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.