“When did you first feel inclined to write?” Shaw was once asked.
“I never felt inclined to write, any more than I ever felt inclined
to breathe,” was his perverse reply. “I felt inclined to draw:
Michelangelo was my boyish ideal. I felt inclined to be a wicked
baritone in an opera when I grew out of my earlier impulse towards
piracy and highway robbery. You see, as I couldn't draw, I was
perfectly well aware that drawing was an exceptional gift. But it never
occurred to me that my literary sense was exceptional. I gave the whole
world credit for it. The fact is, there is nothing miraculous, nothing
particularly interesting, even, in a natural faculty to the man who
has it. The amateur, the collector, the enthusiast in an art, is the
man who lacks the faculty for producing it. The Venetian wants to be
a cavalry soldier; the Gaucho wants to be a sailor; the fish wants to
fly, and the bird to swim. No, I never wanted to write. I know now, of
course, the value and the scarcity of the literary faculty (though I
think it over-rated); but I still don't want it.” And he added: “You
cannot want a thing and have it, too.”
That Shaw did want to write, however, is clearly shown by the early
outpourings of the artistic mood in the imaginative boy. When he was
quite small, he concocted a short story and sent it to some boys'
journal--something about a man with a gun attacking another man in the
Glen of the Doons. In after years, spiritual adventures fired his soul;
at this time, the gun was the centre of interest. The mimetic instinct
of childhood in his case, however, found incentives to the development
of almost every artistic faculty other than writing. His hours spent
in the National Gallery of Ireland, his study of the literature of
Italian art, filled him with the desire to be another Michelangelo;
but he couldn't draw. Like Browning, Shaw wished to be an artist, and,
like Browning also, he wished to be a musician. He heard music from
the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same; he knew whole
operas and oratorios. He wanted to be a musician, but couldn't play; to
be a dramatic singer, but had no voice. The facile conqueror of every
literary domain, mocked in later life with the accusation of being a
sort of literary Jack-of-all-trades, was only puzzled as a youth to
discover in himself a single promising potentiality.
A casual remark of an acquaintance first startled Shaw, then in his
teens, into recognition of the fact that he lacked any sort of final
consciousness in regard to his own position and destiny. The apprentice
in the land agency office, eight or ten years Shaw's senior, who sang,
“_Ah, che la morte_” with such deadly effect, one day happened to
observe that every young fellow thinks that he is going to be a great
man until he is twenty. “The shock that this gave me,” Mr. Shaw once
confessed to me with perfect naïveté, “made me suddenly aware that this
was my own precise intention. But a very brief consideration reassured
me--why, I don't know; for I could do nothing that gave me the smallest
hope of making good my calm classification of myself as one of the
world to which Shelley and Mozart and Praxiteles and Michelangelo
belonged, and as totally foreign to the plane on which land agents
laboured.”
In _Cashel Byron's Profession_, the hero, a prize-fighter, remarks that
it is not what a man would like to do, but what he can do, that he must
work at in this world. Naturally enough, Bernard Shaw, the young lad in
his teens, had not yet come to any sort of artistic self-consciousness.
Shaw may be said to have spent half of his life in the search for the
Ultima Thule of what he _could_ do. And it is by no means certain,
judging from the lesson of his career, that he has yet discovered
all of his capabilities. Certain it is that, at this formative stage
in his career, he had found only one: the ability to keep--not to
write--books. Mr. Shaw once pictured for me his state of dejection at
this time over his inefficiency and incompetence. “What was wrong with
me then was the want of self-respect, the diffidence, the cowardice
of the ignoramus and the duffer. What saved me was my consciousness
that I must learn to do something--that nothing but the possession of
skill, of efficiency, of mastery, in short, was of any use. The sort
of aplomb which my cousins seemed to derive from the consciousness that
their great-great-grandfather had also been the great-great-grandfather
of Sir Robert Shaw, of Bushy Park, was denied to me. You cannot be
imposed on by remote baronets if you belong to the republic of art. I
was chronically ashamed and even miserable simply because I couldn't do
anything. It is true that I could keep Mr. Townshend's cash, and that
I never dreamt of stealing it; and riper years have made me aware that
many of my artistic feats may be less highly estimated in the books of
the Recording Angel than this prosaic achievement; but at this time it
counted for less than nothing. It was a qualification for what I hated;
and the notion of my principal actually giving me a testimonial to my
efficiency as a cashier drove me to an exhibition of rage that must
have seemed merely perverse to my unfortunate father.”
