and spelling were mostly kept by the editor. Christian names, surnames, positions and ranks were added in square brackets when they were omitted but are necessary for a better understanding. Cuts of a few words are indicated by three dots and longer omissions by four dots.

The ebook cover was created by the editor using the picture of Sir John Everett Millais.

1/ A diary entry for 17th September 1893

—... Bernard Shaw I know less well than Graham Wallas, though he is quite as old a friend of Sidney’s. Marvellously smart witty fellow with a crank for not making money, except he can make it exactly as he pleases. Persons with no sense of humour regard him as a combined Don Juan and a professional blasphemer of the existing order. An artist to the tips of his fingers and an admirable craftsman. I have never known a man use his pen in such a workmanlike fashion or acquire such a thoroughly technical knowledge of any subject upon which he gives an opinion. But his technique in specialism never overpowers him—he always translates it into epigram, sparkling generalization or witty personalities. As to his character, I do not understand it. He has been for twelve years a devoted propagandist, hammering away at the ordinary routine of Fabian Executive work with as much persistence as Wallas or Sidney [Webb]. He is an excellent friend—at least to men—but beyond this I know nothing. I am inclined to think that he has a ‘slight’ personality—agile, graceful and even virile, but lacking in weight. Adored by many women, he is a born philanderer—a ‘Soul’ [a member of a loosely-knit but distinctive elite social and intellectual group The Souls], so to speak—disliking to be hampered either by passions or by conventions and therefore always tying himself up into knots which have to be cut before he is free for another adventure. Vain is he? A month ago I should have said that vanity was the bane of his nature. Now I am not so sure that the vanity itself is not part of the mise en scène—whether, in fact, it is not part of the character he imagines himself to be playing in the world’s comedy. A vegetarian, fastidious but unconventional in his clothes, six foot in height with a lithe, broad-chested figure and laughing blue eyes. Above all a brilliant talker, and, therefore, a delightful companion. To my mind he is not yet a personality; he is merely a pleasant, though somewhat incongruous, group of qualities. Some people would call him a cynic—he is really an Idealist of the purest water (see his Quintessence of Ibsenism and his plays [Widowers’ Houses and Candida]).

These two men with Sidney make up the Fabian Junta. Sidney is the organizer and gives most of the practical initiative, Graham Wallas imparts the morality and scrupulousness, Bernard Shaw gives the sparkle and flavour. Graham Wallas appeals to those of the upper and educated class who have good intentions. No one can doubt his candour, disinterestedness, enthusiasm, entire moral refinement. Sidney insinuates ideas, arguments, programmes, organizes the organism. Bernard Shaw heads off the men of straw, men with light heads, the would-be revolutionists, who are attracted by his wit, his daring onslaughts and amusing parodies. He has also a clientele among the cynical journalists and men of the world. What the Junta needs to make it a great power are one or two personalities of weight, men of wide experience and sagacity, able to play a long hand and to master the movement. If John Burns would get over his incurable suspicion, if he could conquer his instinctive fear of comradeship, I know no man who could so thoroughly complete the Fabian trio and make it thoroughly effective. If Burns would come in and give himself away to the other three as they do to each other, the Fabians could dominate the reform movement. Burns, in some respects, is the strongest man of the four, though utterly ill-equipped, in his isolation, for leadership. But that contingency, I fear, is past praying for. Collectivism will spread but it will spread from no one centre. Those who sit down and think will, however, mould the form, though they will not set the pace or appear openly as the directors.

2/ A diary entry for 25th July 1894

—... Spent two days (while Sidney was in London) alone with Graham Wallas. Long walks after dinner on the moorland in the clouded twilight of this stormy summer season—with the yellow of the setting sun peering on the horizon between thick black clouds. Poor fellow, he is in a dreary mood just now, overworked with organizing the Progressives for the next School Board election—and himself standing for Hackney—besides making his livelihood by lecturing. Like many men who live alone and work hard he is a joyless being who has to some extent lost his manners and capacity for agreeable intercourse in the daily grind of devoted work for others. We are probably his nearest and dearest friends with whom he feels perfectly at ease, able to come and go as if our house were his rightful home. He will be with us, off and on, the whole three months, finishing his book on Francis Place. But friends, however dear, are no substitute for a beloved partner who would share evil and good days with him. And Wallas has not Shaw’s light-heartedness, nor Shaw’s witty observations of men and things, which gives an intellectual zest to life and makes a man welcomed wherever he goes. Then Shaw lives in a drama or comedy of which he himself is the hero—his amour propre is satisfied by the jealousy and restless devotion of half a dozen women, all cordially hating each other. Graham Wallas grinds on, making no personal claims, impersonal and almost callous in his manner, an English gentleman in his relations with women to whom a flirtation, let alone an intrigue, would seem underbred as well as unkind and dishonourable. All the same, he is not positively unhappy, only perpetually overworked and living in a grey cloudland of dutiful effort.

