Geneva/Notes and Commentary

Act IV, § ii

Geneva Notes and Commentary written by George Bernard Shaw

Title page

Author's Note

(Malvern Festival Book, 1938)

Geneva is a title that speaks for itself. I hope the Malvern pilgrims this year will be reasonable about it. The critics are sure to complain that I have not solved all the burning political problems of the present and future in it, and restored peace to Europe and Asia. They always do. I am flattered by the implied attribution to me of omniscience and omnipotence; but I am also infuriated by the unreasonableness of the demand. I am neither omniscient nor omnipotent; and the utmost I or any other playwright can do is to extract comedy and tragedy from the existing situation and wait and see what will become of it.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what the existing situation is. For instance, how many people have heard of the Intellectual Cooperation Committee? It will probably be dismissed by the critics as an overstrained fiction. It is nothing of the sort. The League of Nations had not been long in existence when a Frenchman, perceiving that without intellectual cooperation the League could do nothing but practise the old diplomacy, founded the Committee in Paris. Everyone was delighted; and the most eminent intellects in the world gave their names as intellectual cooperators. The Frenchman gave a million francs to endow the Committee; but as the French franc had dropped to twopence (having been largely borrowed at tenpence) the Committee was stony-broke at the end of a month. It still survived in a little office somewhere (I have invented one in Geneva for it in the play) and even did and does some clerical work in listing universities, learned societies, and the like; but intellectually it sank into profound catalepsy.

When Romain Rolland, with the late Henri Barbusse and their friends, tried from time to time to organize some international movement on the extreme Left and invited me, as they always did, to join them, I asked them why they did not operate through the I.C. Committee of the League, which was sleeping ready to their hands. The suggestion struck them dumb. At last the Committee, which occasionally woke up in the person of Gilbert Murray, asked me to correspond with the League. This very nearly struck me dumb; for what on earth was I to correspond about? Now Gilbert Murray, unlike most fiercely militant Pacifists, has a strong sense of humour and believes in telepathy. He practises it too. And so it came about that I found it growing on me that there was some fun to be got on the stage out of the Committee.

That was how this play began. How it will finish—for in the theatre it only stops; it does not finish—nobody knows. I call your attention, however, to one novelty: instead of making the worst of all dictators, which only drives them out of the League, I have made the best of them, and even given them some measure of fair play. I hope they will like it.

New Shaw Play and Germany

(A letter to the Editor of The Observer, London, 21 August 1938)

Sir.—Your Berlin correspondent's interesting account of this matter describes my able and devoted translator, Siegfried Trebitsch, to whom I owed my vogue as a playwright in Germany long before I enjoyed any in these islands, bluntly, as a Jew. Now Herr Trebitsch is an uncircumcised and baptised Lutheran German who has never as far as I know, set foot in a synagogue in his life, married to a lady of unquestioned Christian authenticity. He may have a Jewish ancestor; but which of us has not; for as Signor Bombardone points out, every person now living must be descended not only from Adam and Eve, but from everyone who was alive in the days of Abraham, including Abraham himself. Christianity has absorbed many millions of Jews since it was founded by a Jew; and it has very completely absorbed Siegfried Trebitsch. The observing circumcised Jew from the Ghetto may still present a problem to Gentile States; but an absorbed Jew presents no problem at all, and must be classed as a citizen of the State under which he was born. It is really misleading to call Herr Trebitsch a Jew in any separate sense.

There will be no difficulty about the appearance of my play entitled "Geneva" in the German language. If the German version is not published in Germany it will be published elsewhere. But there is no need to anticipate any trouble. If the Germans should fancy a resemblance between Herr Hitler and Ernest Battler there is no reason why der Führer should feel otherwise than flattered. The shock if any, will be to his modesty.—Yours, etc.,

G. BERNARD SHAW

For the Press

(Press release sent to Roy Limbert on 19 November 1938, prior to the London premiere of Geneva at the Saville Theatre on 22 November. Reproduced from corrected typescript in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin)

I cannot imagine anything more ridiculous than an attempt to work out an equation between the price of theatre seats and the genius of the author of the play or of the performers. It would simply lead to pricing the stalls at a Shakespear or Shaw performance at a hundred guineas. Do any of these foolish people suppose that Henry Irving ever put himself down in his accounts for as high a salary as that commanded by the low comedian Arthur Roberts? Do they consider that my dignity is compromised by the fact that my plays are sometimes performed to audiences who pay nothing at the doors, but drop what they please or can afford into the hat when it is passed round after the fall of the curtain? In the United States I have placed all my published plays at the disposal of the Federal Theatre on condition that the highest price charged for admission is two shillings. Theatregoing in the West End of London is far too dear. When Bancroft made the theatre dependent on the plutocracy by introducing the half guinea stall and crushing the playbill between the upper millstone of the fashionable dinner hour and the nether one of the suburban trains and trams, he knocked serious drama and big acting on the head. It would be more sensible to have different prices on different nights: say all seats a guinea today, all seats a shilling tomorrow, and perhaps all seats half a crown the day after. At the Saville I have not objected to the lower prices: on the contrary I tried to induce them to abolish the half guinea stall. No play is worth half a guinea to our hard-up playgoers; and they are all hard up except the handful of rich people whom I do my best to make uncomfortable. I learnt my business as a playwright in the pit. And the pit then came right up to the orchestra. What do you think of that? Goodmorning.