In these days of inarticulate revolt against current religious and
social ideals, Shaw somehow found an outlet for that seething lava
of his spirit, which was one day to burst forth with such alarming
effect. This, Shaw's first published work, was the forthright letter
in _Public Opinion_, in which he sought to stem the force of the
first great Moody and Sankey revival by the announcement that he,
personally, had renounced religion as a delusion! Besides this single
public vent for his insurgency, he had found, in the friendship of a
kindred spirit of imaginative temperament, the opportunity for the
expression of all the doubts, hopes and aspirations of his eager
and revolutionary intelligence. With one of his schoolfellows, Shaw
struck up a curious friendship: this young fellow, Edward McNulty,
was afterwards known as the author of _Misther O'Ryan_, _The Son of a
Peasant_, and _Maureen_,[9] three very original and very remarkable
novels of Irish life. Both boys possessed imaginative temperaments,
and their association gave promise of ripening into close and lasting
friendship. But circumstances separated them so effectually that,
after their schooldays, they saw very little of each other. McNulty
was an official in the Bank of Ireland, and had been drafted to
the Newry branch of the institution, while Shaw, as we know, was in
Mr. Townshend's land office in Dublin. During the period of their
separation, between Shaw's fifteenth and twentieth years, they kept
up a tremendous correspondence. In this way they probably worked off
the literary energy which usually produces early works. The immense
letters, sometimes illustrated with crude drawings and enlivened by
brief dramas, which came and went with each post, served as “exhausts”
for the superfluous steam of their literary force. It was understood
between them that the letters were to be destroyed as soon as answered,
as their authors did not relish the possibility of such unreserved soul
histories falling into strange hands.
I believe that Shaw perpetrated one more long correspondence, this
time with an unnamed English lady, whose fervently imaginative novels
would have made her known, Shaw once asserted, had he been able to
persuade her to make her name public, or at least to stick to the same
pen name, instead of changing it for every book. Shaw also made one
valuable acquaintance at this time through the accident of coming to
lodge in the same house with him. This was Chichester Bell, of the
family of that name distinguished for its inventive genius, a cousin of
Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and a nephew of Melville
Bell, the inventor of the phonetic script known as Visible Speech. The
author of the _Standard Elocutionist_, Chichester Bell's father, whom
Shaw has described as by far the most majestic and imposing looking
man that ever lived on this or any other planet, was the elocution
professor in one of the schools attended by Shaw in his youth, the
Wesleyan Connexional, now Wesley College, attendance at which, we may
be sure from Shaw's case, by no means implied Methodism.[10] Although
a qualified physician, Chichester Bell did not care for medical
practice, and had gone to Germany, where he devoted himself to the
study of chemistry and physics in the school of Helmholtz. Shaw's
intercourse with Bell proved to be of great value to him. They studied
Italian together, and while Shaw did not learn Italian with any final
thoroughness, he learned a great deal else, chiefly about physics and
pathology. It was through his association with Bell that he had come
to read Tyndall and Trousseau's “Clinical Lectures.” But Bell is to be
remembered chiefly in relation to Shaw, as first calling his serious
attention to Wagner. When Shaw discovered that Bell, whose judgment he
held in high regard, considered Wagner a great composer, he at once
bought a vocal score of _Lohengrin_, which chanced to be the only
sample to be had at the Dublin music shops. From this moment dates the
career of the remarkable music critic, who, in after life, swept Max
Nordau off the field with his brilliant and unanswerable defence of the
master-builder of modern music. For the first few bars of _Lohengrin_
completely converted him. He immediately became, and ever afterwards
remained, the “Perfect Wagnerite.”
