which very few people have. " Better see rightly
on a pound a week than squint on a million/' he says.
In 1879 a friend induced him to turn from art for a
few weeks. The Edison Telephone Company were
trying to establish a new invention, and Shaw some-
times took the place of the regular lecturer on its
merits. The American artisans he met in the base-
ment in Queen Victoria Street reappear in the Conolly
and Straker of his later work, but his engagement
was short. He returned to letters and Osnaburgh
Street. His father needed his help, and a self-support-
ing mother could hardly be expected to nourish a
strapping son of twenty-three, but Shaw returned to
12 BERNARD SHAW
a way of life in which he would need their aid and
" without a blush embraced the monstrosity." The
good young man of normal tradition would have
carried parcels or blacked boots. " I did not throw
myself into the struggle for life," Shaw says ; " I
threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my
father's old age : I hung on to his coat tails." The
biographer can do no more than murmur in trite
language : All's well that ends well. He began to
write novels, and soon learned that even fiction-readers
were discriminating. His first story was, " with
merciless fitness," entitled " Immaturity." It still
exists, in its worn brown-paper covering, partly
devoured by mice, " but even they have been unable
to finish it." Somewhere its author says that it is
" hardly a work I should be well advised in letting
loose whilst my livelihood depends on my credit as a
literary workman." Even the success in the United
States of its four successors has not tempted him to
part with it.
The four succeeding novels which he wrote in 1880
to 1883 will be examined presently. Meantime, while
he was perfecting his craft by a severe restriction to
writing only five pages a day and living on the maternal
sixpences, he came into contact with thoughtful
Londoners and gathered the material of his philosophy
of life. He preserved his passport of gentility — his
dress-suit — and while his appearance during the day
sank from level to level of disreputability, he could
cut a handsome figure at night. During the day he
spent solitary hours in the National Gallery or the
British Museum. Why trouble about money when
he was part owner of such treasures of literature and
art ? In the evening he had pleasant invitations,
for amateur singers liked his accompaniment ; so
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 13
he says, and it is doubtless true, but one imagines
that he could also talk. Something of his experience
is, no doubt, reproduced in the opening of his second
novel, " The Irrational Knot," where a workman
with musical talent is asked to join middle-class folk
in giving a philanthropic concert. His biographer,
Dr Henderson, says that Shaw has put into the
philanderer Charteris a little of the mental attitude
induced in himself by early experience of women.
It suggests that the tall, sandy-haired Shaw of his
twenties, with fine ironic blue eyes and a caustic
tongue, had personal reason to frame his philosophy
of woman as the pursuer of man. He was, however,
ascetic by temperament, and his circumstances were
starving the little healthy sensuality he had brought
from Ireland. He was being forced into that peculiar -
combination of morality in practice and immorality
in principle which distinguishes him.
This intercourse with middle-class London did more
than furnish the material of the fierce generalisations
and dramatic characters of his later work. It intro-
duced him into the living intellectualism of that
stirring age. It was the height of the period of J. S.
Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Clifford, George Eliot :
a time when new ideas about religion, economics,
morals, politics, and everything that the earl}' Vic-
torian age had definitely settled, were spreading like a
fever through adolescent London. Little circles gathered
in sitting-rooms and small halls, and defiant debates
were held. The Agnosticism of Huxley and Spencer
and Darwin was applauded, and the ethical culture
which the new spiritual directors of England would
substitute for the Christian ethic was boldly derided,
to their extreme concern. There was more republican-
ism and more anti-moralism in London in the early
14 BERNARD SHAW
eighties than there is to-day. Prominent and popular
writers or speakers lived, comfortably or ascetically,
with women to whom they were not married.
One of the most rebellious of these centres of sedition
was the Zetetical Society, which met in Long Acre.
I had occasion, in writing the life of Holyoake, to run
over some of its announcements and realise its terrible
ambitions. All the panaceas of the eighties, which
had succeeded the panaceas of the forties, were dis-
cussed in it : agnosticism, radicalism, the emancipation
of woman, evolution, the destruction of morality, and
so on. The men and women who met there were gener-
ally followers of J. S. Mill : the saint of rationalism,
the idol of women, the hope of the radicals, and the
discreet encourager of rebellion against sex-morality.
