Horace Walpole claimed that the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. The story of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells could be aptly summed up in this dichotomy: Shaw was the thinking man par excellence, whose emotional detachment made him seem diabolically cold-blooded to many of his contemporaries, including Wells, while Wells was a man who hardly knew the meaning of the word “detachment”; his intellect, impressive though it was, could always be overruled by his intense emotions.

The two men met at the disastrous première of Henry James’s play Guy Domville, in January 1895. Shaw, thirty-eight years old, was one of London’s foremost critics as well as a well-known playwright. Wells, ten years younger, was relatively unknown, but he was poised for an imminent flight to superstardom: The Time Machine would appear in May of that year.

That evening saw the beginning of a fifty-year association between the two men that for want of a better word has been called a friendship, though the protagonists’ characters were so opposed, their egos so voracious, that they could as easily be considered enemies as friends. They both used their considerable supplies of charm to conceal the extent of their mutual hostility from their public, each other, and even themselves, and the diverting history of their relations can now be followed in a welcome edition of the great men’s correspondence.[1]

“The idea must not get around that the Wellsians and Shavians have any differences,” Shaw wrote to Wells in old age. “They are in fact the same body.” But Shaw was a master of bluff. From 1903, when Wells joined the Fabian Society (of which Shaw had been a member practically since its beginning in 1884), until Wells’s death in 1946, the two men struggled for the symbolic leadership of the English Socialist movement. To their contemporaries, Wells and Shaw represented very different faces of Socialism, and with Shaw’s incomparable gift of rhetoric and Wells’s of energy, they established the pattern for the two competing strains that are still at odds within British Socialism: Shaw, with his comrades-in-arms Sidney and Beatrice Webb, stood for the bureaucratic strain, Wells for the libertarian one, to use a distinction Michael Foot makes in his new biography of Wells, a study as worshipful as Michael Coren’s 1992 biography was derogatory, and therefore equally unreliable.

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Shaw had staked everything on the essential Fabian principles of historical process, gradualism, and the organic “permeation” of English society. Indeed, he had practically invented them. Wells took a different approach: he believed quite simply in revolution. He became a Fabian with the express intention of taking over the Society and boldly asserting his own revolutionary aims, and for that he had the mandate of the younger and more radical members. Where the Old Gang—Shaw, the Webbs, Hubert Bland, Edward Pease, Sydney Olivier—were middle-aged, Wells, if not in his own first youth, spoke for Youth all over the world. Storm Jameson later described the extraordinary effect Wells had upon her contemporaries: “He formed a whole generation, throwing himself at us in a rage of energy, overwhelming us with his ideas, some absurd, all explosively liberating. Unlike Bernard Shaw, who did no more than instruct and amuse us, he changed our lives.”

Wells began his attack on the Fabians with a public assault on an economic tract of Shaw’s, to which the older man responded with his characteristic bravado. “Nothing can be more improbable than that I am wrong,” Shaw wrote to his critic: “still, even I am not absolutely infallible; and as you are an interesting youth, I may as well hear what babble you may have to offer.”

Wells was aware of his value to an organization whose genteel brand of Socialism was beginning to be perceived as less than thrilling, and he was determined to make his attacks on the Society matters of public debate, with himself cast in the role of Young Turk. Soon he was talking of throwing all the Society’s carefully-evolved theories “into the dustbin,” and in early 1906 he delivered a paper, “Faults of the Fabians,” a devastating attack on the Old Gang’s discreet methods.

We don’t advertise, thank you, it’s not quite our style. We cry Socialism as the reduced gentlewoman cried oranges—I do hope no-one will hear me… .

You know this cryptic socialism is not a little reminiscent of the mouse that set out to kill the cat; violent methods were deprecated … The mouse decided to adopt indirect and inconspicuous methods, not to complicate its proceedings by too many associates, to win over and attract the cat by friendly advances rather than frighten her by a sudden attack. It is believed that in the end the mouse did succeed in permeating the cat, but the cat is still living and the mouse can’t be found.