The days of Shaw's youth before he went to London, as we have seen,
were poisoned because he was taught to bow down to proprietary
respectability. But even in his “unfortunate childhood,” as he calls
it, his heart was so unregenerate that he secretly hated, and rebelled
against, mere respectability. In after life, he found it impossible
to express the relief with which he discovered that his heart was all
along right, and that the current respectability of to-day is “nothing
but a huge inversion of righteous and scientific social order weltering
in dishonesty, uselessness, selfishness, wanton misery, and idiotic
waste of magnificent opportunity for noble and happy living.” Not
the evangelist's but the true reformer's zeal was always Shaw's. He
had too much insight not to recognize the futility of the effort to
reform individuals; his humanitarian spirit was impersonal and found
its freest manifestation in fulmination and revolt against social
institutions. Concerning the unsocial system of setting class against
class, and creed against creed, he has mordantly expressed himself:
“If I had not suffered from these things in my childhood,
perhaps I could keep my temper about them. To an outsider
there is nothing but comedy in the spectacle of a forlorn
set of Protestant merchants in a Catholic country, led by
a miniature plutocracy of stockholders, doctors and land
agents, and flavoured by that section of the landed gentry
who are too heavily mortgaged to escape to London, playing at
being a court and an aristocracy with the assistance of the
unfortunate exile who has been persuaded to accept the post
of lord-lieutenant. To this pretence, involving a prodigious
and continual lying, as to incomes and the social standing of
relations, are sacrificed citizenship, self-respect, freedom
of thought, sincerity of character, and all the realities of
life, its votaries gaining in return the hostile estrangement
of the great mass of their fellow countrymen, and in their own
class the supercilious snubs of those who have outdone them
in pretension and the jealous envy of those whom they have
outdone.”
The power which he found in Ireland religious enough to redeem him from
this abomination of desolation was, fitly enough, the power of art. “My
mother, as it happened, had a considerable musical talent. In order to
exercise it seriously she had to associate with other people who had
musical talent. My first childish doubt as to whether God could really
be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable
fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother's
in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed
to Roman Catholics. Even the divine gentility was presently called in
question, for some of these vocalists were undeniably connected with
retail trade.”
The situation in which Mrs. Shaw found herself offered no alternative.
“There was no help for it; if my mother was to do anything but sing
silly ballads in drawing-rooms she had to associate herself on an
entirely republican footing with people of like artistic gifts, without
the smallest reference to creed or class. Nay, if she wished to take
part in the masses of Haydn and Mozart, which had not then been
forgotten, she must actually permit herself to be approached by Roman
Catholic priests and even, at their invitation, to enter that house
of Belial, the Roman Catholic chapel (in Ireland the word church, as
applied to a place of worship, denotes the Protestant denomination),
and take part in their services. All of which led directly to the
discovery, hard to credit at first, that a Roman Catholic priest could
be as agreeable and cultivated a person as a Protestant clergyman was
supposed, in defiance of bitter experience, always to be; and, in
short, that the notion that the courtly distinctions of Dublin society
corresponded to any real human distinctions was as ignorant as it was
pernicious. If religion is that which binds men to one another, and
irreligion that which sunders, then must I testify that I found the
religion of my country in its musical genius and its irreligion in its
churches and drawing-rooms.”
It was unerring common sense on the domestic plane, acquiescence in
the sole solution of a flinty problem of life, which reveals Shaw's
mother to us as the parent from whom he derived his determination,
and his firm grip on practical affairs. In marked contradistinction
to Lee, Mrs. Shaw made no concessions to fashion, firmly adhering
to her master's old method in all its rigour. She behaved with
complete independence of manner and speech in the mode of an Irish
lady confronted with English people openly describing themselves as
“middle-class.” On account of this characteristic independence her
first experiences in London were unfortunate and disheartening. Not
until she began to teach choirs in schools did she enter upon the road
of complete success. The results she produced in these undertakings
so pleased the inspectors--and more particularly the parents at the
prize distributions--that the head mistresses were sensible enough to
let her go her own way. Quite a conclusive proof of her ability is
found in the fact that this remarkable woman, vigorous and young-minded
to-day although now in the seventies, worked at that famous modern
institution, the North Collegiate School for Girls, until quite
recently. For some years she sought to retire for the same reason that
she stopped singing: to her Irish sense of humour there was an element
almost of the ridiculous in a first-rate school having an old woman of
between seventy and eighty wave a stick and conduct a choir. But D.