In 1879 a friend took Shaw to a meeting of this society,
and he found it congenial. There was a Captain
Wilson who denounced morals as a device of Christian-
ity for the enslavement of people, and a learned Scot
named Stuart Glennie who held that the Christian
ethic was a narcotic which the white races adminis-
tered to the coloured. The members were generally
opponents of Christianity, which was riddled with
Darwinian arrows and lacerated with Nietzschean
scorn (though Nietzsche was then unknown) in the
debates. Social and economic questions also were
discussed, but on the sober lines of Mill's political
economy.
This atmosphere thoroughly agreed with Shaw,
and he joined the society at once and assisted in
the battering of Christian doctrines and morals. His
associates were well-read men and women, and he was
stimulated to read. Sidney Webb was a member of
the group, and it was at this period that Shaw entered
into a life-long association with the economist. Shaw
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 15
began to articulate his own " atheism " and other
heresies, but found that public speaking was not with
him a natural art. With characteristic resolution
he learned to speak easily and forcibly, and struggled
with hi^ nervousness at meeting after meeting until
it disappeared.
The peep into subterranean London encouraged
him, and he began to attend all sorts of meetings.
He still cultivated music and enjoyed paintings,
and he plodded grimly by day through his scheme of
novels. At night he wandered in search of open doors,
wherever some heresy was preached, and one evening,
toward the close of 1882, when he was writing " Cashel
Byron's Profession," he was drawn to the Memorial
Hall in Farringdon Street. Henry George was visiting
Europe, and he had been excellently advertised by
the authorities ; they had arrested him in Ireland a
few months before. That evening was critical in
Shaw's career. No doubt, he was bound to turn
sooner or later from the intellectual issues of the
Zetetical Society to the vast problem of poverty, but
it was Henry George who gave him the first fiery
interest in it. The eloquence and clear dogmatism
of the enthusiast carried him away. He bought
George's book and became convinced that the remedy
of the gravest evil in the world was exquisitely simple
— Henry George's single tax — and London must be
made to see it. All that festering mass of squalor
which then (and partly now) surrounded the debating
room in Long Acre could be abolished by an Act of
Parliament.
He joined the Land Reform Union, and met new
friends : educated middle-class men, like himself,
with a high-principled hostility to the unequal dis-
tribution of wealth and the trappings which wealthy
16 BERNARD SHAW
people wore. An Eton master, J. L. Joynes, had been
arrested with Henry George, and had been forced
to leave Eton. Another master, Henry Salt, the
well-known humanitarian and writer on Shelley,
voluntarily retired and practised the simple life in
a Surrey cottage. Edward Carpenter was of the
group of sandal-wearers and water-drinkers. H. H.
Champion, now a genial guide of literary taste at the
Antipodes, had thrown up a commission in the army
to enlist in the war against poverty. Sidney Olivier
(now Sir Sidney, recently Governor of Jamaica — then
a civil servant), Stewart Headlam (a prominent
representative of the new High-Broad-Church Socialist
clergy), and others, were more or less connected.
Shaw, who had a slender knowledge of economics and
a large acquaintance with poverty, turned from
Darwinism and his other intellectual issues to the new
panacea, and became an ardent propagandist.
In tracing the growth of his ideas one must attach
great importance to these new associations. The
single tax would be represented, in his own peculiar
language, as a mere trick of the Life-Force to lead
him to higher things. The asceticism and humanita-
rianism of the new group would make a deeper im-
pression. The simple abstemious habits which his
poverty imposed on him seem to have been made
easy by a personal disposition to asceticism, but they
now became a philosophy. Plain living and high
thinking was, literally, the ideal of the group. They
introduced Shaw to Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and
Shelley ; he attended a meeting of the Shelley Society,
and the infant society was almost shattered when a
dour, badly-dressed figure, with straggling sandy
beard and other features of the typical " wild Irish-
man," got up and said that he was, " like Shelley,' 5
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 17
an atheist, a Socialist, and a vegetarian. It was at
this period he adopted vegetarianism, the ravages
of which his robust constitution has admirably resisted
for thirty years.
Some of the most singular features of his creed
were fixed at this time. The Neo-Pagan of the nine-
teenth century generally became, like the ancient
Pagan, either a Stoic or an Epicurean. As the most
prominent character of the Stoic is a profound and
almost unreasoning reverence for natural moral law,
Shaw certainly cannot be described as a Stoic. On
the other hand, it was easy to persuade himself, in
his circumstances and with his simple tastes, that to
set up happiness or pleasure as the supreme aim was
hoggish, and this was supposed to be the essence of
Epicureanism. In point of fact, these simple-life
colonies are the nearest approach in modern times
to the intellectual conversations, over simple cakes
and water, which Epicurus loved to arrange in his
garden on the outskirts of Athens. The Roman
luxury and banquets which St Augustine taught
Europe to regard as " Epicurean " are the widest
possible departure from the ideal of the great Greek.
However, though there was more boisterous fun
among the simple-lifers than there had ever been in
the Epicurean garden, they persuaded themselves
that happiness was a by-product of a healthy life ;
such men as Shaw and Carpenter united what most
people would call the utmost license in opinions to
the utmost severity in practice, and a free-spoken
scorn of moral law to an ardent passion for justice
and other moral qualities. At a later date Shaw would
find a philosophy which would, in his opinion, bring
consistency into these attitudes. First he had to break
entirely with the rationalism of the Zetetical Society.
18 BERNARD SHAW
From the later work of Henry Salt and Edward
Carpenter we may conclude that the new message of
science was already regarded with some suspicion as
encouraging cruelty. It talked of a bloody struggle
for life as a fundamental law of planetary existence,
defended vivisection and vaccination, and so on.
But it was the further development of his Socialist
feeling which completed Shaw's aversion from science
and put him in the peculiar and isolated position
which he still occupies : the position of one who is
opposed with equal vehemence to Christianity and
to Rationalism.
Socialism was at that time entering upon a new
phase in England. The earlier system of Robert
Owen, which had been called Socialism, had fallen
into disfavour, and Owen had died in complete
obscurity. The work of reform had been divided
among a number of special movements (Co-operation,
Trade Unionism, Arbitration, Education, etc.), and
revolutionary feeling was in abeyance, especially after
what were called the horrors of French Communism
in 1871. Now the eloquence of Ferdinand Lassalle
and the learning of Karl Marx were imposing a new
Socialism on Europe, and a number of impatient
middle-class Londoners were translating it into
English. A new panacea was discovered, and (as in
every previous case) this time it was the real panacea.
Marx's theory of surplus value had given the first
scientific diagnosis of social disease, it was said, and
his cry of a " class war " was loudly repeated over
Europe — very largely by men who (like Marx and
Lassalle) themselves belonged to the middle class.
In England these elements were chiefly gathered
in the Social Democratic Federation, in which middle-
class men like H. M. Hyndman and Belfort Bax and
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 19
H. H. Champion and W. Morris joined with John
Burns and other rebellious working men. They
smiled at the enthusiasm of the followers of Henry
George, and the train of zeal or indignation which his
lectures left in England swept large numbers into
their Federation, where a more drastic remedy was
urged in more lurid language. The conversion of
Shaw is typical of what was happening. He went
to a meeting of the Social Democrats, and, at question
time, rose to ask why they were wasting time instead
of pressing the plain remedy prescribed by George.
He was greeted with a laugh and told to read Karl
Marx. Thorough in everything, he had bought and
studied George's book, " Progress and Poverty," at
the close of the lecture in the Memorial Hall ; he
now went to the Museum and studied Karl Marx.
" Das Kapital " is one of the most impressive books
that can be put into the hands of a thoughtful young
man with plenty of rebellious feeling and not too much
knowledge of economics. Its apparently rigorous
logic seems to provide a most solid foundation for the
class- war which it recommends. Shaw read and was
convinced. " From that hour," he says, " I became
a man with some business in the world." Huxley's
Gadarene swine, and Bradlaugh's atheism, and Mill's
emancipation of woman, and all the issues he had
debated in the Zetetical Society, seemed pale and
bloodless. The charm of the Socialist ideal is in
the simplicity of the formula and the complexity and
comprehensiveness of the supposed result. It was
fascinating to think that one bold revolution would
transform the face of the world for ever.
In later years Shaw said that what chiefly won and
inflamed him in Marx's book was the attack on the
middle class. He came in a few years to regard both
20 BERNARD SHAW
the theory of surplus value and the cry for a class-war
as fallacious, but the general attack on the middle
class fell in with and encouraged his own mood. He
did not in the least share the illusion of virtuous
Lazarus and wicked Dives. He had already (in 1880)
written " The Irrational Knot," in which the artisan
Conolly says to the middle-class man : —
" Although a workman, I don't look on every gentle-
man as a bloodsucker who seizes on the fruits of
my labour only to pursue a career of vice. I will even
admit that there are gentlemen who deserve to be
respected more than the workmen who have neglected
all their opportunities — slender as they are — of
cultivating themselves a little. You, on the other
hand, know that an honest man is the noblest work
of God ; that nature's gentlemen are the only real
gentlemen ; that kind hearts are more than coronets
and simple faith than Norman blood, and so forth.
But when your approval of these benevolent clap-
traps is brought to such a practical test as the marriage
of your sister to a workman, you see clearly enough
that they do not establish the suitability of personal
intercourse between members of different classes."
Workmen, of course, do not talk like that, but
Shaw did, long before he heard of Socialism. He had
closely observed, and lightly disdained, the American
workers in the employment of the Edison Telephone
Company ; and he had seen and disdained the ways
of the middle class from his earliest years. In
London he had found the same prejudices and stupi-
dities as in Dublin : social pretence, religious bigotry,
moral insincerity, political inanity. He was in the
mood of Samuel Butler, his chief inspirer, whose
" Erewhon " had been published ten years before.
Karl Marx crowned the iniquity of the wealthy and
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 21
the middle class for him by apparently showing
that they maintained all this wasteful folly by the
economic trick of filching the surplus value of the
products of labour.
I deal fully in later chapters with the development
of his Socialism and his philosophy and art, and
would merely trace here, in general terms, the relation
of his growth to his circumstances. It is a point on
which he has never been consistent. He insists in
1903 (" Man and Superman ") that " the bubble of
heredity has been pricked," meaning that the theory
of Weismann has triumphed, and environment has
nothing like the importance which the earlier theory
assigned to it ; and in 1904 (" John Bull's Other
Island ") he insists that the Irish character is wholly
a matter of environment. His inconsistencies, and
the foolish claim of some of his admirers that we
cannot expect a witty man to be consistent, may
be considered later. The fact is that his own
philosophy steadily grows with the changes of his
external circumstances.
The new Socialism brought new friends — Graham
Wallas, William Archer, Hubert Bland, William
Morris, etc. — and new activity, as will be told presently.
He flung himself ardently into the propaganda of
Socialism, and was as fierce and optimistic as the
rawest recruit to any extreme body. Indirectly, as
well as by persuading him that his earlier interests
were trivial in comparison with this sacred campaign,
this new and absorbing fervour pressed him further
in the direction of his peculiar philosophy of life. _
His earlier friends, and Freethinkers like Bradlaugh
and Foote, were opposed to Socialism on Darwinian
as well as economic grounds. The free struggle of
individuals and survival of the fittest was said to be
22 BERNARD SHAW
the supreme law of the development of living things.
So much the worse for Darwinism, Shaw concluded.
This cruel and wasteful struggle could not be an
essential law of life. He looked to rival theorists, who
were not Christians, and found a learned and congenial
guide in Samuel Butler, whose wit, sarcasm, and
disdain of conventional rules and practices very
stronglv recommended him. Butler was just then
conducting the last campaign of any ability against
Darwinism, and Shaw certainly read and reviewed
his " Luck or Cunning " in 1887. He took the side
of Butler, contemptuously called the Darwinians
" materialists," and adopted the position of a bitterly
anti-rationalist atheist, with as profound a disdain
of science as an uneducated Wesleyan minister. I
will state the grounds of his position more fully at a
later stage, and wish here only to indicate the historical
development. If any man ever did " parthenogeneti-
cally bring forth a complete original cosmogony," it
was not Mr Shaw.
In 1885 he made the acquaintance of William Archer,
who persuaded him to turn from his futile novel-
writing to journalism. In the next phase of his life
he was to be devoted to art-criticism, leading by
accident to dramatic production, and the propagation
of Socialism. Meantime, some of the five novels he
had written between 1879 and 1883 were published,
and one examines them with interest for traces — such
traces as may be discoverable in a work of fiction —
of a reflection of his mental development. Champion
and other Socialists bought the periodical called
To-day and used it for propagating advanced ideas.
Shaw says that the editors of the many little periodicals
which struggled against bankruptcy at that idealist
period were in the habit of printing their friends'
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 23
efforts at fiction and poetry, in order to ease the
treasury, and so he came to find a publisher at last,
though not payment. He gave Champion the last
and, presumably, best of his five manuscripts, and
" The Unsocial Socialist " went out to bewilder their
small public, in 1884. " Cashel Byron's Profession "
followed in 1885, and Mrs Besant published " The
Irrational Knot " and " Love among the Artists " in
Our Corner. It will, however, be better to notice, the
works in the order of their origin.
In introducing the novels to a wider public, years
afterwards, Shaw complained that he had " lost the
impudence of the apprentice without gaining the skill
of the master." He calls them " very green things,
very carefully written." Most critics agree with
him, though some believe that he would have become
famous as a novelist. It is not improbable that,
although dramatic talent is clearer from the start
than a gift for writing novels, he would have won a
large circle of admirers as a novelist when his con-
ception of work was fully developed. Fifteen years
ago he recommended to me as the first rule of writing :
" Take the utmost care that what you have to say
is correct, and then dash it down as frivolously as you
can." His earlier novels were certainly not written
on this recipe. What he had to say was largely in-
correct, and the way in which he said it was too
laboured. If you confine yourself to writing five
folios a day, you can hardly be frivolous. Great
artists like Zola and Phillpotts have imposed this
severe restraint on themselves, but Shaw was too
inexperienced to conceal the labour.
He improves from year to year in this respect,
though even the fifth novel is, as such, very defective,
But a graver defect is the reflection of his lonely,
U BERNARD SHAW
brooding life and narrow experience. His power and
use of observation are obviously great, but his range
is limited. In the third novel, as he remarks, he
assigns his wealthy heroine a park of thirty acres,
imagining that this means an estate about the size
of the Isle of Wight. In describing such a world he
was " like a peasant in a drawing-room." He knows
little more about the workers (who are hardly noticed) ,
and his picture of the middle class is enlarged by a
liberal use of a brooding and malicious imagination.
He admits that he knew little of English life, though
the works were " not wholly a compound of intuition
and ignorance." His characters, especially women,
are often bloodless, theoretical constructions ; often
(as in his later work) very exceptional persons pressed
on us as types. Yet the works contain an ample pro-
mise of the wit, shrewd observation, caustic reflection,
and humorous exaggeration, and some of the paradox
and epigram, that distinguish his later work.
His first novel, " Immaturity," has never seen the
light, as I said. The second, written in 1880, was
called " The Irrational Knot," a study of marriage
in the very common form of depicting an unhappy
and incongruous marriage. A smart American artisan,
a superior Straker, attracts the affection of a young
lady of the upper middle class — by some means which
the novel does not make clear — and, when an inven-
tion enriches him, marries her. Conolly is a mixture
of Bernard Shaw and the American worker he had
studied in Queen Victoria Street : a super-workman.
At times he talks pure Shavianese and acts with
heroic disregard of the sentimental conventions.
When his wife tires of his frigid bluntness, and elopes
with an amorous noodle, he behaves as if his errand-
boy had stolen twopence. He is depicted as an
THE MAKING OF A REBEL 25
amateur musician who mixes with, and studies, the
middle class at musical evenings. Hence the story is
far from impersonal, and it shows the beginning of
Shavianism. The women pursue the men rather
than the men the women : the frailties of the middle-
class paterfamilias are scathingly accentuated : parents
and children are on the worst possible terms : and the
scorn of unreality and convention includes a disdain
of the current standard of sex-relations. His favourite
woman-character, Nelly M'Quinch, an admirable in-