Shaw and Bertrand Russell versus Gilbert Murray on Britain's Entry into World War I
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 33; Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/shaw.33.1.0025
ISSN1529-1480
Autores Tópico(s)Literature Analysis and Criticism
ResumoWhat follows is a brief history of bitter strife among lifelong friends. It expands into a revelation of what lies beneath and remains concealed in those people when their friendships are severely challenged. Because all three of them happened to be unquestioned geniuses, dedicated activists, and highly prolific writers, their interaction during a time of extreme stress becomes all the more revealing. The key individual who touched off this cultivated but disquieting conflict was Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary from 1906 to 1915; the key event was his decision to commit his country to war against Germany on 3 August 1914.By that time, approaching the age of sixty, Bernard Shaw had completed his triumphant “reign” at the Court Theatre and had resigned from the Executive Board of the Fabian Society. He was one of England's most conspicuous figures, constantly arguing his opinions from whatever pulpits would risk his voice and whatever publications cared to exploit his popularity. He was relentless in pursuing and exposing scandals which derived from the government and its bedfellow, the aristocracy, and which threatened to affect the lower echelons of society in disastrous ways. The decision to go to war became a prime target.One of his very best friends and a favorite correspondent, although a decade younger, was an Australian / English classics professor named Gilbert Murray, whose vocation would normally have been enough to draw little but scorn from Shaw. Murray's scholarly brilliance was confirmed when, in 1908, he was appointed to the highest academic honor in England at the time, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. Shaw's greatest achievement to date was his successful campaign, bolstered mainly by his own plays, to influence susceptible English playgoers to prefer intellectually stimulating drama to the “popular” fare. The friendship of the two was mutually respectful: they sent each other the drafts of nearly all of their writings and assumed that they would take the time to read them carefully and comment upon them at length. This despite the fact that both were also otherwise occupied as earnest campaigners for worthy causes and cultivators of a host of valued relationships.Bertrand Russell, one of the most respected British philosophers in the early twentieth century, was a cousin of Murray's wife and member of an aristocratic family. But like Shaw he had a strong iconoclastic bent directed especially toward conventional ideals that were typically evoked by his fellow aristocrats. A socialist at heart while eschewing an active commitment, his chief expertise was in logic, which he used as an instrument of persuasion on social and political issues as well as in philosophy and mathematics. His collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead on the landmark work Principia Mathematica was his most notable achievement during the prewar period. Russell corresponded extensively with Murray in those years.Shaw was won over to Murray in the late 1890s partly because of his famously engaging manner and wide-ranging erudition, but more immediately by the fact that he yearned to become a playwright.1 Influenced by Euripides and Ibsen and nudged by Shaw, after a few false starts he shifted his focus to composing a kind of play that was unparalleled at the time: modernized translations of Greek dramas aimed at converting theater audiences from “Sardoodledom” (Shaw's term for the French well-made play à la Victorien Sardou) to “the New Drama” chiefly exemplified by Shaw but also by Harley Granville Barker, St. John Hankin, John Galsworthy, and (in Murray's and Shaw's minds) Euripides. Shaw appropriated Gilbert's looks, mannerisms, and translations for the character of Cusins in Major Barbara—a problematic episode for Murray, but not severe enough in itself to cause a breach.2The three were destined to clash head-on when, on 3 August 1914, Sir Edward Grey surprised half the nation and many members of Parliament by announcing that Britain was joining its fellow members of the “Triple Entente,” France and Russia, in declaring war on Germany and its allies. The clinching event was the German army's invasion of Belgium on its way to attack France. Murray wholly approved of Grey's decision; Shaw regretted it but mainly deplored the way it had been reached; Russell was outraged by his country's commitment to such a self-destructive action taken with little or no consent from Parliament, much less the people who would be on the front lines.3 Three months later Shaw published an eighty-page supplement to The New Statesman entitled “Common Sense About the War,” later issued as a pamphlet, which attacked Grey's progress toward war