Sophia Bryant, the principal and an old friend of hers, could not see
her way to change for the better, and it was only within the last year
or two that Mrs. Shaw retired from her post. No doubt Mrs. Bryant was
right; for Mr. Shaw once remarked to me that it was not an easy matter
to find a woman in England who perfectly combines the ability to take
command in music with the knowledge of music as an artist, and not as a
school-mistress who has superficially studied the subject for the sake
of the certificates and the position.
Mr. Shaw's mother is the most remarkably youthful person for her
years I have ever known, with the possible exception of Mark Twain.
I remember with vivid pleasure taking tea with her and her son one
afternoon at her attractive little “retreat” in West London. Her eyes
danced with suppressed mirth as she talked, and it was quite easy to
see from whom her son derived his strong sense of humour. Mrs. Shaw
told several delightful stories, one of which deserves repetition here.
It seems that Mrs. Shaw is quite a medium and spiritualist, and takes a
great deal of interest in communicating with “spirits” from the other
world. One day she “called up” Mr. Shaw's sister and asked her what she
thought of George being such a distinguished man. The spirit expressed
surprise to hear the news. “But aren't you very proud of George?”
queried his mother disappointedly. “Oh, yes,” replied the spirit; “it's
all very well in its way. But,” she added, “that sort of thing doesn't
count for anything up here”!
Many of Mr. Shaw's very distinctive traits are a direct inheritance
from his mother, modified, to be sure, by the differences in
education, temperament and views of life. In her teaching of music,
Mrs. Shaw deliberately displayed total insensibility to the petty
dignities so cherished in English school-life. Upon visiting rectors,
head mistresses, local “personages,” and, in fact, upon all those
who wished things done their own way, she made what her son called
“perfectly indiscriminate onslaughts.” This aggressive assertion of
her authority would often have made her position untenable, had it
not been for her patent ability and unquestioned power of leadership.
Her outspoken frankness of manner and conduct, reproduced with such
comically extravagant excess in her son, always won her the support of
the discriminating: it was always the real “bigwigs” who understood
her manners. Mr. Shaw once said: “From my mother I derive my brains
and character, which do her credit.” I remember asking Mr. Shaw's
mother one day to what she attributed her son's remarkable success in
the world of letters. “Oh,” she said, without a moment's hesitation,
her eyes twinkling merrily the while, “the answer is quite simple. Of
course, he owes it all to me.”
To his parents, his mother in particular, Mr. Shaw is also indebted
for actual financial support during several years of an able-bodied
young manhood. But he has warned us against supposing, because he is
a man of letters, that he never tried to commit that “sin against his
nature” called earning an honest living. We have followed his struggles
from his fifteenth to his twentieth year--a period marking a social
and spiritual growth on his part, he maintains, of several centuries.
“I was born on the outskirts of an Irish city, where we lived exactly
as people lived in the seventeenth century, except that there were
gas-lamps and policemen in tall hats. In the course of my boyhood
literature and music introduced me to the eighteenth century; and I was
helped a step further through the appearance in our house of candles
that did not need snuffing, an iron-framed pianoforte and typhoid
sanitation. Finally, I crossed St. George's Channel into the decadence
of the mid-nineteenth-century England of Anthony Trollope, and
slowly made my way to the forefront of the age--the period of Ibsen,
Nietzsche, the Fabian Society, the motor-car, and my own writings.”
Very slowly indeed did he make his way to the forefront of the age of
Shavianism. He felt that he was a man of genius, and coolly classified
himself as such. With no effort of the imagination, and, likewise,
with no prevision of his subsequent oft-repeated failures and the
position of pecuniary dependence he was temporarily to occupy, he found
himself looking upon London as his destiny. There is something at once
amusing, inspiring, and pathetic in the spectacle of this bashful, raw,
inexperienced boy, fortified only by the confident consciousness of
his yet unproved superiority to the “common run” of humanity, throwing
himself thus headlong into London.
