III
Meanwhile Shaw had become engaged in half a dozen reform crusades. Vegetarianism found in him an early advocate and socialism won him easily. In 1883, the year Karl Marx died, Thomas Davidson, an American, laid the foundation of the Fabian Society at a series of parlor conferences in London. In 1884 Shaw joined the society, and four years later, when it began holding public meetings, he found himself one of its leading lights. He has told us himself how he delighted to indulge in eloquent socialistic orations from cart-tails and how he came to acquire a bodyguard of faithful auditors whose presence was assured whenever it was announced that he would speak. With the pen, too, he labored for the manifesto of 1845, and even to-day he is still hard at it—despite prosperity, the approach of middle age and a fair imitation of the thing called fame. He wrote tracts in great number and after 1889 edited the Fabian Essays. Incidentally he wrote “Fabianism and the Empire” (1900), “Fabianism and the Fiscal Question” (1904), and other socialistic broadsides. At odd moments he had his say, too, upon the subjects of vegetarianism, the use of quotation marks, capitalization, evening clothes, capital punishment, and the eternal snobbishness of the patriotic Britisher.
During all this time he was drawn nearer and nearer to the theater. As far back as 1885 he began a play in collaboration with William Archer, the translator of Ibsen. This drama, rewritten and amplified seven years later, was the first of his works to be performed in public. But the need of getting on in the world pressed gloomily. “The question was,” Shaw has told us, “how to get a pound a week.” Novel writing was plainly hopeless and play making seemed equally impossible. There remained a chance to set up shop as a critic. Shaw made the plunge and almost immediately his humor and originality won him an audience. “Soon,” he says, “my privileges were enormous and my wealth immense.... The classes patiently read my essays; the masses patiently listened to my harangues. I enjoyed the immunities of impecuniosity with the opportunities of a millionaire....”
At the start Shaw’s regular topic was the art pictorial, but before long he began to dabble in music. According to Max Beerbohm, his first essay was printed in the first number of the Star in 1888. This was a highly purposeful periodical, founded by T. P. O’Connor (“If we enable the charwoman to put two lumps of sugar in her tea instead of one,” said “Tay Pay,” in his salutatory, “we shall not have worked in vain”), and Shaw wrote over the nom de plume of “Corno di Bassetto.” In 1890, after two years’ service, he transferred his flag to the World. Then, like his friend Huneker, he abandoned music for the drama, and from January, 1895, to May, 1898, he was the critic of the Saturday Review—the London weekly in whose columns the ingenious Mr. Beerbohm now holds forth.