in the mode of a well-documented exposé; in mid-1915 Murray countered with The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey, 1906–1915, a book-length attempt to exonerate the Foreign Office and refute its detractors; then Russell attacked that attempt head-on in December 1915 with his longer book, The Policy of the Entente, 1904–1914: A Reply to Professor Gilbert Murray. Interspersed were lesser steps in the ongoing conflict that refined and intensified the continuing argument.During the spring and summer of 1914, war had seemed to most Europeans both unlikely and ill-advised. An authoritative study of World War I explains that the International Tribunal at the Hague, set up in 1900 to settle disputes between sovereign countries, was a symbol of the determination of the civilised world not to allow itself to become embroiled in mutually destructive conflicts. Socialists throughout Europe denounced the very concept of war and urged the working class everywhere to refuse to be a part of capitalist enthusiasm for war. Bankers and financiers, like the landed aristocracy with whom they were in competition, felt themselves part of a wider international grouping, which, whether by trade in the one case or intermarriage in the other, had nothing to gain by war, and much to lose.4 In his widely read book, The Great Illusion, Norman Angell put the situation in a nutshell when he wrote that “even a victorious warring power would suffer extraordinary economic and financial loss as a result of war”—which of course turned out to be true.5Early in the century Murray had classified himself as a Radical Liberal, with capitalist and aristocratic leanings but some sympathy with socialist aspirations. His criticism of his country's treatment of the Boers during the South African War of 1899–1902, one of his granddaughters recalled, got him “pelted with rotten eggs for his unpopular anti-war views.”6 Bertrand Russell, in his relatively unformed twenties, reacted to the war by undergoing a conversion from “an imperialist more or less” to a humanist with “a horror of force,” and thus a pro-Boer (Clark, 86). Much more pragmatically, Shaw correctly assumed the British would win and annex the Transvaal region with its hoards of gold, and focused his energy on fitting the postwar situation there into the Fabian vision of gradually changing the entire world into a socialist one, with the more advanced countries guiding the underdeveloped ones.By this time, to paraphrase Duncan Wilson, Murray had become one of the Liberals' most coveted intellectuals, and he profited from his relations with the political establishment. But he remained a dedicated Radical: he had been associated with the Webbs and other Fabians in their efforts to reform the Poor Law, and with Christian Socialists on social issues. He sympathized with the Independent Labour Party and other groups on the left who argued that it was working-class families who would suffer most from war because their breadwinners would necessarily be the chief source of manpower, which in this case could truly be described as cannon fodder (Wilson, 217). Most of his associates were strong advocates of peace.Sir Edward Grey had risen to his position of Foreign Secretary through his aristocratic family and the partisanship of fellow “country gentlemen.” Preferring sports, fishing, and other pleasures to the rigors of education, he was sent down from Oxford in 1884 for incorrigible idleness.7 At nineteen he inherited the title “Sir” along with a two thousand-acre estate and ample income to continue doing what he wished. At twenty-three, he somehow won an election for the House of Commons as a Radical Liberal; at twenty-four, he was favored with a typical stepping-stone position with the Foreign Office, parliamentary Under-Secretary. There, he earned the approval of the Secretary, Lord Rosebery, as a man with well-defined qualifications: his addresses impressed the House, Rosebery stated, “not by brilliance of speech or sharpness of retort but by soundness of grasp and sincerity of tone” (Robbins, 44). He weaved his way upward into greater and greater appreciation, if not influence, until Rosebery told the new Foreign Secretary that Grey was “one of the most important members of the Govt … Moreover he is persona gratissima to the H. of C., popular, admired, and respected … If he sticks to political life, he is certain to make his mark” (Robbins, 51–52).In line with this prophecy, Grey became the Foreign Secretary in 1906. This was a precarious choice for a peace-seeking administration, since he had already developed a strong dislike for Germany. As early as 1903 he had described the country as “our worst enemy and our greatest danger.”8 One of the first problems he had to deal with as Foreign Secretary was “the Denshawai affair,” an incident that occurred on 13 June 1906 in a small Egyptian town when five British officers visited it to go pigeon shooting and started firing. The farmers, for whom the pigeons were the main