II
Shaw was twenty when he reached London—the meditative, impressionable, speculative, iconoclastic age. Apparently he fell an easy prey to the philosophical anarchists who then held the centre of the stage—Proudhon, Lassalle, Marx, Louis Blanc, Engels, Liebknecht, and the lesser Germans. Certainly it was a day of stimulating stirring about. Huxley and Spencer were up to their necks in gore; Ibsen, with “The League of Youth” behind him, was giving form to “The Pillars of Society” and “A Doll’s House”; Nietzsche was tramping up and down his garden path; Wagner was hard at work; “The Principles of Sociology” had just come from the press. Sham-smashing was in the air. Everything respectable was under suspicion.
It didn’t take Shaw long to spring out of the audience upon the stage. His first novel, in truth, must have been begun long before he learned to find his way about the streets of London. Whether it was good or bad the human race will never know; publishers declined it without thanks, and the author, when his manuscripts began to have a value, decided that it should remain unpublished. “It was a very remarkable work,” he says, “but hardly one which I should be well advised in letting loose whilst my livelihood depends on my credit as a literary workman. I can recall a certain difficulty, experienced even while I was writing the book, in remembering what it was about....” Thus heavily did his theme bear down upon him.
What the young Irishman did to relieve his imagination during the next three years is not recorded. That he learned a great deal, particularly of music and literature, is very probable. His sister was a professional singer, and the persons he met were chiefly of the literary-artistic sort. He was “but an infant of twenty-four, when, being at that time one of the unemployed” he essayed to mend his “straitened fortunes” by writing his second novel, “The Irrational Knot.” It was no masterpiece, but if the few persons who glanced through it possessed prophetic eyes they must have seen in it marks of a genius rather startling. A year later came “Love Among the Artists”—a volume of nearly 500 pages. Then, in order, came “Cashel Byron’s Profession” and “An Unsocial Socialist.” Not one of these extraordinary tales struck the fancy of the publishers. “An encouraging compliment or two,” says Shaw, was his sole reward for the fatiguing labor of writing them. Not until a good while afterward did any of the five see the light, and then it was only “to fill up the gaps in socialist magazines financed by generous friends.” “An Unsocial Socialist” was the first to reach the dignity of covers. After it came “Cashel Byron’s Profession” and “The Irrational Knot.” “Love Among the Artists” was the last to appear upon the book stalls.