Telescoping "Geneva"

(The Times, London, 22 April 1939)

An ingenious and amusing summary of the first two acts of Geneva has been written by Mr. Bernard Shaw to introduce the televised performance of the third act of his play which is to be given on Sunday evening with Mr. Cecil Trouncer and Mr. Walter Hudd as the dictators, Battler and Bombardone, who appear before the International Court of Justice at The Hague to answer charges brought against them by "the Toms, Dicks, Harriets, Susans, and Elizas" of all nations. Sir Orpheus Midlander, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, will be played by Mr. Ernest Thesiger.

At the beginning of the synopsis Mr. Shaw implicitly admits the need for economy in time in dealing with Geneva, and accepts the opinion of the critics that the third act is the one that matters. Following this his summary goes on:—"All that is generally known about the League of Nations is that it holds assemblies in Geneva at which the nations which belong to it confer with one another from time to time. But there is more than this in it. There is a Committee for International Cooperation which is so little known, and so neglected and starved that until Mr. Shaw's play appeared hardly anyone knew of its existence; and even now they believe that it is an invention of Mr. Shaw's. But it is quite real: Mr. Shaw has only transferred its office from Paris to Geneva; and it is at this office that the play opens with nobody in charge of it except a young typist from Camberwell who, as the winner of a County Council scholarship, has a considerable opinion of herself. As nobody ever visits the office or knows of its existence, she is astonished when on one and the same morning she is called upon by five people in succession, each with a grievance which they expect her to remedy as the representative of intellectual cooperation in Europe. She has not the faintest idea of how to set about it until the first visitor, a persecuted Jew, suggests that she apply to the International Court at The Hague for a warrant against his persecutors. The second visitor is a British democrat who has been locked out of a colonial legislature to which he has been elected. The third is the widow of a Central American President who has been shot. She has also been compelled by etiquette to shoot her best friend for having engaged the affection of her husband.

"The fourth is an English Bishop whose grievance is that the Bolshevists have converted his footman to Communism. The fifth is a Russian Commissar who has to complain on behalf of his Government that the Church of England, by number 18 of the 39 Articles, declares that all Russians are accursed. The Bishop drops dead on discovering that he has dined with the Commissar under the impression that he was a Conservative; consequently there are only four plaintiffs left alive.

"The Camberwell typist, at the suggestion of the Jew, and not knowing what else to do, applies to the International Court at The Hague, in the name of her Committee, for summonses against the dictators of Europe. The crisis she creates by this unprecedented step is terrific: and she becomes so popular that she has to be made a Dame of the British Empire to satisfy public feeling. It is expected that the International Court will ignore her application; but an able and resolute young Judge at The Hague insists on taking it seriously; and the summonses to the dictators are duly issued.

"The third act of the play opens in the International Court, with no one present but the four plaintiffs, the secretary of the League of Nations, the Camberwell typist, and an infatuated young gentleman who has become betrothed to her. They are presently joined by Sir Orpheus Midlander, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He is the only person in the play whose name is revealed, except the Camberwell lady, whose full style and title is now Dame Begonia Brown. They are all waiting in tense expectation to see what will happen."

Further Meditations on Shaw's "Geneva" by Shaw

(Published from undated typescript [c. 1939] in the British Museum: Add. Mss. 50643, ff. 196-199)

I wish I could persuade Englishmen to be logical in their mental operations instead of proceeding recklessly by association of ideas. I cannot admit the most obvious fact of the political situation without being at once accused of harboring a bundle of miscellaneous opinions which happen to be associated with that fact in the minds of my readers. I am repeatedly reminded of an acquaintance of mine, a colonel in the British army, who said to me fifty years ago, when religious controversy was crude and hot, "I happen to know for a fact that the rector's son is the father of his housemaid's child; and after that you may tell me, if you like, that the Bible is true; I dont believe it." All the arguments of Voltaire and Tom Paine would have been thrown away on this officer; but the rector's son made an "infidel" of him at a single entirely irrelevant stroke.

