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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS
So far, however, their attack on society has lacked simplicity.
The poor do not share their tastes nor understand their
art-criticisms. They do not want the simple life, nor the
esthetic life; on the contrary, they want very much to wallow in
all the costly vulgarities from which the elect souls among the
rich turn away with loathing. It is by surfeit and not by
abstinence that they will be cured of their hankering after
unwholesome sweets. What they do dislike and despise and are
ashamed of is poverty. To ask them to fight for the difference
between the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and
the Kelmscott Chaucer is silly: they prefer the News. The
difference between a stockbroker's cheap and dirty starched white
shirt and collar and the comparatively costly and carefully dyed
blue shirt of William Morris is a difference so disgraceful to
Morris in their eyes that if they fought on the subject at all,
they would fight in defence of the starch. "Cease to be slaves,
in order that you may become cranks" is not a very inspiring call
to arms; nor is it really improved by substituting saints for
cranks. Both terms denote men of genius; and the common man does
not want to live the life of a man of genius: he would much
rather live the life of a pet collie if that were the only
alternative. But he does want more money. Whatever else he may be
vague about, he is clear about that. He may or may not prefer
Major Barbara to the Drury Lane pantomime; but he always prefers
five hundred pounds to five hundred shillings.
Now to deplore this preference as sordid, and teach children that
it is sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme
possible limit of impudence in lying, and corruption in
hypocrisy. The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact
in our civilization, the one sound spot in our social conscience.
Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents
health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously
and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness,
disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is
that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and
dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to
worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that
it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish
social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two
things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to
be distributed socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and
bank notes are money. The first duty of every citizen is to
insist on having money on reasonable terms; and this demand is
not complied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten
or twelve hours' drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for
nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals,
cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen
sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship
of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be
attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft,
demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any
other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply
poverty.
Once take your eyes from the ends of the earth and fix them on
this truth just under your nose; and Andrew Undershaft's views
will not perplex you in the least. Unless indeed his constant
sense that he is only the instrument of a Will or Life Force
which uses him for purposes wider than his own, may puzzle you.
If so, that is because you are walking either in artificial
Darwinian darkness, or to mere stupidity. All genuinely religious
people have that consciousness. To them Undershaft the Mystic
will be quite intelligible, and his perfect comprehension of his
daughter the Salvationist and her lover the Euripidean republican
natural and inevitable. That, however, is not new, even on the
stage. What is new, as far as I know, is that article in
Undershaft's religion which recognizes in Money the first need
and in poverty the vilest sin of man and society.
This dramatic conception has not, of course, been attained per
saltum. Nor has it been borrowed from Nietzsche or from any man
born beyond the Channel. The late Samuel Butler, in his own
department the greatest English writer of the latter half of the
XIX century, steadily inculcated the necessity and morality of a
conscientious Laodiceanism in religion and of an earnest and
constant sense of the importance of money. It drives one almost
to despair of English literature when one sees so extraordinary a
study of English life as Butler's posthumous Way of All Flesh
making so little impression that when, some years later, I
produce plays in which Butler's extraordinarily fresh, free and
future-piercing suggestions have an obvious share, I am met with
nothing but vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche, and am
only too thankful that they are not about Alfred de Musset and
Georges Sand. Really, the English do not deserve to have great
men. They allowed Butler to die practically unknown, whilst I, a
comparatively insignificant Irish journalist, was leading them by
the nose into an advertisement of me which has made my own life a
burden. In Sicily there is a Via Samuele Butler. When an English
tourist sees it, he either asks "Who the devil was Samuele
Butler?" or wonders why the Sicilians should perpetuate the
memory of the author of Hudibras.
Well, it cannot be denied that the English are only too anxious
to recognize a man of genius if somebody will kindly point him
out to them. Having pointed myself out in this manner with some
success, I now point out Samuel Butler, and trust that in
consequence I shall hear a little less in future of the novelty
and foreign origin of the ideas which are now making their way
into the English theatre through plays written by Socialists.
