“What am I to say? I have read your friend's book with singular relish. If he has written any other, I beg you will let me see it; and if he has not, I beg him to lose no time in supplying the deficiency. It is full of promise, but I should like to know his age. There are things in it that are very clever, to which I attach no importance; it is the shape of the age. And there are passages, particularly the rally in the presence of the Zulu King, that show genuine and remarkable narrative talent—a talent that few will have the wit to understand, a talent of strength, spirit, capacity, sufficient vision, and sufficient self-sacrifice, which last is the chief point in a narrative.”
And at the end of his next letter to Mr. Archer (February, 1888), he says “Tell Shaw to hurry up. I want another.”
Neither Shaw nor Champion earned anything from that first shilling edition, “which began with a thousand copies, but proved immortal.” Shortly after this first edition was exhausted, the publishing house of Walter Scott and Company placed a revised shilling edition on the market; and the book was also published in New York at about the same time (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1887). Brentanos, New York, brought out an edition in 1897, and this was followed in 1899 by an edition of An Unsocial Socialist.[21]
The immediate cause of these editions was the temporary interest in the works of Mr. Shaw, occasioned by Mr. Richard Mansfield's notable productions of Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple. The publication of Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, in two volumes, by H. S. Stone and Company, of Chicago, followed shortly afterwards. In 1904, when Mr. Daly's production of Candida created such a stir in America, Mr. Volney Streamer, of the firm of Brentanos, a Shaw enthusiast of many years' standing, used his influence to have these two books reprinted. None of Shaw's novels are copyright in America, so that he has never, it appears, reaped the reward of the moderate, although intermittent, vogue which his novels have enjoyed in that country. It is a fact of common knowledge that Shaw prefers to be judged by his later work; but the demand in America for these novels has been so large that they are likely to be published for years yet to come. In 1889 or 1890, it must have been, Shaw happened to notice that his novels were “raging in America,” and that the list of book sales in one of the United States was headed by a novel entitled An Unsocial Socialist. In the preface to the “Authorized Edition” of Cashel Byron's Profession, which contains the history of the life and death of the novels, Mr. Shaw says, “As it was clearly unfair that my own American publishers (H. S. Stone and Company) should be debarred by delicacy towards me from exploiting the new field of derelict fiction, I begged them to make the most of their inheritance; and with my full approval Opus 3, called 'Love Among the Artists' (a paraphrase of the forgotten line 'Love Among the Roses') followed.”[22]
This third act of Shaw's “tragedy,” as he calls it, is by no means the end of the play; as with Thomas Hardy's endless dramas, the curtain may never be rung down. One might imagine that Shaw, the Socialist, required the patience of a Job and the self-repression of a stoic to enable him to restrain his anger over the diversion of the rewards of his talent from his own to the pockets of Capitalist publishers, free of all obligation to the author. But he accepts his fate with breezy philosophy.
“I may say,” he wrote to Harper and Brothers (who had published his Cashel Byron's Profession) in November, 1899, “that I entirely disagree with the ideas of twenty years ago as to the 'piratical' nature of American republications of non-copyright books. Unlike most authors, I am enough of an economist to know that unless an American publisher acquires copyright he can no more make a profit at my expense than he can at Shakspere's by republishing Hamlet. The English nation, when taxed for the support of the author by a price which includes author's royalties, whilst the American nation escapes that burden, may have a grievance against the American nation, but that is a very different thing from a grievance of the author against the American publisher.”[23]
“Suffice it to say here that there can be no doubt now that the novels so long left for dead in the forlorn-hope magazines of the eighties have arisen and begun to propagate themselves vigorously throughout the New World at the rate of a dollar and a half per copy, free of all royalty to the flattered author.” He begs for absolution from blame “if these exercises of a raw apprentice break loose again and insist on their right to live. The world never did know chalk from cheese in the matter of art; and, after all, since it is only the young and old who have time to read—the rest being too busy living—my exercises may be fitter for the market than my masterpieces.”
In 1883, when the last of the novels of his nonage was completed, Shaw was still striking in the dark. He had not yet found the opening into the light, the portal giving out from the stuffy world of imaginative lying into the great world of real life—a life of pleasurable activity, strenuous endeavour, and high achievement. He found his way out by following an insistent summons—the clarion call of Henry George. And when, having doffed the swaddling clothes of romance, he emerged from the dim retreat of his imagination, it was to find himself standing in the dazzling light of a new day—the day of Socialism, of the Fabian Society, and—of George Bernard Shaw.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] These books were published by Edward Arnold.