Man is, so far, a failure as a political animal: he can manage neither aggregations of millions of his species nor the powers of destruction that chemistry has put into his hands. His big civilizations have broken down again and again. That is a hard fact which I recognize. But it does not follow that I despair of mankind, that I have fallen at the feet of the dictators, that I am no longer a Socialist but a pessimist, that like Job's wife I call on Mr Rowse and on the Intelligent Woman for whom I wrote a Guide to curse democracy and die. What is democracy? Government in the interest of the whole people and not of a privileged class. What are the ideas associated with the word democracy in the English mind? Adult suffrage, the House of Commons, and the Party System. When I point out the obvious fact that adult suffrage, consummated in England 20 years ago by giving the casting vote to Miss Begonia Brown, is a guarantee of petty snobbery and parochial ignorance in the choice of rulers, and that the party system in Parliament has made the House of Commons quite useless as a check on plutocratic oligarchy and completely effective in paralyzing the government industrially and reducing all democratic leaders to helpless impotence, it is immediately assumed that I have renounced democracy and socialism and am now a Fascist and adore Messrs Mussolini and Hitler, who, not being reduced to impotence by membership of our House of Commons, have both done a lot of things that badly want doing here, but cannot be done because to do them would infringe British liberty to be governed by Begonia. For what is done or not done these two men are responsible and can be brought to account, whereas in England the political responsibility under adult suffrage is everybody's; and what is everybody's responsibility is nobody's responsibility.

A democratic Press is a Press that is open to all reasonable opinions. When I point out that such a Press is impossible in a country where only persons in command of £50,000 can start a magazine and of £250,000 a daily newspaper, I am at once assumed to be opposed to freedom of the Press. When I point out that the English are left without the restraints on individual freedom which continental dictators impose solely because, as my countrymen put it, "It would be waste of time to muzzle a sheep," or, as I put it, waste of time to put chains on people fettered hand, foot and brain by uncertainty as to next week's [blank in original], I am supposed to be calling for more and heavy fetters to hang on the free people.

And so on and so forth.

Now the point of all this is that all the mischievous institutions which have produced the poverty, unemployment, class war, and foreign war which threaten us with another collapse of civilization, and which led the late Edward Carpenter, author of Towards Democracy, to describe civilization as a disease for which we had to find a cure, are not results of human cupidity, ferocity, and general depravity. They were all founded with the very best intentions. Private property in land was not established to deprive the cultivator of the fruits of his labor, but to secure it to him. War was not organized to gratify a lust for rapine, pillage, and murder, but to protect society against them. When Shakespear advocated the enclosure of common lands at Welcombe he had not read Karl Marx or Henry George: he was impatient of the frightful extent to which land was being wasted because nobody owned it. The barbarities of our criminal code are meant to prevent crime, not to encourage it. The superstition of blood sacrifice with which our Book of Common Prayer is saturated was meant to propitiate a bloodthirsty God and save the nations from plague, pestilence, and famine; and it is to human nature that we owe the reform of Moloch and the Mexican deities into "Our Father which art in Heaven," and the sacrifices into a symbolic wafer of bread and a sip of cheap wine. When the religion of Europe was founded on the infallibility of Semite scriptures, and Galileo made a statement which knocked that infallibility into a cocked hat, the Church was seeking the salvation of Europe when it gave Galileo his choice between withdrawing his statement and being [word missing in original] as a heretic.

It was not until the nineteenth century that a playwright named Ibsen, from Norway, shewed that it is not the villainy of mankind that is destroying us, but those very good intentions and ideals, patriotic, domestic, and religious. It is our good men that we need to get rid of, our bad ones being politically negligible. If Ibsen were alive now he would warn Europe that it was not Mr [Neville] Chamberlain's imagined vices that are to be feared, but his very real virtues, not Herr Hitler's imagined resemblance to King Richard the Third, but his very real resemblance to Saint Louis and Charlemagne.

It is not a change of heart that is needed: our hearts are in the right place. It is a change of head. Scientific education, in short. Teach Shakespear the Ricardian law of rent, and he will see that the remedy for wasted land is not selling it to himself or to the Lucy family. Teach Herr Hitler that the vigor of his nation and ours is due to the fact that we are nations of arrant mongrels, and that if we begin with inbreeding we should end with the brains of Borzoi dogs and a general prevalence of paralysis and hæmophilia, and he will follow my advice and not only invite the Jews back to Germany but make it punishable incest for a Jew to marry anybody but an Aryan. If he could be persuaded to substitute my Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism for Mein Kampf we should hear no more indignantly virtuous denunciation of Communism by people who are steeped in it up to the neck and whose civilization would crumble and themselves perish miserably of hunger and violence if it were abolished or even suspended for a week.

Therefore I exhort Mr Rowse to be of good cheer. It is our people who are wrong: it is our education. As Mr Lancelot Hogben words it, we want Scientific Humanism as a basis of all our other isms. It was for lack of that that the old civilization collapsed, and the half a dozen or so of the new ones may collapse too. But the remedy is plain; and we shall round the cape sometime or other without being wrecked.

Finally remember that democracy did great things when it was an ideal. It was its reduction to reality in the idiocy of Begonia Brown that produced the snobocracy of the last twenty years. She and Henry Dubb will not control the destinies of the British Commonwealth for long. If they do there will soon be no British Commonwealth.

THE END