There are living men whose originality and power are as obvious
as Butler's; and when they die that fact will be discovered.
Meanwhile I recommend them to insist on their own merits as an
important part of their own business.
THE SALVATION ARMY
When Major Barbara was produced in London, the second act was
reported in an important northern newspaper as a withering attack
on the Salvation Army, and the despairing ejaculation of Barbara
deplored by a London daily as a tasteless blasphemy. And they
were set right, not by the professed critics of the theatre, but
by religious and philosophical publicists like Sir Oliver Lodge
and Dr Stanton Coit, and strenuous Nonconformist journalists like
Mr William Stead, who not only understood the act as well as the
Salvationists themselves, but also saw it in its relation to the
religious life of the nation, a life which seems to lie not only
outside the sympathy of many of our theatre critics, but actually
outside their knowledge of society. Indeed nothing could be more
ironically curious than the confrontation Major Barbara effected
of the theatre enthusiasts with the religious enthusiasts. On the
one hand was the playgoer, always seeking pleasure, paying
exorbitantly for it, suffering unbearable discomforts for it, and
hardly ever getting it. On the other hand was the Salvationist,
repudiating gaiety and courting effort and sacrifice, yet always
in the wildest spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing,
drumming, and tambourining: his life flying by in a flash of
excitement, and his death arriving as a climax of triumph. And,
if you please, the playgoer despising the Salvationist as a
joyless person, shut out from the heaven of the theatre,
self-condemned to a life of hideous gloom; and the Salvationist
mourning over the playgoer as over a prodigal with vine leaves in
his hair, careering outrageously to hell amid the popping of
champagne corks and the ribald laughter of sirens! Could
misunderstanding be more complete, or sympathy worse misplaced?
Fortunately, the Salvationists are more accessible to the
religious character of the drama than the playgoers to the gay
energy and artistic fertility of religion. They can see, when it
is pointed out to them, that a theatre, as a place where two or
three are gathered together, takes from that divine presence an
inalienable sanctity of which the grossest and profanest farce
can no more deprive it than a hypocritical sermon by a snobbish
bishop can desecrate Westminster Abbey. But in our professional
playgoers this indispensable preliminary conception of sanctity
seems wanting. They talk of actors as mimes and mummers, and, I
fear, think of dramatic authors as liars and pandars, whose main
business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city speculator
when what he calls the serious business of the day is over.
Passion, the life of drama, means nothing to them but primitive
sexual excitement: such phrases as "impassioned poetry" or
"passionate love of truth" have fallen quite out of their
vocabulary and been replaced by "passional crime" and the like.
They assume, as far as I can gather, that people in whom passion
has a larger scope are passionless and therefore uninteresting.
Consequently they come to think of religious people as people who
are not interesting and not amusing. And so, when Barbara cuts
the regular Salvation Army jokes, and snatches a kiss from her
lover across his drum, the devotees of the theatre think they
ought to appear shocked, and conclude that the whole play is an
elaborate mockery of the Army. And then either hypocritically
rebuke me for mocking, or foolishly take part in the supposed
mockery! Even the handful of mentally competent critics got into
difficulties over my demonstration of the economic deadlock in
which the Salvation Army finds itself. Some of them thought that
the Army would not have taken money from a distiller and a cannon
founder: others thought it should not have taken it: all assumed
more or less definitely that it reduced itself to absurdity or
hypocrisy by taking it. On the first point the reply of the Army
itself was prompt and conclusive. As one of its officers said,
they would take money from the devil himself and be only too glad
to get it out of his hands and into God's. They gratefully
acknowledged that publicans not only give them money but allow
them to collect it in the bar--sometimes even when there is a
Salvation meeting outside preaching teetotalism. In fact, they
questioned the verisimilitude of the play, not because Mrs Baines
took the money, but because Barbara refused it.
