Mr. Shaw's mother is the most remarkably youthful person for her years I have ever known, with the possible exception of Mark Twain. I remember with vivid pleasure taking tea with her and her son one afternoon at her attractive little “retreat” in West London. Her eyes danced with suppressed mirth as she talked, and it was quite easy to see from whom her son derived his strong sense of humour. Mrs. Shaw told several delightful stories, one of which deserves repetition here. It seems that Mrs. Shaw is quite a medium and spiritualist, and takes a great deal of interest in communicating with “spirits” from the other world. One day she “called up” Mr. Shaw's sister and asked her what she thought of George being such a distinguished man. The spirit expressed surprise to hear the news. “But aren't you very proud of George?” queried his mother disappointedly. “Oh, yes,” replied the spirit; “it's all very well in its way. But,” she added, “that sort of thing doesn't count for anything up here”!
Many of Mr. Shaw's very distinctive traits are a direct inheritance from his mother, modified, to be sure, by the differences in education, temperament and views of life. In her teaching of music, Mrs. Shaw deliberately displayed total insensibility to the petty dignities so cherished in English school-life. Upon visiting rectors, head mistresses, local “personages,” and, in fact, upon all those who wished things done their own way, she made what her son called “perfectly indiscriminate onslaughts.” This aggressive assertion of her authority would often have made her position untenable, had it not been for her patent ability and unquestioned power of leadership. Her outspoken frankness of manner and conduct, reproduced with such comically extravagant excess in her son, always won her the support of the discriminating: it was always the real “bigwigs” who understood her manners. Mr. Shaw once said: “From my mother I derive my brains and character, which do her credit.” I remember asking Mr. Shaw's mother one day to what she attributed her son's remarkable success in the world of letters. “Oh,” she said, without a moment's hesitation, her eyes twinkling merrily the while, “the answer is quite simple. Of course, he owes it all to me.”
To his parents, his mother in particular, Mr. Shaw is also indebted for actual financial support during several years of an able-bodied young manhood. But he has warned us against supposing, because he is a man of letters, that he never tried to commit that “sin against his nature” called earning an honest living. We have followed his struggles from his fifteenth to his twentieth year—a period marking a social and spiritual growth on his part, he maintains, of several centuries. “I was born on the outskirts of an Irish city, where we lived exactly as people lived in the seventeenth century, except that there were gas-lamps and policemen in tall hats. In the course of my boyhood literature and music introduced me to the eighteenth century; and I was helped a step further through the appearance in our house of candles that did not need snuffing, an iron-framed pianoforte and typhoid sanitation. Finally, I crossed St. George's Channel into the decadence of the mid-nineteenth-century England of Anthony Trollope, and slowly made my way to the forefront of the age—the period of Ibsen, Nietzsche, the Fabian Society, the motor-car, and my own writings.” Very slowly indeed did he make his way to the forefront of the age of Shavianism. He felt that he was a man of genius, and coolly classified himself as such. With no effort of the imagination, and, likewise, with no prevision of his subsequent oft-repeated failures and the position of pecuniary dependence he was temporarily to occupy, he found himself looking upon London as his destiny. There is something at once amusing, inspiring, and pathetic in the spectacle of this bashful, raw, inexperienced boy, fortified only by the confident consciousness of his yet unproved superiority to the “common run” of humanity, throwing himself thus headlong into London.
Little of romantic glamour, fittingly enough, attaches to Shaw's early struggles in London. No rapt listening to the songs of rival nightingales, Keats and Shelley, as with Browning; no impetuous and clandestine marriage, as with Sheridan; no roses and raptures of la vie Bohème, as with Zola. It is, instead, for the most part a tale of consistent literary drudgery, rewarded by continual and repeated failures. The rare and individual style of the satirist, the deft fingering of the dramatist were wholly undeveloped, and even unsuspected, during this tentative period in his career. He turned his hand to various undertakings—to musical criticism, to versifying, to blank-versifying, to novel-writing; but all equally to no purpose. Asked once what was his first real success, he replied: “Never had any. Success in that sense is a thing that comes to you and takes your breath away. What came to me was invariably failure. By the time I wore it down I knew too much to care about either failure or success. Life is like a battle; you have to fire a thousand bullets to hit one man. I was too busy firing to bother about the scoring. As to whether I ever despaired, you will find somewhere in my works this line: 'He who has never hoped can never despair.' I am not a fluctuator.” His self-sufficiency, even at this time, was proof against all discouragement. Perhaps he found consolation also in the saying: “He who is down need fear no fall.”