Little of romantic glamour, fittingly enough, attaches to Shaw's
early struggles in London. No rapt listening to the songs of rival
nightingales, Keats and Shelley, as with Browning; no impetuous and
clandestine marriage, as with Sheridan; no roses and raptures of
_la vie Bohème_, as with Zola. It is, instead, for the most part
a tale of consistent literary drudgery, rewarded by continual and
repeated failures. The rare and individual style of the satirist, the
deft fingering of the dramatist were wholly undeveloped, and even
unsuspected, during this tentative period in his career. He turned his
hand to various undertakings--to musical criticism, to versifying, to
blank-versifying, to novel-writing; but all equally to no purpose.
Asked once what was his first real success, he replied: “Never had
any. Success in that sense is a thing that comes to you and takes your
breath away. What came to me was invariably failure. By the time I
wore it down I knew too much to care about either failure or success.
Life is like a battle; you have to fire a thousand bullets to hit one
man. I was too busy firing to bother about the scoring. As to whether
I ever despaired, you will find somewhere in my works this line:
'He who has never hoped can never despair.' I am not a fluctuator.”
His self-sufficiency, even at this time, was proof against all
discouragement. Perhaps he found consolation also in the saying: “He
who is down need fear no fall.”
Shaw never experienced any poverty of spirit, of determination, or of
will; his poverty was pecuniary only. Until the time of his marriage
he remained secure from the accusation of being the mould of fashion
or the glass of form. While the Shaw of matrimonial respectability
bears all the marks of his wife's civilizing influence in the matter
of a _costume de rigueur_--fashionable clothes, patent-leather boots,
and even, on rare occasions, a “stiff” collar--his dress in the late
seventies and for twenty years thereafter was usually, like that of
Marchbanks, strikingly anarchic. His outward appearance, as someone
unkindly remarked, suggested that he might be a fairly respectable
plasterer! “Now,” said Shaw in 1896, “when people reproach me with
the unfashionableness of my attire, they forget that to me it seems
like the raiment of Solomon in all his glory by contrast with the
indescribable seediness of those days, when I trimmed my cuffs to
the quick with scissors, and wore a tall hat and _soi-disant_ black
coat, green with decay.” But the poverty of which this attire was the
outward, visible sign was “shortness of cash,” as numerous personal
reminiscences show. From the depressing and devitalizing effects of
“real poverty” he was strong enough to free himself, as the following
autobiographical confidence clearly evidences:
“Whilst I am not sure that the want of money lames a poor man
more than the possession of it lames a rich one, I am quite
sure that the class which has the pretensions and prejudices
and habits of the rich without its money, and the poverty of
the poor without the freedom to avow poverty--in short, the
people who don't go to the theatre because they cannot afford
the stalls and are ashamed to be seen in the gallery--are the
worst-off of all. To be on the down grade from the _haute
bourgeoisie_ and the landed gentry to the nadir at which the
younger son's great-grandson gives up the struggle to keep
up appearances; to have the pretence of a culture without
the reality of it; to make three hundred pounds a year look
like eight hundred pounds in Ireland or Scotland; or five
hundred pounds look like one thousand pounds in London; to
be educated neither at the Board School and the Birkbeck
nor at the University, but at some rotten private adventure
academy for the sons of gentlemen; to try to maintain a select
circle by excluding all the frankly poor people from it, and
then find that all the rest of the world excludes you--that
is poverty at its most damnable; and yet from that poverty
a great deal of our literature and journalism has sprung.