On the point that the Army ought not to take such money, its
justification is obvious. It must take the money because it
cannot exist without money, and there is no other money to be
had. Practically all the spare money in the country consists of a
mass of rent, interest, and profit, every penny of which is bound
up with crime, drink, prostitution, disease, and all the evil
fruits of poverty, as inextricably as with enterprise, wealth,
commercial probity, and national prosperity. The notion that you
can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical
individualist superstition. None the less the fact that all our
money is tainted gives a very severe shock to earnest young souls
when some dramatic instance of the taint first makes them
conscious of it. When an enthusiastic young clergyman of the
Established Church first realizes that the Ecclesiastical
Commissioners receive the rents of sporting public houses,
brothels, and sweating dens; or that the most generous
contributor at his last charity sermon was an employer trading in
female labor cheapened by prostitution as unscrupulously as a
hotel keeper trades in waiters' labor cheapened by tips, or
commissionaire's labor cheapened by pensions; or that the only
patron who can afford to rebuild his church or his schools or
give his boys' brigade a gymnasium or a library is the son-in-law
of a Chicago meat King, that young clergyman has, like Barbara, a
very bad quarter hour. But he cannot help himself by refusing to
accept money from anybody except sweet old ladies with
independent incomes and gentle and lovely ways of life. He has
only to follow up the income of the sweet ladies to its
industrial source, and there he will find Mrs Warren's profession
and the poisonous canned meat and all the rest of it. His own
stipend has the same root. He must either share the world's guilt
or go to another planet. He must save the world's honor if he is
to save his own. This is what all the Churches find just as the
Salvation Army and Barbara find it in the play. Her discovery
that she is her father's accomplice; that the Salvation Army is
the accomplice of the distiller and the dynamite maker; that they
can no more escape one another than they can escape the air they
breathe; that there is no salvation for them through personal
righteousness, but only through the redemption of the whole
nation from its vicious, lazy, competitive anarchy: this
discovery has been made by everyone except the Pharisees and
(apparently) the professional playgoers, who still wear their Tom
Hood shirts and underpay their washerwomen without the slightest
misgiving as to the elevation of their private characters, the
purity of their private atmospheres, and their right to repudiate
as foreign to themselves the coarse depravity of the garret and
the slum. Not that they mean any harm: they only desire to be, in
their little private way, what they call gentlemen. They do not
understand Barbara's lesson because they have not, like her,
learnt it by taking their part in the larger life of the nation.
BARBARA'S RETURN TO THE COLORS.
Barbara's return to the colors may yet provide a subject for the
dramatic historian of the future. To go back to the Salvation
Army with the knowledge that even the Salvationists themselves
are not saved yet; that poverty is not blessed, but a most
damnable sin; and that when General Booth chose Blood and Fire
for the emblem of Salvation instead of the Cross, he was perhaps
better inspired than he knew: such knowledge, for the daughter of
Andrew Undershaft, will clearly lead to something hopefuller than
distributing bread and treacle at the expense of Bodger.
It is a very significant thing, this instinctive choice of the
military form of organization, this substitution of the drum for
the organ, by the Salvation Army. Does it not suggest that the
Salvationists divine that they must actually fight the devil
instead of merely praying at him? At present, it is true, they
have not quite ascertained his correct address. When they do,
they may give a very rude shock to that sense of security which
he has gained from his experience of the fact that hard words,
even when uttered by eloquent essayists and lecturers, or carried
unanimously at enthusiastic public meetings on the motion of
eminent reformers, break no bones. It has been said that the
French Revolution was the work of Voltaire, Rousseau and the
Encyclopedists. It seems to me to have been the work of men who
had observed that virtuous indignation, caustic criticism,
conclusive argument and instructive pamphleteering, even when
done by the most earnest and witty literary geniuses, were as
useless as praying, things going steadily from bad to worse
whilst the Social Contract and the pamphlets of Voltaire were at
the height of their vogue. Eventually, as we know, perfectly
respectable citizens and earnest philanthropists connived at the
September massacres because hard experience had convinced them
that if they contented themselves with appeals to humanity and
patriotism, the aristocracy, though it would read their appeals
with the greatest enjoyment and appreciation, flattering and
admiring the writers, would none the less continue to conspire
with foreign monarchists to undo the revolution and restore the
old system with every circumstance of savage vengeance and
ruthless repression of popular liberties.