source of revenue, were enraged, tried to stop them, failed, and sought redress. British tribunals sentenced the delinquent villagers to awful punishments, including four hangings and many floggings, but the British officers involved were all cleared. Before the trials were concluded, Lord Cromer, Consul-General of Egypt, sought Grey's approval for the sentences. Grey exposed his weakness as the man in charge who had to make tough decisions: he “had a hurried conversation with the Prime Minister and Asquith, but decided to take no action, although he found the verdicts startlingly severe … The more the Foreign Secretary studied the affair, the more uncertain he became. Nevertheless, he considered that he had been right not to interfere, since the authority of the man on the spot had to be upheld” (Robbins, 166). Murray was surely aware of this event because he would have read Shaw's lengthy discussion of it in the last section of his 1912 preface to John Bull's Other Island, “The Denshawai Horror.”9 In Common Sense About the War Shaw cites this incident as proving that the kind of man who could behave with such squeamish deference to people responsible to him had the wrong kind of character for the position he was in. For Shaw it became an analogy to Grey's allowing Britain to send tens of thousands of middle- and lower-class men to die in the war because, well before, he could not play the bully and tell Germany outright that if it attacked Belgium and France it would have to defeat not only their forces (and that of their ally, Russia) but also Britain's well-trained volunteer armed forces and dominant armada.When Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Serbia, Italy, Turkey, Morocco, Japan, and other countries were jockeying to maneuver advantageous alliances in the European and Asian balance of power competitions, Murray was hesitant to favor war as a means to that end. Besides hating war, this would ally him with militant anti-German sentiment expressed by Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and other leading Conservative and Liberal voices. As an academic, he admired much German literature and the cultivated milieu out of which it emerged. One of his most valued friends was the distinguished German classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who assisted him with an edition of Euripides' plays in 1901 and stayed in contact for many years (Wilson, 54–56). Just before the war began, Murray had signed a letter prepared by the British Neutrality Committee urging that Britain remain neutral if war broke out between other great powers. Ironically, and perhaps symptomatically, the letter was delayed and did not get published until the war had already started, with England as its anti-German centerpiece.Several times Murray had voiced the widespread pre-1914 belief that European nations had become so civilized that there could never be war again. He later admitted that he had been shortsighted in this tenuous assumption, prompted by his own Hellenic faith in the power of reason to influence man. Shortly before the war broke out, he was walking through St. James's Park and encountered Sir Edward Grey. When he commented that surely war was unthinkable, he was shocked to hear Grey respond that it was certain to come, and come in the near future.10 Grey was of the same stock that the great majority of British cabinet members and parliamentarians boasted: aristocrats who assumed that they had the proper qualifications to run the country and its colonies as leaders of its political and military establishments, and whose highest ambitions were to do just that. Murray himself was not quite in this class, lacking their wealth and lofty ambitions. However, he felt a personal kinship with it, and had managed to marry into the aristocracy by wooing and finally winning the daughter of the Countess of Carlisle at her home, Castle Howard. (The Countess was the “formidable” woman whom Shaw approximated as the model for Lady Britomart in Major Barbara.)On the eve of by far the most momentous and destructive war the world had ever experienced, 3 August 1914, Murray was swayed toward favoring Britain's entry into it by a single speech of Grey, his long and hastily prepared address to Parliament. After hearing that Germany had just invaded neutral Belgium in order to attack France advantageously, which to Grey made war Britain's only alternative, Murray came away convinced that his country “had no choice” but to oppose Germany's chosen path.11 Close friends, among them Shaw, Russell, J. L. Hammond, and John Morley, strongly disagreed with this, but he was not swayed from his view that the British government's determination had been correct. He wrote to his wife, Lady Mary, on 7 September: I have hours in which I feel as you do, utterly abased and crushed by the misery of the war, feeling that the death and maiming and starving of Germans and Austrians is just as horrible a thing as the same suffering in Englishmen. But mostly