Clearly shaken, Beatrice Webb resorted to the traditional English ploy of invoking class snobbery when bested, explaining Wells’s tasteless lapse with the feeble defense that “this is absolutely the first time he has tried to co-operate with his fellow men— and he has neither tradition nor training to fit him to do it. It is a case of ‘Kipps’ in matters more important than table manners.”

Shaw was a wilier customer. He was as determined to keep these Fabian fissures private as Wells was to force them into the open, for he believed deeply in the creed of gradualism, the principle that social change must occur as an organic process rather than a sudden disturbance. He also knew, however, that a number of Wells’s points were well taken and that Wells himself, with his tremendous following, was an invaluable asset to the Fabians. He must be kept in his place, as a vital but subordinate member of the team. “Generally speaking,” Shaw wrote to him, “you must identify yourself frankly with us, and not play the critical outsider and the satirist. We are all very clever; and long ago we have come to understand that we must not play our cleverness off against one another for the mere fun of it.”

Wells was pleased by the consternation he had wrought. He quickly followed up his parry with a thrust, a caustic tract called “The Misery of Boots” in which he sneered at the Fabians and their methods. Again, Shaw played the diplomat.

The whole thing is so ridiculous that if you once let your mind turn from your political object to criticism of the conduct and personality of the men around you, you are lost. Instantly you find them insufferable; they find you the same; and the problem of how to get rid of one another supersedes Socialism, to the great advantage of the capitalist… . You must, in short, learn your business as a propagandist and peripatetic philosopher if you are ever to be anything more than a novelist bombinating in vacuo except for a touch of reality gained in your early life.

At Shaw’s urging, Wells stood for the executive of the Society and was elected in March 1907. Predictably Wells and his supporters pushed for the Fabians to take a far more active role in the political life of the nation, and to seek a large membership across class lines rather than to maintain their current identity as an elite cadre of intellectuals. Shaw argued the Old Gang’s purpose. “We have absolutely nothing but our ideas to offer; and to sell them in exchange for votes & subscriptions is ‘the idea of gain’ at its maddest. If you want a party, there are three or four to choose from; and we hope to see another—a Socialist one— formed.”

In the event, when it came to hand-to-hand combat with Shaw, Wells never stood a chance. The history of their relations was to be one of perpetual frustration for the younger man. The battle was in many ways unequal. Shaw had honed his skills as a debater and a rhetorician to a level that few have ever reached; Wells was physically unprepossessing, Cockney, a mediocre public speaker. But what fatally handicapped him was the very same ungovernable passion that made him such an attractive figure. He loved, he hated, he felt. He found it impossible to keep his temper, while Shaw repressed his, disguising venom as light sarcasm. Frank Harris spoke of Shaw’s “exasperating patience”; he never lost his cool. He defeated Wells by provoking bursts of uncontrolled rage and then behaving like a tolerant adult with a fractious child, tut-tutting about the little one’s nasty temper. “I seem to spend my life rescuing the victims of your outrageous onslaughts and seeming to remonstrate with you and make fun of you whilst I have to boost you subtly all the time.”

Shaw was victorious against Wells and innumerable lesser opponents in this kind of intellectual gamesmanship largely because of his own unassailable self-control, which Wells was canny enough to recognize as being in fact not so much self-control as lack of appetite. Wells described himself as “a biologist first and foremost,” Shaw as having “a physiological disgust at vital activities.” This distinction goes far toward accounting for the balance of power between the two: the man who thinks holds a distinct advantage over the man whose body and emotions prevail.

It was Wells’s exotic sex life that finally cooked his goose with the more conventional Fabians. He had long advocated complete freedom between the sexes and derided the institution of bourgeois marriage; he preached free sex and he practiced it. The Fabians reluctantly tolerated Wells’s peccadillos until he invaded their own turf by trying to elope with Hubert Bland’s daughter Rosamund. Shaw, apparently, was moved to remonstrate, and Wells blasted him.