3/ A diary entry for 25th September 1895

—... Bernard Shaw is a perfect ‘house friend’—self-sufficient, witty and tolerant, going his own way and yet adapting himself to your ways. If only he would concentrate his really brilliant intellect on some consecutive thought.

The [William Pollard] Byles (editor of the Bradford Observer) and the Bertrand Russells spent some days with us. Russell a young aristocrat—the son of old friends of our family, the Amberleys—a very young man with considerable intellectual promise, subtle and contentious but anarchic in his dislike of working in teams. Has married a pretty bright American Quakeress [Alys Pearsall Smith] some years older than himself with anarchic views of life, also hating routine. The Pelhams [Arthur and Evelyne] were there—reminding one of old times—Mrs Pelham an adorer of Shaw’s (Shaw’s public is not of a solid sort—it is made up of dilettantes). Finished our holiday by a three days’ ride in exquisite weather by Bath, Warminster, Stonehenge, Andover, arriving here dusty and hot early yesterday morning. Must now set to and work hard at the book. It is hanging somewhat heavily on our hands....

4/ A diary entry for 16th September 1896

—... Meanwhile a new friend has joined the ‘Bo’ family. [Beatrice was named ‘Bo’ by the Potter family.] Charlotte Payne-Townshend [later Mrs Shaw] is a wealthy unmarried woman of about my own age. Bred up in second-rate fashionable society without any education or habit of work, she found herself at about thirty-three years of age alone in the world, without ties, without any definite creed, and with a large income. For the last four years she has drifted about—in India, in Italy, in Egypt, in London, seeking occupation and fellow spirits. In person she is attractive—a large graceful woman with masses of chocolate-brown hair, pleasant grey eyes, ‘matte’ complexion which sometimes looks muddy, at other times forms a picturesquely pale background to her brilliant hair and bright eyes. She dresses well—in her flowing white evening robes she approaches beauty. At moments she is plain. By temperament she is an anarchist—feeling any regulation or rule intolerable—a tendency which has been exaggerated by her irresponsible wealth. She is romantic but thinks herself cynical. She is a socialist and a radical, not because she understands the collectivist standpoint, but because she is by nature a rebel. She has no snobbishness and no convention: she has ‘swallowed all formulas’ but has not worked out principles of her own. She is fond of men and impatient of most women, bitterly resents her enforced celibacy but thinks she could not tolerate the matter-of-fact side of marriage. Sweet-tempered, sympathetic and genuinely anxious to increase the world’s enjoyment and diminish the world’s pain.

This is the woman who has, for a short time or for good, entered the ‘Bo’ family. Last autumn she was introduced to us. We, knowing she was wealthy, and hearing she was socialistic, interested her in the London School of Economics. She subscribed £1,000 to the Library [of Political Science], endowed a woman’s scholarship, and has now taken the rooms over the School at Adelphi Terrace, paying us £300 a year for rent and service. It was on account of her generosity to our projects and ‘for the good of the cause’ that I first made friends with her. To bring her more directly into our little set of comrades, I suggested that we should take a house together in the country and entertain our friends. To me she seemed at that time a pleasant, well-dressed, well-intentioned woman—I thought she should do very well for Graham Wallas! Now she turns out to be an ‘original’, with considerable personal charm and certain volcanic tendencies. Graham Wallas bored her with his morality and learning. In a few days she and Bernard Shaw were constant companions. For the last fortnight, when the party has been reduced to ourselves and Shaw, and we have been occupied with our work and each other, they have been scouring the country together and sitting up late at night. To all seeming, she is in love with the brilliant philanderer and he is taken, in his cold sort of way, with her. They are, I gather from him, on very confidential terms and have ‘explained’ their relative positions. Though interested I am somewhat uneasy. These warm-hearted unmarried women of a certain age are audacious and are almost childishly reckless of consequences. I doubt whether Bernard Shaw could be induced to marry: I doubt whether she will be happy without it. It is harder for a woman to remain celibate than a man.