Shaw never experienced any poverty of spirit, of determination, or of will; his poverty was pecuniary only. Until the time of his marriage he remained secure from the accusation of being the mould of fashion or the glass of form. While the Shaw of matrimonial respectability bears all the marks of his wife's civilizing influence in the matter of a costume de rigueur—fashionable clothes, patent-leather boots, and even, on rare occasions, a “stiff” collar—his dress in the late seventies and for twenty years thereafter was usually, like that of Marchbanks, strikingly anarchic. His outward appearance, as someone unkindly remarked, suggested that he might be a fairly respectable plasterer! “Now,” said Shaw in 1896, “when people reproach me with the unfashionableness of my attire, they forget that to me it seems like the raiment of Solomon in all his glory by contrast with the indescribable seediness of those days, when I trimmed my cuffs to the quick with scissors, and wore a tall hat and soi-disant black coat, green with decay.” But the poverty of which this attire was the outward, visible sign was “shortness of cash,” as numerous personal reminiscences show. From the depressing and devitalizing effects of “real poverty” he was strong enough to free himself, as the following autobiographical confidence clearly evidences:
“Whilst I am not sure that the want of money lames a poor man more than the possession of it lames a rich one, I am quite sure that the class which has the pretensions and prejudices and habits of the rich without its money, and the poverty of the poor without the freedom to avow poverty—in short, the people who don't go to the theatre because they cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed to be seen in the gallery—are the worst-off of all. To be on the down grade from the haute bourgeoisie and the landed gentry to the nadir at which the younger son's great-grandson gives up the struggle to keep up appearances; to have the pretence of a culture without the reality of it; to make three hundred pounds a year look like eight hundred pounds in Ireland or Scotland; or five hundred pounds look like one thousand pounds in London; to be educated neither at the Board School and the Birkbeck nor at the University, but at some rotten private adventure academy for the sons of gentlemen; to try to maintain a select circle by excluding all the frankly poor people from it, and then find that all the rest of the world excludes you—that is poverty at its most damnable; and yet from that poverty a great deal of our literature and journalism has sprung. Think of the frightful humiliation of the boy Dickens in the blacking warehouse, and his undying resentment of his mother's wanting him to stay there—all on a false point of genteel honour. Think of Trollope, at an upper-class school with holes in his trousers, because his father could not bring himself to dispense with a man-servant. Ugh! Be a tramp or be a millionaire—it matters little which: what does matter is being a poor relation of the rich; and that is the very devil. Fortunately, that sort of poverty can be cured by simply shaking off its ideas—cutting your coat according to your cloth, and not according to the cloth of your father's second cousin, the baronet. As I was always more or less in rebellion against those ideas, and finally shook them off pretty completely, I cannot say that I have much experience of real poverty—quite the contrary.”[11]
With that comic seriousness which always passes for outrageous prevarication, Shaw has related that during the nine years from 1876 to 1885 his adventures in literature netted him the princely sum of exactly six pounds. At first he “devilled” for a musical critic; but his notices “led to the stoppage of all the concert advertisements and ruined the paper”—“which died—partly of me.” He also began a Passion Play in blank verse, with the mother of the hero represented as a termagant. Ah, if that play had only been finished! But Shaw never carried through these customary follies of young authors, unless we agree with those who classify his novels as follies of a green boy. “I was always, fortunately for me,” Mr. Shaw once remarked, “a failure as a trifler. All my attempts at Art for Art's sake broke down; it was like hammering tenpenny nails into sheets of notepaper.”
One finds it an easy matter to believe him when he tells us, not only that he was provincial, unpresentable, but, more broadly speaking, that he was in an impossible position. “I was a foreigner—an Irishman, the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the University mill. I was ... not uneducated; but, unfortunately, what I knew was exactly what the educated Englishman did not know, and what he knew—I either didn't know or didn't believe.” Six pounds was a very small allowance for a growing young man, even a struggling author, to live on for nine years. Even if we match him with equal scepticism, at least we can discover, as will be seen, no error in his arithmetical calculations. After Shaw had hounded the musical critic and his paper to the grave, London absolutely refused to tolerate him on any terms. As the nine years progressed, he had one article accepted by Mr. G. R. Sims, who had just started a short-lived paper called One and All. “It brought me fifteen shillings. Full of hope and gratitude, I wrote a really brilliant contribution. That finished me.” During this period, he received his greatest fee—five pounds—for a patent medicine advertisement, a circumstance which may give some colour to Dr. Meyerfeld's early denunciation of Shaw as a “quacksalver.” On another occasion, a publisher asked Shaw for some verses to fit some old blocks which he had bought up for a school prize book. “I wrote a parody of the thing he wanted and sent it as a joke. To my stupefaction he thanked me seriously, and paid me five shillings.” Shaw was so much touched by the gift of five shillings for his parody that he wrote the generous publisher a serious verse for another picture. With the startling result that the publisher took it as a joke in questionable taste! Is it any wonder that Shaw's career as a versifier abruptly ended?
The analysis of the artistic temperament which Shaw puts in the mouth of John Tanner—an analysis which Mr. Robert Loraine finds to smack more of mania than of insincerity—is a cynical and distorted picture at best. And yet it gives us a refracted glimpse of the position which Shaw himself deliberately assumed. “The true artist,” Tanner rattles on, “will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose, whilst he really means them to do it for his.” After various attempts “to earn an honest living,” Shaw gave up trying to commit that sin against his nature, as he puts it. His last attempt was in 1879, we are told, “when a company was formed in London to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison—a much too ingenious invention, as it proved, being nothing less than a telephone of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion.” His interest in physics, his acquaintance with the works of Tyndall and Helmholtz, and his friendship with Mr. Chichester Bell, of which mention has been made, gave him, he asserts, the customary superiority over those about him which he is in the habit of claiming in all the relations of life. While he remained with the company only a few months, he discharged his duties in a manner, which, according to his own outrageous and comically prevaricative assertion, “laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's London reputation.”
After this experience, he began, as he says, to lay the foundations of his own fortune “by the most ruthless disregard of all the quack duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to the White House, and harness the real peasant boy to the plough until he is finally swept, as rubbish, into the workhouse.” Far from being a “peasant lad,” who climbed manfully upward from the lowest rung of the social ladder, he was in reality the son of a gentleman who had an income of at least three figures (four, if you count in dollars instead of pounds), and was second cousin to a baronet. “I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby warn all peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own bad novels.”