Think of the frightful humiliation of the boy Dickens in
the blacking warehouse, and his undying resentment of his
mother's wanting him to stay there--all on a false point of
genteel honour. Think of Trollope, at an upper-class school
with holes in his trousers, because his father could not bring
himself to dispense with a man-servant. Ugh! Be a tramp or be
a millionaire--it matters little which: what _does_ matter
is being a poor relation of the rich; and that is the very
devil. Fortunately, that sort of poverty can be cured by simply
shaking off its ideas--cutting your coat according to your
cloth, and not according to the cloth of your father's second
cousin, the baronet. As I was always more or less in rebellion
against those ideas, and finally shook them off pretty
completely, I cannot say that I have much experience of real
poverty--quite the contrary.”[11]
With that comic seriousness which always passes for outrageous
prevarication, Shaw has related that during the nine years from 1876
to 1885 his adventures in literature netted him the princely sum of
exactly six pounds. At first he “devilled” for a musical critic; but
his notices “led to the stoppage of all the concert advertisements
and ruined the paper”--“which died--partly of me.” He also began a
Passion Play in blank verse, with the mother of the hero represented as
a termagant. Ah, if that play had only been finished! But Shaw never
carried through these customary follies of young authors, unless we
agree with those who classify his novels as follies of a green boy. “I
was always, fortunately for me,” Mr. Shaw once remarked, “a failure as
a trifler. All my attempts at Art for Art's sake broke down; it was
like hammering tenpenny nails into sheets of notepaper.”
One finds it an easy matter to believe him when he tells us, not only
that he was provincial, unpresentable, but, more broadly speaking, that
he was in an impossible position. “I was a foreigner--an Irishman,
the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the
University mill. I was ... not uneducated; but, unfortunately, what I
knew was exactly what the educated Englishman did not know, and what he
knew--I either didn't know or didn't believe.” Six pounds was a very
small allowance for a growing young man, even a struggling author, to
live on for nine years. Even if we match him with equal scepticism, at
least we can discover, as will be seen, no error in his arithmetical
calculations. After Shaw had hounded the musical critic and his paper
to the grave, London absolutely refused to tolerate him on any terms.
As the nine years progressed, he had one article accepted by Mr. G.
R. Sims, who had just started a short-lived paper called _One and
All_. “It brought me fifteen shillings. Full of hope and gratitude,
I wrote a really brilliant contribution. That finished me.” During
this period, he received his greatest fee--five pounds--for a patent
medicine advertisement, a circumstance which may give some colour to
Dr. Meyerfeld's early denunciation of Shaw as a “quacksalver.” On
another occasion, a publisher asked Shaw for some verses to fit some
old blocks which he had bought up for a school prize book. “I wrote a
parody of the thing he wanted and sent it as a joke. To my stupefaction
he thanked me seriously, and paid me five shillings.” Shaw was so much
touched by the gift of five shillings for his parody that he wrote
the generous publisher a serious verse for another picture. With the
startling result that the publisher took it as a joke in questionable
taste! Is it any wonder that Shaw's career as a versifier abruptly
ended?
The analysis of the artistic temperament which Shaw puts in the mouth
of John Tanner--an analysis which Mr. Robert Loraine finds to smack
more of mania than of insincerity--is a cynical and distorted picture
at best. And yet it gives us a refracted glimpse of the position which
Shaw himself deliberately assumed. “The true artist,” Tanner rattles
on, “will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother
drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but
his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into
intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of
convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that
they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue
him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams,
to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do
this for their own purpose, whilst he really means them to do it for
his.” After various attempts “to earn an honest living,” Shaw gave up
trying to commit that sin against his nature, as he puts it. His last
attempt was in 1879, we are told, “when a company was formed in London
to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison--a much too
ingenious invention, as it proved, being nothing less than a telephone
of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private
communications all over the house instead of whispering them with
some sort of discretion.” His interest in physics, his acquaintance
with the works of Tyndall and Helmholtz, and his friendship with Mr.
Chichester Bell, of which mention has been made, gave him, he asserts,
the customary superiority over those about him which he is in the habit
of claiming in all the relations of life. While he remained with the
company only a few months, he discharged his duties in a manner, which,
according to his own outrageous and comically prevaricative assertion,
“laid the foundation of Mr. Edison's London reputation.”
After this experience, he began, as he says, to lay the foundations
of his own fortune “by the most ruthless disregard of all the quack
duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to the White House, and
harness the real peasant boy to the plough until he is finally swept,
as rubbish, into the workhouse.” Far from being a “peasant lad,” who
climbed manfully upward from the lowest rung of the social ladder, he
was in reality the son of a gentleman who had an income of at least
three figures (four, if you count in dollars instead of pounds),
and was second cousin to a baronet. “I never climbed any ladder: I
have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby warn all
peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding
their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity so
dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own bad novels.”
