Herne, Garland, and Henry George

ENRY GEORGE made few converts among men of letters to his lgospel of the Single Tax, and his doctrine exerted little direct influence upon their creative writing, but their devotion to The Prophet of San Francisco as a man and as a champion and symbol of social justice is a striking phenomenon in the history of modern literature. To Tolstoy, George was a modern Moses inspired by God to lead the oppressed millions of the earth to a new Promised Land, and he declared: your side are justice, reason, love. On your side is God, and therefore you cannot but be successful.' Tolstoy wrote some twenty pamphlets and articles advocating George's plan, which he believed to be eminently practicable, stating in an article in the London Times in I905: The method of solving the land problem has been elaborated by Henry George to such a degree of perfection that under the existing State organization and compulsory taxation, it is impossible to invent any other better, more just, practical, and peaceful solution.2 Yet Tolstoy's creative writing shows little specific evidence of the prophet's famous panacea. George Bernard Shaw credited Henry George with changing the whole current of his life by turning him from a music critic and novelist into a student of economic questions, the study of which inspired his first plays.3 In I905 he wrote to Hamlin Garland, then chairman of the Progress and Poverty dinner to be given in New York on January 24 of that year, that hearing Henry George speak in London in the early eighties had swept him into the great Socialist revival of I883, and that although he had outgrown George's ideas, Nobody has ever got away, or ever will get away, from the truths that were the center of his propaganda.4 But there

Art · Art history · George (robot) · History · Literature Analysis and Criticism · Theater, Performance, and Music History

• Idealistic realist on the platform

  Walter Lazenby•Quarterly Journal of Speech•1963

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