Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell by Raymond Williams

Author:Raymond Williams [Williams, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Comparative Literature, Historical Events, History, Literary Criticism, Non-Fiction, Social History, Subjects & Themes
ISBN: 9781473520660
Google: HXKfAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00KHX0HE4
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

IV. Shaw and Fabianism

‘Do I at last see before me that old and tried friend of the working classes, George Bernard Shaw? How are you, George?’

… I was not then old, and had no other feeling for the working classes than an intense desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people.42

This is the right way, with Gissing still in mind, to approach the social thinking of Shaw. It is a point which he often makes:

When the Socialist movement in London took its tone from lovers of art and literature … it was apt to assume that all that was needed was to teach Socialism to the masses (vaguely imagined as a huge crowd of tramplike saints) and leave the rest to the natural effect of sowing the good seed in kindly virgin soil. But the proletarian soil was neither virgin nor exceptionally kindly.… The blunt truth is that ill used people are worse than well used people: indeed this is at bottom the only good reason why we should not allow anyone to be ill used.… We should refuse to tolerate poverty as a social institution not because the poor are the salt of the earth, but because ‘the poor in a lump are bad’.43

Such negative criticism is useful (it is the point made in Turgeniev’s Virgin Soil), but Shaw’s conviction of the essential badness of the poor is very close to Gissing (compare Pygmalion with Gissing’s ’Arry). It exists, however, within a still deeper feeling, which is fundamental to Shaw:

We have to confess it: Capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable.… Both rich and poor are really hateful in themselves. For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but am equally bent on their extermination. The working classes, the business classes, the professional classes, the propertied classes, the ruling classes, are each more odious than the other: they have no right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.… And yet I am not in the least a misanthrope. I am a person of normal affections.44

If we look at this sentiment, soberly, we shall probably recognize it as one of the perennial sources of politics. The description of available mankind as ‘capitalist mankind’ is so plausible a gambit, to be followed by adherence to a system, and prophecy of a new kind of man, that what in its direct terms might not be easily confessed is soon rationalized as a humanitarian concern. It is not that one doubts Shaw’s kindliness, his ‘normal affections’, but that one sees these, quite clearly, as pre-social affections: attachments that can hardly be mediated in any adult world. The choice of the word ‘extermination’ is hardly an accident; it betrays the dissociated violence of the feeling, which is still compatible with private kindliness. ‘Yahoo’ is perhaps never shouted but by sensitive, kindly, lonely men.

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