Shaw seems intent upon convincing us that, like the artist of his own description, he was an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others; but we must take his confessions with the customary grain of salt. “I was an able-bodied and able-minded young man in the strength of my youth; and my family, then heavily embarrassed, needed my help urgently. That I should have chosen to be a burden to them instead was, according to all the conventions of peasant fiction, monstrous. Well, without a blush I embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old age: I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own (now eminent in literature as Mr. John Mackinnon Robertson) prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this was a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid trade. Handsome or not, it was the only return he ever had for the little pension he contrived to export from Ireland for his family. My mother reinforced it by drudging in her elder years at the art of music which she had followed in her prime freely for love. I only helped to spend it. People wondered at my heartlessness: one young and romantic lady had the courage to remonstrate openly and indignantly with me, 'for the which,' as Pepys said of the shipwright's wife who refused his advances, 'I did respect her.' Callous as Comus to moral babble, I steadily wrote my five pages a day and made a man of myself (at my mother's expense) instead of a slave.”
In Shaw's opinion, his brain constituted the sum and substance of his riches. The projection and exposition of his experience came to be the most urgent need and object of his life. He recognized a higher duty than merely earning his living: the fulfilment of his individual destiny. He resolved to become a writer. In this resolve to dedicate all his powers to the art of self-expression, lies the explanation of his strange words: “My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers; therefore, take off your hat to her and blush.”[12]
Although it was a “frightful squeeze” at times, Shaw was not wholly destitute. A suit of evening clothes and the knack of playing a “simple accompaniment at sight more congenially to a singer than most amateurs,” gave him “for a fitful year or so,” the entrée into the better circle of musical society in London.
In this latter day of his assertion that money controls morality, Shaw is perfectly consistent in speaking of his poverty and quotidian shabbiness as the two “disgusting faults” of his youth. But at the time he did not recognize them as faults, because he could not help them. “I therefore tolerated the gross error that poverty, though an inconvenience and a trial, is not a sin and a disgrace: and I stood for my self-respect on the things I had: probity, ability, knowledge of art, laboriousness, and whatever else came cheaply to me.” A certain pride of birth, a consciousness of worthy ancestry, also sustained him, and helped him to triumph over circumstance. It was this same feeling which gave him suavity and poise during the later campaigns of his revolutionary Socialism, and saved him from the excesses, the blind fury, of the mere proletarian. He had a magnificent library in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture-gallery in Trafalgar Square, and another at Hampton Court, without any servants to look after or rent to pay. During these years Shaw's gain in the cultivation of his musical and artistic tastes more than compensated for his lack of the advantages of wealth. Nor were his essays in literature and criticism—I do not refer to his playful dilettantism—profitless in any real sense. It is true that innumerable articles were consistently returned to him; and yet he went his way undismayed, slowly saturating himself with Italian art from Mantegna to Michelangelo, with the best music from London to Bayreuth. And while London had not “caught his tone,” musical or otherwise, at this time, the day was to come in which he should reap the reward for his critical knowledge of art and music, for the rare and individual style which he was slowly perfecting.
To the student of Shaw as the littérateur—the highwayman who “held up” so many different forms of art—the chief interest of this period is to be found in the five novels which he wrote during the five years from 1879 to 1883—an average of one a year. His first novel, written in 1879, and called, “with merciless fitness” as Shaw says, Immaturity, was never published; and we are told that even the rats were unable to finish it. George Meredith, the novelist, who was a reader and literary adviser for the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall, London, from 1860 to 1897, rejected the manuscript of Immaturity, sans phrase—quickly disposing of it with a laconic “No.” The remaining four have all been published, in magazines and in book-form, either in England or America. Shaw “turned them out,” one each year, with unvarying regularity and also with unvarying result: refusal by the publishers. That six pounds which Shaw earned in nine years must certainly have gone a long way—as postage stamps.
Shaw at the age of twenty-three.
From a photo by Window & Grove.
From a photograph taken in London, July 4th, 1879.
Mr. Shaw has carefully explained to us why his works were refused by publisher after publisher. And I find no reason to question his explanation to the effect that it was the world-old struggle between literary conscience and public taste. The more he progressed towards his own individual style, and ventured upon the freer expression of his own ideas, the more he disappointed the “grave, elderly lovers of literature.” As to the regular novel-publishing houses, whose readers were merely on the scent of popularity, they gave him, we are told, no quarter at all. “And so between the old stool of my literary conscientiousness and the new stool of a view of life that did not reach publishing point in England until about ten years later, when Ibsen drove it in, my novels fell to the ground.”
We may omit for the present any discussion of the validity of Mr. Shaw's claims as a “fictionist.” But the story of the circumstances under which the novels finally found their way into print is certainly worthy of narration. It was in 1882 that Henry George, by a speech during one of the public meetings at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, fired Shaw to enlist, in Heine's phrase, “as a soldier in the Liberative War of Humanity.”[13] About this time a body, styling itself the Land Reform Union, which still survives as the English Land Restoration League, was formed to propagate Georgite Land Nationalization. The official mouthpiece of this body was called, if memory serves, the Christian Socialist, which did not last long, owing, as Shaw said, to a lack of Christians. Shaw made a number of lifelong friends through his connection with this organization, which he joined soon after its formation. Chief among these may be mentioned James Leigh Joynes, Sydney Olivier and Henry Hyde Champion; other acquaintances were two Christian Socialist clergymen—Stewart Headlam and Symes of Nottingham. Shaw and Symes frequently indulged in wordy warfare over the respective merits of Socialism and Land Nationalization as universal panaceas for social evils. Symes argued that Land Nationalization would settle everything, to which Shaw cleverly and characteristically replied, as he once told me, that if capital were still privately appropriated Symes would remain “the chaplain of a pirate ship.” It is proof of Shaw's fundamental Socialism that he still regards this as a very fair description of the position of a clergyman under our present system.