5/ A diary entry for 9th March 1897

—As I mounted the stairs with Shaw’s Unsocial Socialist to return to Bertha Newcombe I felt somewhat uncomfortable as I knew I should encounter a sad soul full of bitterness and loneliness. I stepped into a small wainscotted studio and was greeted coldly by the little woman. She is petite and dark, about forty years old but looks more like a wizened girl than a fully developed woman. Her jet-black hair heavily fringed, half-smart, half-artistic clothes, pinched aquiline features and thin lips, give you a somewhat unpleasant impression though not wholly inartistic. She is bad style without being vulgar or common or loud—indeed many persons, Kate Courtney for instance, would call her ‘lady-like’—but she is insignificant and undistinguished. ‘I want to talk to you, Mrs Webb,’ she said when I seated myself. And then followed, told with the dignity of devoted feeling, the story of her relationship to Bernard Shaw, her five years of devoted love, his cold philandering, her hopes aroused by repeated advice to him (which he, it appears, had repeated much exaggerated) to marry her, and then her feeling of misery and resentment against me when she discovered that I was encouraging him ‘to marry Miss Townshend’. Finally, he had written a month ago to break it off entirely: they were not to meet again. And I had to explain with perfect frankness that so long as there seemed a chance for her I had been willing to act as chaperone, that she had never been a personal friend of mine or Sidney’s, that I had regarded her only as Shaw’s friend, and that as far as I was concerned I should have welcomed her as his wife. But directly I saw that he meant nothing I backed out of the affair. She took it all quietly, her little face seemed to shrink up and the colour of her skin looked as if it were reflecting the sad lavender of her dress.

‘You are well out of it, Miss Newcombe,’ I said gently. ‘If you had married Shaw he would not have remained faithful to you. You know my opinion of him—as a friend and a colleague, as a critic and literary worker, there are few men for whom I have so warm a liking; but in his relations with women he is vulgar, if not worse; it is a vulgarity that includes cruelty and springs from vanity.’

As I uttered these words my eye caught her portrait of Shaw—full-length, with his red-gold hair and laughing blue eyes and his mouth slightly open as if scoffing at us both, a powerful picture in which the love of the woman had given genius to the artist. Her little face turned to follow my eyes and she also felt the expression of the man, the mockery at her deep-rooted affection. ‘It is so horribly lonely,’ she muttered. ‘I daresay it is more peaceful than being kept on the rack, but it is like the peace of death.’ There seemed nothing more to be said. I rose and with a perfunctory ‘Come and see me—someday,’ I kissed her on the forehead and escaped down the stairs. And then I thought of that other woman with her loving easygoing nature and anarchic luxurious ways, her well-bred manners and well-made clothes, her leisure, wealth and knowledge of the world. Would she succeed in taming the philanderer?

6/ A diary entry for 1st May 1897

—... I am watching with concern and curiosity the development of the Shaw-Townshend friendship. All this winter they have been lovers—of a philandering and harmless kind, always together when Shaw was free. Charlotte insisted on taking a house with us in order that he might be here constantly, and it is obvious that she is deeply attached to him. But I see no sign on his side of the growth of any genuine and steadfast affection. He finds it pleasant to be with her in her luxurious surroundings, he has been studying her and all her little ways and amusing himself by dissecting the rich woman brought up without training and drifting about at the beck of impulse. I think he has now exhausted the study, observed all that there is to observe. He has been flattered by her devotion and absorption in him; he is kindly and has a cat-like preference for those persons to whom he is accustomed. But there are ominous signs that he is tired of watching the effect of little words of gallantry and personal interest with which he plied her in the first months of the friendship. And he is annoyed by her lack of purpose and utter incapacity for work. If she would set to, and do even the smallest and least considerable task of intellectual work, I believe she could retain his interest and perhaps develop his feeling for her. Otherwise he will drift away, for Shaw is too high-minded and too conventionally honourable to marry her for the life of leisure and luxury he could gain for himself as her husband.

