Shaw was twenty when he reached London—the meditative, impressionable, speculative, iconoclastic age. Apparently he fell an easy prey to the philosophical anarchists who then held the centre of the stage—Proudhon, Lassalle, Marx, Louis Blanc, Engels, Liebknecht, and the lesser Germans. Certainly it was a day of stimulating stirring about. Huxley and Spencer were up to their necks in gore; Ibsen, with “The League of Youth” behind him, was giving form to “The Pillars of Society” and “A Doll’s House”; Nietzsche was tramping up and down his garden path; Wagner was hard at work; “The Principles of Sociology” had just come from the press. Sham-smashing was in the air. Everything respectable was under suspicion.
It didn’t take Shaw long to spring out of the audience upon the stage. His first novel, in truth, must have been begun long before he learned to find his way about the streets of London. Whether it was good or bad the human race will never know; publishers declined it without thanks, and the author, when his manuscripts began to have a value, decided that it should remain unpublished. “It was a very remarkable work,” he says, “but hardly one which I should be well advised in letting loose whilst my livelihood depends on my credit as a literary workman. I can recall a certain difficulty, experienced even while I was writing the book, in remembering what it was about....” Thus heavily did his theme bear down upon him.
What the young Irishman did to relieve his imagination during the next three years is not recorded. That he learned a great deal, particularly of music and literature, is very probable. His sister was a professional singer, and the persons he met were chiefly of the literary-artistic sort. He was “but an infant of twenty-four, when, being at that time one of the unemployed” he essayed to mend his “straitened fortunes” by writing his second novel, “The Irrational Knot.” It was no masterpiece, but if the few persons who glanced through it possessed prophetic eyes they must have seen in it marks of a genius rather startling. A year later came “Love Among the Artists”—a volume of nearly 500 pages. Then, in order, came “Cashel Byron’s Profession” and “An Unsocial Socialist.” Not one of these extraordinary tales struck the fancy of the publishers. “An encouraging compliment or two,” says Shaw, was his sole reward for the fatiguing labor of writing them. Not until a good while afterward did any of the five see the light, and then it was only “to fill up the gaps in socialist magazines financed by generous friends.” “An Unsocial Socialist” was the first to reach the dignity of covers. After it came “Cashel Byron’s Profession” and “The Irrational Knot.” “Love Among the Artists” was the last to appear upon the book stalls.
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.
IV
As has been noted, “Widowers’ Houses,” Shaw’s first play, was completed in 1892. It was given its initial performance during that year at the Royalty Theater, London, by the Independent Theater Company, and made a rather strenuous success. “The socialists and independents,” says Shaw, “applauded me furiously on principle; the ordinary play-going first-nighters hooted me frantically on the same ground; I, being at that time in some practice as what might be unpolitely called a mob-orator, made a speech before the curtain; the newspapers discussed the play for a whole fortnight, not only in the ordinary theatrical notices and criticisms, but in leading articles and letters; and finally the text of the play was published, with an introduction by Mr. Grein (the manager of the Independent Company), an amusing account by Mr. Archer of the original collaboration, and a long preface and several elaborate controversial appendices in the author’s most energetically egotistical fighting style.”
“The Philanderer” was written in 1893, also for the Independent Theater, and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” was completed the same year. The former was withdrawn because it was found well-nigh impossible to unearth actors capable of understanding it sufficiently to play it, and the latter remained in the manager’s desk because the virtuous English play-censor forbade its performance. Nine years later—January 12, 1902—it was presented privately by the Stage Society.