I feel strung up and exalted by a feeling of the tremendous issue and the absolute duty that lies upon us to save Europe and humanity. We did not know until the war revealed it what this German system meant. Once it is revealed I do feel that we must strike it down or die. (Quoted in Wilson, 218)The first indication to Murray that Shaw might have conflicting views came in mid-September when he naively asked him to join the “greatest possible number of eminent writers” in signing an official manifesto in support of the war (Wilson, 219). This was the initial gesture of a newly formed unit of the Foreign Office, the Bureau of Information, which had solicited and received Murray's assistance. Clearly irked, Shaw rewrote parts of the document to turn its message on its head, signed it, and invited Murray to send this new version out. Then, in a serious postscript, he urged him not to support the original Manifesto. “What it says is not true and not new,” he said, “and it gives Grey a testimonial just when the war gives us a chance of discrediting all this Cromer-Milner-Grey diplomacy & reviving what is valuable in the Liberal tradition.”12 Shaw had already published an article that Murray must not have seen: “The Peril of Potsdam: Our Business Now.” It begins, “Now that we are at war, it is as well that we should know what that war is about.” He denounces the acclamations of patriotism and manly aggression, declaring: “Our national trick of virtuous indignation is tiresome enough in peaceful party strife at home. At war it is ungallant and unpardonable. Let us take our pugnacity to the field and leave our hypocrisy and bad blood at home.” Then he asserts: “This war is a Balance of Power war and nothing else.” His finale takes satiric aim at Grey: “History will not excuse us because, after making war inevitable, we run round at the last moment begging everyone not to make a disturbance, but to come to London and be talked to kindly but firmly by Sir Edward Grey.”13Four days later Bertrand Russell's more strident voice was heard in a brief article, “The Rights of the War,” published in The Nation (15 August). Dejected by learning that several of his friends favored the war—among them Whitehead, George Trevelyan, H. W. Massingham, and his brother—he registered both shock and indignation: Those who saw the London crowds, during the nights leading up to the Declaration of War, saw a whole population, hitherto peacable and humane, precipitated in a few days down the steep slope to primitive barbarism, letting loose, in a moment, the instincts of hatred and blood-lust against which the whole fabric of society has been raised. “Patriots” in all countries acclaim this brutal orgy as a noble determination to vindicate the right; reason and mercy are swept away in one great flood of hatred …And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that anyone of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country's pride. He then directed his attack on the Foreign Office, singling out Grey for a special rebuke: Our diplomacy … has not been guiltless. Secret arrangements, concealed from Parliament and even (at first) from all the Cabinet, in spite of reiterated denials, an obligation suddenly revealed when the war fever had reached the point which rendered public opinion tolerant of the discovery that the lives of many, and the livelihood of all, had been pledged by one man's irresponsible decisions. Yet, though France knew our obligations, Sir E. Grey refused, down to the last moment, to inform Germany of the conditions of our neutrality or of our intervention.14Shaw's letter to Murray quoted above concludes: “I am struggling laboriously through a Manifesto of my own on the subject.” That document, Common Sense About the War, begins, “The time has now come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war.” Flaunting his “Irish capacity for criticizing England with something of the detachment of a foreigner,” he rails against the widespread jingoistic reaction to the war's alleged progress, and traces the path of British anti-German propaganda from the 1870s to the present (16, 20–22).15 He mentions Murray only once, en passant (61–62).16The framework for his argument about how the war started is to describe what governmental spokesmen and accommodating journalists identified as Germany's war-mongering Junkers and equate them with those high-level British officials who, in his mind, fit the definition themselves: I see the people of England united in a fierce detestation and defiance of the views and acts of Prussian Junkerism. And I see the German people stirred to the depths by a similar antipathy to English Junkerism, and angered by the apparent treachery and duplicity of the attack made on them by us in their extremest peril from France and Russia. I see both nations duped, but alas! not quite unwillingly duped, by their Junkers and Militarists into wreaking on one another the wrath they should have spent in destroying Junkerism and Militarism in