The nineteenth century saw the same lesson repeated in England.
It had its Utilitarians, its Christian Socialists, its Fabians
(still extant): it had Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle,
Butler, Henry George, and Morris. And the end of all their
efforts is the Chicago described by Mr Upton Sinclair, and the
London in which the people who pay to be amused by my dramatic
representation of Peter Shirley turned out to starve at forty
because there are younger slaves to be had for his wages, do not
take, and have not the slightest intention of taking, any
effective step to organize society in such a way as to make that
everyday infamy impossible. I, who have preached and
pamphleteered like any Encyclopedist, have to confess that my
methods are no use, and would be no use if I were Voltaire,
Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, George,
Butler, and Morris all rolled into one, with Euripides, More,
Moliere, Shakespear, Beaumarchais, Swift, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy,
Moses and the prophets all thrown in (as indeed in some sort I
actually am, standing as I do on all their shoulders). The
problem being to make heroes out of cowards, we paper apostles
and artist-magicians have succeeded only in giving cowards all
the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every abomination,
accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression.
Christianity, in making a merit of such submission, has marked
only that depth in the abyss at which the very sense of shame is
lost. The Christian has been like Dickens' doctor in the debtor's
prison, who tells the newcomer of its ineffable peace and
security: no duns; no tyrannical collectors of rates, taxes, and
rent; no importunate hopes nor exacting duties; nothing but the
rest and safety of having no further to fall.
Yet in the poorest corner of this soul-destroying Christendom
vitality suddenly begins to germinate again. Joyousness, a sacred
gift long dethroned by the hellish laughter of derision and
obscenity, rises like a flood miraculously out of the fetid dust
and mud of the slums; rousing marches and impetuous dithyrambs
rise to the heavens from people among whom the depressing noise
called "sacred music" is a standing joke; a flag with Blood and
Fire on it is unfurled, not in murderous rancor, but because fire
is beautiful and blood a vital and splendid red; Fear, which we
flatter by calling Self, vanishes; and transfigured men and women
carry their gospel through a transfigured world, calling their
leader General, themselves captains and brigadiers, and their
whole body an Army: praying, but praying only for refreshment,
for strength to fight, and for needful MONEY (a notable sign,
that); preaching, but not preaching submission; daring ill-usage
and abuse, but not putting up with more of it than is inevitable;
and practising what the world will let them practise, including
soap and water, color and music. There is danger in such
Activity; and where there is danger there is hope. Our present
security is nothing, and can be nothing, but evil made
irresistible.
WEAKNESSES OF THE SALVATION ARMY.
For the present, however, it is not my business to flatter the
Salvation Army. Rather must I point out to it that it has almost
as many weaknesses as the Church of England itself. It is
building up a business organization which will compel it
eventually to see that its present staff of enthusiast-commanders
shall be succeeded by a bureaucracy of men of business who will
be no better than bishops, and perhaps a good deal more
unscrupulous. That has always happened sooner or later to great
orders founded by saints; and the order founded by St William
Booth is not exempt from the same danger. It is even more
dependent than the Church on rich people who would cut off
supplies at once if it began to preach that indispensable revolt
against poverty which must also be a revolt against riches. It is
hampered by a heavy contingent of pious elders who are not really
Salvationists at all, but Evangelicals of the old school. It
still, as Commissioner Howard affirms, "sticks to Moses," which
is flat nonsense at this time of day if the Commissioner means,
as I am afraid he does, that the Book of Genesis contains a
trustworthy scientific account of the origin of species, and that
the god to whom Jephthah sacrificed his daughter is any less
obviously a tribal idol than Dagon or Chemosh.
