Disraeli in Shaw

Shaw would never have identified himself as a royalist, or even as a conservative, yet the most admirable politician in all of his plays is King Magnus of the futuristic The Apple Cart (1929), who is both. In some respects, too, his Magnus suggests the conservative and royalist prime minister who dominated British politics in the early years of Shaw’s emigration from Dublin to London, Benjamin Disraeli, by then the Earl of Beaconsfield. “I could not read his novels,” Shaw told Hesketh Pearson decades later, “because they are all about upper-ten ladies and gentlemen, whom I cannot abide.”¹ Could he have known that by not reading them? After reading Shaw’s early novel Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882), about a half-educated, upwardly mobile prize-fighter who marries a wealthy lady and gets elected to parliament, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to William Archer that he saw in the novel’s ingredients “½ part Disraeli (perhaps unconscious).”²

Whatever, Disraeli’s artful handling of his political role interested Shaw enough that in 1886 he attended a lecture by the economist H. R. Beeton, the subject described in his diary as on “Beaconsfield.” And two years later, when writing an article, “The Transition to Social Democracy,” he went to the British Museum to read, as background, the Disraeli entry in the new Dictionary of National Biography.³

Shaw admired Disraeli’s pragmatism as a politician. As he claimed in 1901, Karl Marx’s Capital “was supposed to be written for the working classes, but the working man … wants to be a bourgeois…. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society; the proletariat is the Conservative element, as Disraeli well knew.” With that understanding of “Tory Democracy,” which Shaw told Winston Churchill was Disraeli’s “invention,” King Magnus outwits the fantasy Labour prime minister and his quarrelsome Cabinet who blindly assume that they represent popular will.⁴

The work of governing, Magnus tells them cuttingly, has been abandoned by “anyone with outstanding organizing or administrative ability.” What man of genius would exchange rewarding work “for the squalor of the political arena in which we have to struggle with foolish factions in parliament and with ignorant voters in the constituencies?… Politics, once the centre of attraction for ability, public spirit, and ambition, has now become the refuge of a few fanciers of public speaking and party intrigue who find all the other avenues of distinction closed to them.” Echoes of Disraeli the royalist and Tory democrat arise everywhere in the king’s polemic. “I do not want the old governing class back. It governed so selfishly that the people would have perished if democracy had not swept it out of politics. But evil as it was in many ways, at least it stood above the tyranny of popular ignorance and popular poverty…. I have no elections to fear…. Think of the things you dare not do! Responsibilities which would break your backs may still be borne on a king’s shoulders. But he must be a king, not a puppet.”⁵

As early as 1888, with Disraeli dead only seven years, Shaw became involved with the South St. Pancras Liberal and Radical Association and got himself elected as its delegate to the Birmingham Conference of the National Liberal Federation. In his diary he registered his disgust at “the sheeplike docility of the delegates and the rottenness and meanness of the wirepullers and leaders.” Democracy, he began to realize, was not only inefficient, but a sham and a fraud. And it became more so to him when parliamentary institutions not only blundered into a popular (at first) world war in 1914 but failed to extricate Europe from its consequences afterward. “Evidently,” he wrote then,

there is something wrong with what we call democracy: that is, giving votes to everybody. We were clearly mistaken in supposing that when we got our majority of votes everything would go smoothly and rapidly. Why did we make that mistake? The explanation lies in our history. Democracy had been one of the most wonderful forces in politics. Looking back over its history in the eighteenth and nineteenth...