their own country. (17) Shaw cites a German dictionary which says that the term Junker actually denotes wealthy young noblemen or country gentlemen whose natural course is to rise to positions of power and influence in the government. His prime example is not a German but Sir Edward Grey, whom he calls “a Junker from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes.” He grants that the Kaiser is also a Junker, but “much less autocratic than … Grey, who … sends us to war by a word to an ambassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign allies by a stroke of his pen.” In fact, to him Grey's Foreign Office is a virtual “Junker Club” (18–19). While documenting the Byzantine political maneuvers of diplomats in several countries, Shaw focuses especially upon Grey, whom, he says, an autocratic foreign policy permitted to make war “without consulting the nation, or confiding in it,” resulting “inevitably” in “a disastrous combination of war and unpreparedness for war” (43).He then offers a distinctly different view of the role played by the German intrusion into Belgium. Undeniably this event was the provocation on which England declared war, but in Shaw's eyes the rationale offered by Grey had little to do with the underlying reasons, which traced back to secret balance-of-power diplomacy. Britain had been prepared for this contingency since 1906, having secretly told France and Belgium that it would not permit any military power to invade the continental shores of the North Sea. When Germany did, Prime Minister Asquith had what Shaw later called “a perfectly presentable and correct pretext for entering on a war to which he was already secretly pledged, Belgium or no Belgium.”17Only about a third of Common Sense About the War is concerned with how England became involved in it, but Shaw's arguments so far drew little but venom from those who read them and heard about them. Murray's reactions seem to be unrecorded. In retrospect, Shaw summed up the general effect by saying that his inflammatory statements were “so revolting to Englishmen in the delirium of the war fever, and so contradictory to the current legends of melodramatic patriotism, that [the essay], launched in November 1914, when the war fever was at its height, produced furious demands for my immediate execution as a pro-German, a Pacifist, a traitor, … and what not.”18 The polemic was excoriated by several of his close friends (chief among them Henry Arthur Jones, William Archer, and H. G. Wells), and he was expelled from the Dramatists' Club, one of whose members was Murray. He took small consolation in cheers from rigid pacifists (like Bertrand Russell at the time) or extreme socialists (like Keir Hardie). The howls of execration, especially in the press, were almost as hysterical as those which greeted Bertrand Russell from a Cambridge University group assembled by a divinity professor after he issued the pamphlet War, The Offspring of Fear on 7 November 1914.19 He was told: “[A]fter a very careful discussion it was gravely burned with the consent of the whole company; and one of their number expressed the opinion that it ought to have been burned by the common hangman” (38).This cogent, forceful thirteen-page essay, published by the left-leaning Union of Democratic Control, is a call for understanding what causes underlay the outbreak of the war as viewed by the various nations involved. Its basic premises are axiomatic: “[T]here are higher goals than victory and nobler ideals than the destruction of hostile armies” (39), and “the horror of this war should produce the will for peace” (46). Russell implicitly measures Britain's jingoistic response to entering the war against a criticism of the decision by two distinguished German intellectuals, who had characterized it as “an indelible shame to England” and stressed a crucial angle on the conflict which its enemies had downplayed: the factor of Russia's “barbarism” threatening their homeland with their hosts of armed divisions. It was that nation's partial mobilization that prompted Germany to declare war against the third member of the Triple Entente before moving on Belgium and France. “England fights to please a half-Asiatic Power against Germanism,” the writers state, and then generalize: It is the fault of England that the present War is extended to a world-war, and that all culture is thereby endangered. And why all this? Because she was envious of Germany's greatness, because she wanted at all costs to hinder a further extension of this greatness. She was only waiting for a favourable opportunity to break out to the detriment of Germany, and therefore she seized most promptly on the necessary German advance through Belgium as a pretext in order to cloak her brutal national selfishness with a mantle of respectability. (39–40)At about the same time that Russell's pamphlet appeared, another from a fellow member of the UDC was published which attempted to refute the prewar policies of the Foreign Office: H. N. Brailsford's