Through his association with James Leigh Joynes and the Salt family it is not difficult to trace Shaw's initial feeling for Shelley, and the origin and growth of his humanitarian and vegetarian principles. At this time Joynes had just been deprived of his Eton post because he had made a tour in Ireland with Henry George and been arrested with him under the Coercion Act by the police, who did not understand Land Nationalization and supposed the two to be emissaries of the Clan na Gael. Henry Salt, another Eton master, to whom Joynes' sister was married, was not only, like Joynes, a vegetarian, a humanitarian, a Shelleyan, but a De Quinceyite as well. Being a born revolutionist, he loathed Eton; and as soon as he had saved enough to live with a Thoreau-like simplicity in a labourer's cottage in the country, he threw up his post and shook the dust of Eton from his feet. In company with Joynes, Shaw visited the Salts once before they left Eton. It is interesting in this connection to read an absurdly amusing description, written by Shaw, of his first visit to them in the country at Tilford—an article entitled A Sunday on the Surrey Hills.[14]
There were no children in the family; and one of Shaw's chief amusements while visiting the Salts was to play endless pianoforte duets with Mrs. Salt, on what he called “the noisiest grand piano that ever descended from Eton to a Surrey cottage.” Salt found his métier, not in Socialism, but in humanitarianism. He founded the Humanitarian League, of which he is still secretary. This association of Shaw with the Salt family eventuated in close and warm mutual friendship. Many were the visits Shaw paid them at this time and in later years. It was in the heather on Limpsfield Common, during his visits to them at Oxford, that he wrote several of the scenes of his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant.
In this association may be discovered the real link between Shaw and the Humanitarians. For twenty-five years Shaw was a “cannibal,” according to his own damning verdict. For the remainder of his life he has been a strict vegetarian, professing his principles with a comic force equalled only by the rigour with which he puts them into practice. While the most of men in their boyhood have walked about with a cheap edition of Shelley in their pockets, it is a tiresome trait in Shaw, someone has slightingly remarked, that he has never taken this cheap edition out. Shelley it was, certainly, who first called Shaw's attention to the “infamy of his habits.” And it is also true that Shaw has never discarded his vegetarian principles, never repudiated Shelley's humane views and ideals of life. “It may require some reflection,” Shaw once wrote, “to see that high feeling brings high thinking; but we already know, without reflection, that high thinking brings what is called plain living. In this century the world has produced two men—Shelley and Wagner—in whom intense poetic feeling was the permanent state of their consciousness, and who were certainly not restrained by any religious, conventional or prudential considerations from indulging themselves to the utmost of their opportunities. Far from being gluttonous, drunken, cruel or debauched, they were apostles of vegetarianism and water-drinking; had an utter horror of violence and 'sport'; were notable champions of the independence of women; and were, in short, driven into open revolution against the social evils which the average sensual man finds extremely suitable to him. So much is this the case that the practical doctrine of these two arch-voluptuaries always presents itself to ordinary persons as a saint-like asceticism.”[15]
At the time of the mutual intimacy of Joynes, Shaw, and the Salts, and their unhesitating approval and admiration of Shelley, early in the eighties, vegetarian restaurants began to be established here and there throughout the country. These scattered restaurants, Mr. Shaw once remarked in connection with his own conversion to the faith of Shelley, “made vegetarianism possible for a man too poor to be catered for.”[16] It is hardly open to doubt that, while Shelley first called Shaw's attention to vegetarianism, it was Joynes and Salt who first confirmed him in the belief, which soon became solidified into a hard-and-fast principle, that “the enormity of eating the scorched corpses of animals—cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted—becomes impossible the moment it becomes consciously instead of thoughtlessly habitual.”
Another member of this coterie, in which there was no question of Henry George and Karl Marx, but a great deal of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, was the now well-known Socialist and author, Edward Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy and other works are a faithful reflex of the man. It became the habit of these early apostles of “the simple life” to wear sandals; Carpenter even wore his out of doors. He had taught the secret of their manufacture to a workman friend of his at Millthorpe, a village near Sheffield, where he resided. Not unfittingly, the habitual wearer of moccasins, Carpenter, was always called The Noble Savage by the members of this congenial and delightful circle. The noisy grand piano grew noisier than ever when Shaw and Carpenter visited the Salts—Carpenter, like Shaw, revelling in pianoforte duets with Mrs. Salt.