7/ A diary entry for 8th May 1897

—Silly these philanderings of Shaw’s. He imagines that he gets to know women by making them in love with him. Just the contrary. His stupid gallantries bar out from him the friendship of women who are either too sensible, too puritanical or too much ‘otherwise engaged’ to care to bandy personal flatteries with him. One large section of women, comprising some, at any rate, of the finest types, remains hidden from him. With the women with whom he has ‘bonne fortune’ he also fails in his object, or rather in his avowed object—vivisection. He idealizes them for a few days, weeks or years, imagines them to be something utterly different from their true selves, then has a revulsion of feeling and discovers them to be unutterably vulgar, second-rate, rapscallion, or insipidly well-bred. He never fathoms their real worth, nor rightly sees their limitations. But in fact it is not the end he cares for: it is the process. His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity, delight in being the candle to the moths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity. And he is mistaken if he thinks that it does not affect his artistic work. His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationships, the lack of the sterner kind of humour which would show him the dreariness of his farce and the total absence of proportion and inadequateness in some of his ideas, all these defects come largely from the flippant and worthless self-complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women. For all that, he is a good-natured agreeable sprite of a man, an intellectual cricket on the hearth always chirping away brilliant paradox, sharp-witted observation and friendly comments. Whether I like him, admire him or despise him most I do not know. Just at present I feel annoyed and contemptuous.

For the dancing light has gone out of Charlotte’s eyes—there is at times a blank haggard look, a look that I myself felt in my own eyes for long years. But throughout all my misery I had the habit of hard work and an almost religious sense of my intellectual mission. I had always my convent to fly to. Poor Charlotte has nowhere to turn. She can only wander listless through the world, with no reason for turning one way rather than another. What a comfort to be a fanatic. It is Bernard Shaw’s fanaticism to turn everything inside out and see whether the other side won’t do just as well if not better; it is this fanaticism which gives him genuine charm. He has a sort of affectionateness too, underneath his vanity. Will she touch that?

8/ A diary entry for 24th May 1897

—Glorious summer days. In excellent working form. Long mornings spent in work, recasting some of the chapters, filling up crevasses and thinking out the last chapter and foreshadowing the preface. Sidney sits at one table and I at another: the sun streams in through the dancing leaves. As fast as I can plan he criticizes and executes, filling in his time with administrative work, but sacrificing everything to the book. Charlotte sits upstairs typewriting Shaw’s plays. Shaw wanders about the garden with writing-book and pencil, writing the Saturday [Review] article, correcting his plays for press or reading through one of our chapters. With extraordinary good nature he will spend days over some part of our work, and an astute reader will quickly divine those chapters which Shaw has corrected and those which he has not—there is a conciseness and crispness in parts subjected to his pruning-knife lacking elsewhere.

In the afternoon there is the interval for cigarettes, letters and the newspapers before the early cup of tea, and between 5 or 6 o’clock and 8 o’clock supper, a ride or a walk in this beautiful country. Our daily life is an earthly paradise....

9/ A diary entry for 27th September 1897

—These two months we have overworked for enjoyment; constantly too exhausted to care for exercise, and days when extreme exasperation from over-brainwork has made me quite incapable of enjoying the country. Also Shaw and Charlotte’s relationship is disturbing. Shaw goes on untroubled, working hard at his plays and then going long rides with her on a tandem cycle. But she is always restless and sometimes unhappy, too anxious to be with him. He is sometimes bored, but he is getting to feel her a necessary part of his ‘entourage’ and would, I think, object to her breaking away from the relationship. He persuades himself that by keeping her occupied he is doing her good. If it were not for the fact that he is Shaw I should say that he was dishonourable. But as he has always advertised his views of marriage and philandering from the house-tops, every woman ought to be prepared for his logical carrying out of these principles.

10/ A diary entry for 29th March 1898

—“To America, Australia and New Zealand, when they might go to Russia, India and China: What taste! Just what one would expect from them” remarked a Tory acquaintance to a friend of ours. A little group of Fabians came to see us off at Euston—Edward Pease, [George Bernard] Shaw and the [Graham] Wallas’s. Bob Trevelyan came to see the last of his brother; Kate Courtney of her sister; whilst F. W. [Francis Wrigley] Hirst divided his attentions between C. P. T. [Charles Philips Trevelyan] and “the Webbs.” We were a jolly little party as we steamed out of the station, all thoroughly satisfied with ourselves. Sydney Olivier sent to Washington on Colonial office business (to adjust the tariff with America for West Indian produce). He was burdened with C.O. [Colonial office] papers and Blue Books and lent a certain official gravity to our tourist air. At Liverpool we were met by R. D. [Robert Durning] Holt and [her daughter] Betty and Sir H. [HickmanBeckett] Bacon (who mildly deprecated his anxiety to see Sidney). Our brother-in-law was in high feather. “Come along and look at your cabin: you will see what an advantage it is to be connected with the commercial aristocracy. The White Star Line have treated you as well as a duke: could not have done better if you had been H.R.H. [His or Her Royal Highness] himself. Come along, come along, this way: we’ll show them, Betty, what we have done for them.”...“Now what do you say to this?” and he led us into a charmingly fitted Deck Cabin—“You can keep your own cabinet downstairs as well if you like. Now you see what it is to have capitalist connections” chaffed Robert as we tried to interpolate words of appreciation and thanks.

In spite of our gorgeous deck cabin the next three days were solidly wretched. Sidney became a wreck from sickness, C. P. T. and I struggled to keep up appearances but felt continuous inward misgivings; Olivier alone survived unscathed; eat sumptuous repasts and worked straight on at his sugar bounty calculations and at his “Play.” In more lucid intervals I investigated the careers of the Ship’s Passengers—for the most part a dull lot—commercial travellers (a deadly dull type unless you can get them to talk their own “shop” which they seldom will) prevailing and giving the tone to the company....

11/ A diary entry for 5th February 1899

—Since we returned to England I have been disinclined to write in my diary, having nothing to relate and having lost the habit of intimate confidences, impossible in a joint diary such as we have kept together during our journey round the world. One cannot run on into self-analysis, family gossip, or indiscreet and hasty descriptions of current happenings, if someone else, however dear, is solemnly to read one’s chatter then and there. I foresee the sort of kindly indulgence or tolerant boredom with which Sidney would decipher the last entry and this feeling would, in itself, make it impossible to write whatever came into my head at the time of writing without thought of his criticism.

With regard to our friends and relations, we found only two persons whose lives had been completely changed during our absence—our two friends GBS and Charlotte have married each other. Shaw has become a chronic invalid, Charlotte a devoted nurse. They live in an attractive house up at Hindhead. He still writes but his work seems to be getting unreal: he leads a hothouse life, he cannot walk or get among his equals. He is as witty and as cheery as of old. But now and again a flush of fatigue or a sign of brain irritation passes over him. Charlotte, under pressure of anxiety for the man she loves, has broadened out into a motherly woman and lost her anarchic determination to live according to her momentary desires. There are some compensations for the sadness of the sudden cutting-off of his activity.

12/ A diary entry for 30th October 1899

—... The Shaws have taken up their residence in Charlotte’s attractive flat over the School of Economics, and Sidney and I meet there on Thursdays to dine sumptuously between our respective lectures. Charlotte and Shaw have settled down into the most devoted married couple, she gentle and refined, with happiness added thereto, and he showing no sign of breaking loose from her dominion. What the intellectual product of the marriage will be I do not feel so sure: at any rate he will not become a dilettante, the habit of work is too deeply engrained. It is interesting to watch his fitful struggles out of the social complacency natural to an environment of charm and plenty. How can atmosphere be resisted?...

13/ A diary entry for 12th June 1900

—... I was idling at Bernard Shaw’s pretty little place in Surrey. A minor element in my unhappiness was the discomfort that we had more or less imposed ourselves on the Shaws and that Charlotte Shaw did not want to have us. Perhaps this was a morbid impression. But it is clear that now she is happily married we must not presume upon her impulsive hospitality and kindly acquiescence in our proposals. All this made me glad to get to work again—to enjoy the mental peace of research, unhampered by human relationship, except the one ideal relationship of marriage....I need hard work and obscurity to keep me in good moral condition. The one happiness which never seems to injure me is Sidney’s adoring love: that encourages me when I am despondent and holds me back when I am elated with vanity. It is purely blessed....

14/ A diary entry for 2nd January 1901

—... Then the two dear comrades and friends who for some half-dozen years regularly spent their holidays with us—[Graham] Wallas and Shaw—are both of them married, and though when we meet, we meet as old friends, we seldom see each other. With Audrey Wallas I find it difficult to be sympathetic because she is so extremely unattractive; still, my respect for her increases year by year. Charlotte Shaw does not specially like me, and while meaning to be most friendly, arranges her existence so as to exclude most of Shaw’s old friends. And possibly they would all of them say that we were too much absorbed in each other to care for others and that our friendliness was more an overflow from our happiness than any special love for them. In fact a sort of universal benevolence to all comers seems to take the place of special affection for chosen friends. It is only the persistent yet slack tie of sisterhood that seems to survive these inroads of indifference....