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.
[Illustration: =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.
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:
“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.
[10] Cf. _John Bull's Other Island_; Preface for Politicians, p. xvii.
[11] _Who I Am, and What I Think_, by G. Bernard Shaw. Part I.--In the
_Candid Friend_, May 11th, 1901.
[12] _The Irrational Knot_, Preface to the American edition of 1905,
Brentanos, N. Y.
[13] _Cf._ Chapter IV., _The Fabian Society_.
[14] The _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 28th, 1888.
[15] _The Religion of the Pianoforte._ In the _Fortnightly Review_,
February, 1894.
[16] Mr. Shaw's confessions in regard to his change from “cannibalism”
to vegetarianism are perhaps best given in an article in the _Pall
Mall Gazette_ for January 26th, 1886, entitled, _Failures of Inept
Vegetarians. By an Expert._
[17] For a brief and illuminative biographical sketch of James Leigh
Joynes, compare Shaw's review of his book, _Songs of a Revolutionary
Epoch_, in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 16th, 1888.
[18] The first instalment of _An Unsocial Socialist_ appeared in
_To-Day_, a “monthly magazine of Scientific Socialism,” New Series,
Vol. I. (January-June, 1884), March number, pp. 205-220. The final
instalment appeared in New Series, Vol. II., of the same magazine
(July-December, 1884), December number, pp. 543-579. The novel appeared
under Shaw's name, and is marked at the close (page 579), “The End,”
and dated beneath, “London, 1883,” the date of composition. _Cashel
Byron's Profession_ ran in the same magazine through the years 1885 and
1886, beginning in New Series, Vol. III. (January-June, 1885), April
number, pp. 145-160, and concluding in Vol. V. (January-June, 1886),
March number, pp. 67-73.
[19] _The Irrational Knot_ began in Vol. V. (January-June, 1885), pp.
229-240, ran through Vols. VI., VII. and VIII., and was concluded in
Vol. IX. (January-June, 1887), ending on page 82. _Love Among the
Artists_ opened in Vol. X. (July-December, 1887) of the same magazine,
ran through Vol. XI., and was concluded in Vol. XII. (July-December,
1888), on page 352. It is marked at the close (page 352), “The End,
London, 1881”--the date of composition.
[20] Published, in part, in _The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson_,
Vol. II., edited by Sidney Colvin.
[21] The _New York Herald_ contained the statement that “Brentanos have
done a service to literature in reprinting two of Shaw's novels that
are strangely unfamiliar to the American public.”
[22] This book was published in 1900, followed in 1901 by the
“Authorized Edition” of _Cashel Byron's Profession_ (also published
by H. S. Stone and Co.), which contains the above-quoted remark. In
the autumn of 1901, Grant Richards, at the time the English publisher
of almost all of Mr. Shaw's works, also brought out a revised edition
of _Cashel Byron's Profession_. In the autumn of 1904 _The Irrational
Knot_ was for the first time published in book form by Archibald
Constable and Co., Mr. Shaw's English publishers at present. In 1905
_The Irrational Knot_ was published in America by Brentanos.
[23] On publishing his _Cashel Byron's Profession_, Harper and Brothers
sent Mr. Shaw ten pounds in recognition of his moral right as an
author to share any profits the book might yield. There were then no
international copyright laws in force, and the works of foreign authors
were not protected in America. When Mr. Shaw learned that this same
book had been republished by another American house, he sent back to
Harper and Brothers the ten pounds, with thanks for its use, explaining
that since the book had been republished by another firm, even his
moral claim to recognition by the original American publishers had
lapsed.
THE NOVELIST
“London was not ripe for me. Nor was I ripe for London. I was
in an impossible position. I was a foreigner--an Irishman, the
most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the
University mill. I was ... not uneducated; but, unfortunately,
what I knew was exactly what the educated Englishman didn't
know or didn't believe.”--_George Bernard Shaw: an Interview._
In _The Chap-Book_, November, 1896.