Further, there is still too much other-worldliness about the
Army. Like Frederick's grenadier, the Salvationist wants to live
for ever (the most monstrous way of crying for the moon); and
though it is evident to anyone who has ever heard General Booth
and his best officers that they would work as hard for human
salvation as they do at present if they believed that death would
be the end of them individually, they and their followers have a
bad habit of talking as if the Salvationists were heroically
enduring a very bad time on earth as an investment which will
bring them in dividends later on in the form, not of a better
life to come for the whole world, but of an eternity spent by
themselves personally in a sort of bliss which would bore any
active person to a second death. Surely the truth is that the
Salvationists are unusually happy people. And is it not the very
diagnostic of true salvation that it shall overcome the fear of
death? Now the man who has come to believe that there is no such
thing as death, the change so called being merely the transition
to an exquisitely happy and utterly careless life, has not
overcome the fear of death at all: on the contrary, it has
overcome him so completely that he refuses to die on any terms
whatever. I do not call a Salvationist really saved until he is
ready to lie down cheerfully on the scrap heap, having paid scot
and lot and something over, and let his eternal life pass on to
renew its youth in the battalions of the future.
Then there is the nasty lying habit called confession, which the
Army encourages because it lends itself to dramatic oratory, with
plenty of thrilling incident. For my part, when I hear a convert
relating the violences and oaths and blasphemies he was guilty of
before he was saved, making out that he was a very terrible
fellow then and is the most contrite and chastened of Christians
now, I believe him no more than I believe the millionaire who
says he came up to London or Chicago as a boy with only three
halfpence in his pocket. Salvationists have said to me that
Barbara in my play would never have been taken in by so
transparent a humbug as Snobby Price; and certainly I do not
think Snobby could have taken in any experienced Salvationist on
a point on which the Salvationist did not wish to be taken in.
But on the point of conversion all Salvationists wish to be taken
in; for the more obvious the sinner the more obvious the miracle
of his conversion. When you advertize a converted burglar or
reclaimed drunkard as one of the attractions at an experience
meeting, your burglar can hardly have been too burglarious or
your drunkard too drunken. As long as such attractions are relied
on, you will have your Snobbies claiming to have beaten their
mothers when they were as a matter of prosaic fact habitually
beaten by them, and your Rummies of the tamest respectability
pretending to a past of reckless and dazzling vice. Even when
confessions are sincerely autobiographic there is no reason to
assume at once that the impulse to make them is pious or the
interest of the hearers wholesome. It might as well be assumed
that the poor people who insist on showing appalling ulcers to
district visitors are convinced hygienists, or that the curiosity
which sometimes welcomes such exhibitions is a pleasant and
creditable one. One is often tempted to suggest that those who
pester our police superintendents with confessions of murder
might very wisely be taken at their word and executed, except in
the few cases in which a real murderer is seeking to be relieved
of his guilt by confession and expiation. For though I am not, I
hope, an unmerciful person, I do not think that the inexorability
of the deed once done should be disguised by any ritual, whether
in the confessional or on the scaffold.
And here my disagreement with the Salvation Army, and with all
propagandists of the Cross (to which I object as I object to all
gibbets) becomes deep indeed. Forgiveness, absolution, atonement,
are figments: punishment is only a pretence of cancelling one
crime by another; and you can no more have forgiveness without
vindictiveness than you can have a cure without a disease. You
will never get a high morality from people who conceive that
their misdeeds are revocable and pardonable, or in a society
where absolution and expiation are officially provided for us
all. The demand may be very real; but the supply is spurious.
Thus Bill Walker, in my play, having assaulted the Salvation
Lass, presently finds himself overwhelmed with an intolerable
conviction of sin under the skilled treatment of Barbara.
Straightway he begins to try to unassault the lass and
deruffianize his deed, first by getting punished for it in kind,
and, when that relief is denied him, by fining himself a pound to
compensate the girl. He is foiled both ways. He finds the
Salvation Army as inexorable as fact itself. It will not punish
him: it will not take his money. It will not tolerate a redeemed
ruffian: it leaves him no means of salvation except ceasing to be
a ruffian. In doing this, the Salvation Army instinctively
grasps the central truth of Christianity and discards its central
superstition: that central truth being the vanity of revenge and
punishment, and that central superstition the salvation of the
world by the gibbet.