15/ A diary entry for 9th December 1901

—... And what about the little set we live in? The Bernard Shaws are still our true friends, Charlotte subscribing to the School [of Economics and Political Science], helping forward the Fabian Society, always sweet and helpful to Sidney in his various enterprises. GBS stimulating and extraordinarily good-natured in spending days in correcting the more topical of our productions. Hence the lucidity which characterizes the opening chapter of [my small book] The Case for the Factory Acts and the brilliance of Sidney’s article in the Nineteenth Century are both due to the careful touching-up of our literary ‘ghost’.

The sort of partnership that exists between GBS and ourselves, based on a common faith and real good fellowship, is of the utmost advantage to both, we supplying him with some ideas and he, on crucial occasions, enormously improving our form....

16/ A diary entry for 27th February 1904

—Sidney and [Robert Charles] Phillimore returned unopposed for Deptford, a somewhat striking comment on the threats of last summer that ‘he shall lose his seat.’ He is now turning his attention to getting GBS [as Progressive candidate] in for St Pancras. What effect GBS’s brilliant slashing to the right and the left among his own nominal supporters will have, remains to be seen; the party organizers have long ago given up the seat as lost. Sidney has written to every clergyman in St Pancras (about twenty-one) sending them a copy of his book and imploring them to go hard for Shaw. He has even got the Bishop of Stepney’s blessing sent to the Rural Dean. He has now taken charge of two-thirds of the constituency, installed the Spencers [research assistants Frederick Herbert Spencer and his wife Mrs Spencer née Amy Harrison] in a committee room and called up the whole of the Fabian Society on Shaw’s behalf. Whether this effort will win what would be a forlorn hope to any other Progressive candidate, and will counteract the enemies GBS makes in our current ranks we cannot tell. The Shaws have been good friends to us and we would not like them to have a humiliating defeat. What that erratic genius will do, if he gets on the L.C.C. [London County Council], heaven will know someday, but I am inclined to think that in the main he will back up Sidney. And he will become the enfant terrible of the Progressive party and make Sidney look wisely conventional. In the Fabian Society they have certainly managed to supplement each other in a curiously effective way—let us hope it will be the same on the L.C.C. But he is not likely to get in!

Meanwhile our old friend Graham Wallas is left in the cold, with even a cross against his name so far as our influence with the Church is concerned. It is an uncomfortable fact that we are convinced that on the Council he will obstruct our side of things without promoting his own. One has, in this ruthless world, to accept uncomfortable facts and act on them. We try to persuade ourselves that it will be better for him if he drops out for the next three years, or at any rate has the minor position of a co-opted member. However the party say that Hoxton was a safe win and St Pancras a certain loss and our wish may well be father to our thought. It is strange how impossible it is for the keenest observer to foretell the result of an election when three years have elapsed from the last....

17/ A diary entry for 7th March 1904

—GBS beaten badly, elsewhere the Progressives romping back with practically undiminished members. As to the first event, we are not wholly grieved. GBS with a small majority might have been useful, with an overwhelming one he would simply have been compromising. He certainly showed himself hopelessly intractable during the election, refused to adopt any orthodox devices as to address and polling cards, inventing brilliant ones of his own, all quite unsuited to any constituency but Fabians or Souls. Insisted that he was an Atheist, that though a teetotaller he would force every citizen to imbibe a quartern of rum to cure any tendency to intoxication, laughed at the Nonconformist conscience and chaffed the Catholics about Transubstantiation, abused the Liberals and contemptuously patronized the Conservatives—until nearly every section was equally disgruntled. His bad side is very prominent at an election—vanity and lack of reverence for knowledge or respect for other people’s prejudices; even his good qualities—quixotic chivalry to his opponents and cold-drawn truth ruthlessly administered to possible supporters—are magnificent but not war. Anyway, we did our best for him, Sidney even puffing him outrageously in the Daily Mail, and he and Charlotte are duly grateful. He will never be selected again by any constituency that any wire-puller thinks can be won....

18/ A diary entry for 14th October 1905

—On Sunday afternoon GBS and [Harley] Granville Barker dropped in and spread out before us the difficulties, the hopes, the ridiculous aspects of their really arduous efforts to create an intellectual drama. Granville Barker has suddenly filled out—he looks even physically larger than a year ago. He has grown extraordinarily in dignity and knowledge of human nature. But he dislikes the absorption in mere acting and longs to mix with persons actually in ‘affairs’ or intellectually producing. GBS’s egotism and vanity are not declining; he is increasing his deftness of wit and phrase but becoming every day more completely iconoclastic, the ideal derider....