becoming an
atheist he might stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and
learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet,
Pascal and Descartes.

In the same way I have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third
point of the drama of Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped into a
secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which
he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London;
where he was quite unsuccessful and practically starved for six years.
If I had mentioned this act on the first page of this book it would have
seemed to have either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or else to cover
some ugly escapade of youth or some quite criminal looseness of
temperament. But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he was careless,
but because he was ferociously careful, careful especially of the one
thing needful. What was he thinking about when he threw away his last
halfpence and went to a strange place; what was he thinking about when
he endured hunger and small-pox in London almost without hope? He was
thinking of what he has ever since thought of, the slow but sure surge
of the social revolution; you must read into all those bald sentences
and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You
must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century,
darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free
thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse of Adam.

Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an epoch, or rather at the end of an
epoch, which was in its way unique in the ages of history. The
nineteenth century was not unique in the success or rapidity of its
reforms or in their ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the
peculiar character of the failure which followed the success. The French
Revolution was an enormous act of human realisation; it has altered the
terms of every law and the shape of every town in Europe; but it was by
no means the only example of a strong and swift period of reform. What
was really peculiar about the Republican energy was this, that it left
behind it, not an ordinary reaction but a kind of dreary, drawn out and
utterly unmeaning hope. The strong and evident idea of reform sank lower
and lower until it became the timid and feeble idea of progress. Towards
the end of the nineteenth century there appeared its two incredible
figures; they were the pur