Origins of the Great War. Brailsford argues that “the war hinged entirely on conflicts in the East … rather than on German designs on France or desire for naval supremacy.” If there was moral responsibility for the war, “it must be shared between Germany and Russia.”20 Murray's first response to these two diatribes was a pamphlet published in October by his university's press, How Can War Ever Be Right? The style he adopted reflects the fair, balanced, but finally accusing mode of Grey: From the point of view of one who really believes that great nations ought to behave to one another as scrupulously and honourably as ordinary, law-abiding men, no Power in Europe, or out of it, is quite blameless. They all have ambitions; they all, to some extent, use spies; they all, within limits, try to outwit each other; in their diplomatic dealings they rely not only on the claims of good sense and justice, but ultimately, no doubt, on the threat of possible force. But as a matter of degree, Germany does all these things more than other Powers. In her diplomacy, force comes at once to the front; international justice is hardly mentioned.21 Murray then proceeded to write a 140-page book, published in early 1915 by what had become the Bureau's chosen outlet, Oxford University Press: The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey, 1906–1915. It is a careful, well-documented attempt to describe Grey's rationale in persuasive terms. He sent a copy to Grey, describing it as an “act of homage from one of your rather critical supporters,” and drew a mildly favorable response: “[T]he terms in which you write are a very real pleasure and encouragement” (Wilson, 223). However, when Grey wrote his two-volume memoir in 1925, Twenty-Five Years, 1892–1916, he did not make a single reference to his staunch defender.22Murray touches off his defense by lumping Russell and Brailsford in with a hardly defensible category he calls “pro-Germans,” who are in a very small minority and have to fight hard. And many of them become naturally so wrapped up in their own immediate controversy that, as far as their combative feelings are concerned, the central enemy of the human race is Sir Edward Grey; next to him come the British Cabinet and the most popular generals. The Kaiser is to them a prisoner in the dock, a romantic unfortunate, to be defended against overwhelming odds. (7) Murray does not single out Shaw for criticism, preferring to incriminate him indirectly: These writers are in their way high-minded, disinterested, courageous, and often very clever, but they are not at present in a state of mind which enables them to see or even to seek the truth. They are impassioned advocates, not fair-minded inquirers. They might one and all utter the famous plea of their ally, Mr. Shaw: “Who am I that I should be just?”23 Later he will echo this in two memorial statements about his friend.Replying to the UDC's claims of secret diplomacy and evasion of parliamentary control, Murray argues that Grey (as Wilson cogently summarizes it) “knew of German aggressive designs, and had to build up a system of alliances to counter them, without openly denouncing Germany and thereby closing the door to peaceful accommodation with her” (223). If one is not yet aware of important elements of Grey's diplomacy that breed suspicion, Murray's rebuttals ring soundly enough. His analysis of the historical background, and especially of the twelve crucial days that led up to the war, would strike most readers as extremely careful and thorough. His grande finale is impressive, even if susceptible to criticism from determined opponents: … No one can read the debates of the last few years on Foreign Politics in the House of Commons without feeling that the House was under some heavy shadow and members' tongues not moving freely.This shadow, this overhanging peril, must never be forgotten in any judgement which we pass on Sir Edward Grey's conduct of our foreign affairs…. If here and there on some point of detail he has not driven as clever a bargain as he might; if he has not stood up to our friends Russia and France as defiantly as some of his less responsible critics would have done; even if, here and there, he has not pressed fearlessly forward in support of some weak nation to which British liberal sympathies went naturally forth; if under his guidance, with all our enormous naval expenditure and prestige, Great Britain has sometimes seemed to have little spare strength for the running of avoidable risks or the championing of disinterested causes; let those criticize him who can still say that he over-rated our danger. The rest of us will only be grateful for ever to one who through all these years of crisis acted justly and sought no aggrandizement, who kept faith with his friends and worked for a good understanding with his enemies, who never spoke a rash word to bring the peril nearer, and never neglected a precaution to meet it when
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