The more I think you over the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated middle-Victorian ass you are. You play about with ideas like a daring garrulous maiden aunt, but when it comes to an affair like the Bland affair you show the instincts of conscious gentility and the judgement of a hen… . The fact is yours is a flimsy intellectual acquisitive sort of mind adrift & chattering brightly in a world you dont understand. You dont know, as I do, in blood & substance, lust, failure, shame, hate, love, and creative passion. You dont understand & you cant understand the rights & wrongs of the case into which you stick your maiden judgement—any more than you can understand the aims of the Fabian Society that your vanity has wrecked.

This is a letter few friendships, or even professional associations, could withstand, but Shaw accepted the rebuke with his customary sang-froid. Little more than a year later Wells offended again, in a far more serious manner, with another Fabian daughter, Amber Reeves. (Their affair resulted in Amber’s pregnancy, and is recounted faithfully in Wells’s 1909 novel Ann Veronica, a shocking and notorious book in its day.) Shaw, who actually was quite non-judgmental in sexual matters, came to the lovers’ defense and Wells smothered him with gratitude as passionate as the abuse he had heaped on him the previous year. “Occasionally,” Wells wrote, “you dont simply rise to a difficult situation but soar above it and I withdraw anything you would like withdrawn from our correspondence of the last two years or so.”

Wells stayed married to his Jane, and the pregnant Amber was married off to Blanco White, a young Fabian who generously volunteered to bring up the child as his own. Thus ended Wells’s alliance with the Fabians, though he was to aim a final blow at them in his 1910 novel The New Machiavelli. But Wells and Shaw continued their association: if anything, they became rather friendlier once they were no longer competing for Fabian turf. A certain distance was maintained, but they acknowledged that in a general sense they were allies, and they kept up a tenuous friendship aided by the fact that each man was genuinely fond of the other’s wife.

As Wells passed into his fifties, sixties, and seventies, Shaw’s pose continued to be that of the sage lecturing the importunate youth. Characteristic was the advice he offered Wells on how to speak in public.

When you first spoke at a Fabian meeting, I told you to hold up your head & speak to the bracketed bust of Selwyn Image on the back wall. To shew that you were not going to be taught by me, you made the commonest blunder of the tyro: you insisted on having a table; leaning over it on your knuckles; and addressing the contents of your contracted chest to the tablecloth. I will now, having tried to cure you of that by fair means in vain, cure you of it by a blow beneath the belt. Where did you get that attitude? IN THE SHOP. At the New Reform Club, when your knuckles touched the cloth, you said unconsciously, by reflex action, ‘Anything else today, madam,’ and later on ‘What’s the next article?’ Fortunately, you were inaudible, thanks to the attitude. Now I swear that the next time you take that attitude in my presence I will ask you for a farthing paper of pins. I will make a decent public man of you yet, and an effective public speaker, if I have to break your heart in the process.

Though they had a common religion in Socialism (Wells spoke of Socialism as “the form and substance of my ideal life, and all the religion I possess”), Shaw and Wells took opposing positions on other fraught questions of the period. Shaw was a Marxist and a Stalinist, while Wells deplored both creeds. Wells was a disciple of Darwin and Huxley, while Shaw, who believed that Darwin had banished intelligence from the universe, had concocted for himself a bizarre faith that he dubbed “Creative Evolution,” ruled by a mysterious “Life Force.” Shaw distrusted scientists and abhorred vivisection, while Wells was a trained biologist with an unshakable faith in scientific method.

Though Shaw was consistently the superior polemicist, many of his theories were clearly untenable or absurd, and Wells dealt with them accordingly. “These doctors all think that science is knowledge,” wrote Shaw, “instead of being the very opposite of knowledge: to wit, speculation”; to which Wells answered shortly, “Science is neither knowledge nor speculation. It is criticism ending in wisdom.” As to Shaw’s claims to be qualified to make scientific judgments, Wells was openly scornful. He accused Shaw of talking about biology “like a bright girl at a dinner party.” “Your phrase … of the ‘Life Force’ embodies an almost encyclopaedic philosophical and biological ignorance.”