The death of Joynes was a great grief to these close friends, especially to Shaw. I am convinced that those mordantly incisive and penetrating attacks which Shaw, in after life, made upon modern surgery and modern medicine find their animus in his resentment of the manner of Joynes' death. Certain passages from The Philanderer and The Conflict of Science and Common Sense thus become more humanly comprehensible. The literary activities of this circle, so sadly broken up by the death of Joynes, were by no means confined solely to Carpenter and Shaw. Joynes himself left a volume of excellent translations of the revolutionary songs of the German revolutionists of 1848—Herwegh, Freiligrath and others.[17] Salt, whom Shaw has occasionally quoted, has published several monographs, his tastes and predilections revealing themselves in the names of Shelley, James Thomson, Jeffries and De Quincey.
The Socialist revival of the eighties is responsible for the final publication of Shaw's novels. As long as he kept sending them to the publishers, “they were as safe from publicity as they would have been in the fire.” But as soon as he flung them aside as failures, with a strange perversity, “they almost instantly began to show signs of life.” Among the crop of propagandist magazines which accompanied the Socialistic revival of the eighties was one called To-Day—not the present paper of that name, but one of the many “To-Days which are now Yesterdays.” It was printed by Henry Hyde Champion, but there were several joint editors, of brief tenure, among whom were Belfort Bax, the well-known Socialist, and James Leigh Joynes. Although publishing his novels in this magazine, which it seems paid nothing for contributions, “seemed a matter of no more consequence than stuffing so many window-panes with them,” Shaw nevertheless offered up An Unsocial Socialist and Cashel Byron's Profession on this unstable altar of his political faith.[18]
With one noteworthy exception, there were no visible results from the serial publications of these two novels. Shaw's novels, not uncharacteristically, appeared in inverse order of composition; and number five, An Unsocial Socialist, made Shaw acquainted with William Morris, an acquaintance which, as we shall see, ripened later into genuine and sincere friendship. To Shaw's surprise, as he tells us, William Morris had been reading the monthly instalments with a certain relish—a proof to Shaw's mind “how much easier it is to please a great man than a little one, especially when you share his politics.”
Another propagandist magazine, created after the passing of To-day, and called Our Corner, was published by Mrs. Annie Besant, with whom Shaw had become acquainted about the time he joined the Fabian Society. “She was an incorrigible benefactress,” Shaw says, “and probably revenged herself for my freely expressed scorn for this weakness by drawing on her private account to pay me for my jejune novels.” Up to this time, all Shaw's literary productions seemed to have the deadly effect of driving their media of circulation to an early grave. After The Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists had run through its pages in serial form, Our Corner likewise succumbed to the inevitable.[19]
To Shaw's expressed regret, Cashel Byron's Profession found one staunch admirer at least. This was Henry Hyde Champion, who had thrown up a commission in the Army at the call of Socialism. This admiration for Shaw's realistic exposure of pugilism—Mr. Shaw once told me that he always considered admiration of Cashel Byron's Profession the mark of a fool!—had very momentous consequences. Champion, it seems, had an “unregenerate taste for pugilism”—a pugnacious survival of his abdicated adjutancy. “He liked 'Cashel Byron' so much that he stereotyped the pages of To-Day which it occupied, and in spite of my remonstrances, hurled on the market a misshapen shilling edition. My friend, Mr. William Archer, reviewed it prominently; the Saturday Review, always susceptible in those days to the arts of self-defence, unexpectedly declared it the novel of the age; Mr. W. E. Henley wanted to have it dramatized; Stevenson wrote a letter about it ...; the other papers hastily searched their waste-paper baskets for it and reviewed it, mostly rather disappointedly; the public preserved its composure and did not seem to care.” This letter of Stevenson's to William Archer,[20] written at Saranac Lake in the winter of 1887-8, contains some very interesting criticism, as a quotation will show: