The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson — Read

Most of the distinguished personalities of the Eighteen Nineties challenged somebody or something. George Bernard Shaw challenged everybody and everything. He began the period as one entering the lists, and he has tilted more or less successfully ever since. No other man of the time broke so many lances as he, and looking backwards one is filled with amazement at his prodigality of ideas and wit, his persistent audacity and unfailing cheerfulness. Yet these very qualities limited his effectiveness, for it took even "the intellectuals," whose high priest he became, twenty years to realise that he was in earnest and a genius. G. B. S. was Challenge incarnate -- a rampant note of interrogation, eternally asking us uncomfortable questions about our most cherished habits. Why, for instance, we ate meat? Why we vivisected animals? Why we owned property? Why we tolerated such a brainless drama -- such unimaginative art -- such low wages -- such long hours of labour -- such inconvenient houses -- such adulteration -- such dirty cities -- such illogical morals -- such dead religions -- in short, such a chaotic civilisation? And he did not wait for us to answer his innumerable questions; he answered them himself, or provoking a defence by a process of irritation, he smashed our replies with the nicest of dialectical art; tempting us in the pauses of our bewilderment with a new vision of life.

In the year 1890 Bernard Shaw was hardly a name to those who were outside of convinced Socialist and revolutionary circles, although his articles on music, over the pseudonym _Corno di Bassetto_, in _The Star_ (1888–1890), afterwards continued in _The World_ from 1890–1894, made him the subject of discussion in musical circles. Socialists knew him as a tireless and effective propagandist of the collectivism upheld by the Fabian Society, of which organisation he was one of the most able members, and as the editor of the famous _Fabian Essays in Socialism_ (1889), which contained two essays by himself, one of which had been delivered before the Economic Section at the Bath Meeting of the British Association, in the preceding year. He was also known in the inner circles of Socialism as a persistent enemy of the Marxian theory of value, which he attacked on every possible occasion. He was introduced to a wider public as a result of the first production of Ibsen's plays in London. _Rosmersholm_, _Ghosts_ and _Hedda Gabler_ had been performed by the Stage Society, and the astonishment of the dramatic critics had expressed hopeless bewilderment and surprise in a venomous Press attack. The year before Shaw had lectured upon Henrik Ibsen before the Fabian Society at the St James' Restaurant, and this lecture, rewritten in the form of a reply to the critics, was produced as a book in 1891, under the title of _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_. And in 1892 he followed up this defence of the modern drama with a play of his own, _Widowers' Houses_, which was produced by Mr J. T. Grein at the Royalty Theatre and published in book form during the same year.