In the interests of Socialist solidarity the two men agreed to disagree on subjects from the Third International to Votes for Women to the conduct of the First and Second World Wars; relations remained more or less cordial, and in a half-admiring, half-annoyed note to Shaw, Wells described him as a “mixture of inspiration, deliberate wisdom and a kind of amiable quackery.” It is as good a thumbnail sketch of Shaw as any that has been attempted. But the hostile feelings that had been aroused during the Fabian days had never died. When Wells’s long-suffering but beloved wife, Jane, was diagnosed as having incurable cancer, Shaw jumped into the abyss with a bouncing, abrasive optimism and a barrage of pseudo-medical nonsense that Wells, trying to cope with his bitter grief, was not able to forgive.

Charlotte Shaw attempted to intervene with all the tact her husband so sorely lacked. “Please H. G. dont be angry with him. You know he is like that—he must sometimes let himself go in this aggravating way—& he means it all so more than well! He is very fond of you & Jane.” But for Wells it amounted to the final straw. The two men continued to be cordial until Wells’s own death eighteen years later, but any real warmth, at least on Wells’s part, was gone.

In their letters to each other Shaw and Wells, for all their differences, were mutually generous and appreciative. The obituaries they wrote for each other at the behest of enterprising newspaper editors~dash\documents that each could be sure the other would not read—tell a different story. Shaw wrote about Wells for The New Statesman immediately after Wells died in August 1946; it was breezy and charming but not entirely friendly, claiming, among other things, that Wells was “the most completely spoiled child I have ever known,” his youth a story of “early promotion from the foot of the ladder to the top without a single failure or check”—a patently untrue statement. A private letter in which Shaw responded to the proposal of a memorial fellowship to promote Wells’s ideas went further.

What were his specific ideas? Those which took any practical form, the division of our absurd local government areas into planned regions, the tank, the radio-active bomb, need no promotion. His declaration of Human Rights was not a step in advance of Jefferson and Tom Paine 175 years ago, and left him in despair. He chalked up many ideas, but ran away from them when anyone proposed to put them into practice. He attacked his best friends at home and abroad furiously, denouncing Fabianism and Marxism, the Webbs and Stalin, recklessly. Finally his spleen made him, though once the most readable and hope inspiring of authors, almost unreadable and very discouraging.

Wells had written an obituary of Shaw in 1945, and it appeared in The Daily Express upon Shaw’s death five years later. Though the essay begins genially, it quickly develops into a document of rage, exposing all the fury that Shaw with his “exasperating patience” had in life managed to deflect. Shaw, he wrote,

was ruled by a naked, unqualified, ego-centered, devouring vanity, such as one rarely meets in life… . Apparently he could not think of any other human being, and particularly any outstanding and famous human being, without immediately referring it directly to himself… .

One method of his self-assertion was portraiture. The number of pictures, busts and portraits that encumbered Shaw’s establishment was extraordinary. I used to imagine some great convulsion of nature making a new Herculaneum of London. As one art treasure was disinterred after another, the world would come to believe that for a time London was populated entirely by a race of men with a strong physical likeness to the early Etruscans—men with potato noses and a flamboyant bearing.

That was one method of self-assertion peculiar to Shaw. Another, more general, has been practised since Homo sapiens began his career, and that is to inflict pain.

Wells had long discerned that Shaw used a theatrical mock-vanity to conceal a vanity that was only too real. It is one of the more serious indictments against Shaw, and it is unarguable. But if the truth be told, neither Shaw nor Wells, for all their great qualities and their immeasurable contributions to the cause of intellectual liberty, will go down in history as a model of humility.

Notes
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1. Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw, Vol. 2: Bernard Shaw & H. G. Wells, edited by J. Percy Smith; University of Toronto Press, 242 pages, $40. Go back to the text.
2. H. G.: The History of Mr. Wells, by Michael Foot; Counterpoint, 318 pages, $29. Go back to the text.