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George Bernard Shaw >> PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS
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PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS
BERNARD SHAW
N.B. The Euripidean verses in the second act of Major Barbara are
not by me, or even directly by Euripides. They are by Professor
Gilbert Murray, whose English version of The Baccha; came into
our dramatic literature with all the impulsive power of an
original work shortly before Major Barbara was begun. The play,
indeed, stands indebted to him in more ways than one.
G. B. S.
Before dealing with the deeper aspects of Major Barbara, let me,
for the credit of English literature, make a protest against an
unpatriotic habit into which many of my critics have fallen.
Whenever my view strikes them as being at all outside the range
of, say, an ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that I
am echoing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy,
or some other heresiarch in northern or eastern Europe.
I confess there is something flattering in this simple faith in
my accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a
philosopher. But I cannot tolerate the assumption that life and
literature is so poor in these islands that we must go abroad for
all dramatic material that is not common and all ideas that are
not superficial. I therefore venture to put my critics in
possession of certain facts concerning my contact with modern
ideas.
About half a century ago, an Irish novelist, Charles Lever, wrote
a story entitled A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. It was published
by Charles Dickens in Household Words, and proved so strange to
the public taste that Dickens pressed Lever to make short work of
it. I read scraps of this novel when I was a child; and it made
an enduring impression on me. The hero was a very romantic hero,
trying to live bravely, chivalrously, and powerfully by dint
of mere romance-fed imagination, without courage, without means,
without knowledge, without skill, without anything real except
his bodily appetites. Even in my childhood I found in this poor
devil's unsuccessful encounters with the facts of life, a
poignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The book, in spite
of its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the other day
in the catalogue of Tauchnitz.
Now why is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony of
the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, no
critic ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediate
forerunner, Charles Lever, whilst they confidently derive me from
a Norwegian author of whose language I do not know three words,
and of whom I knew nothing until years after the Shavian
Anschauung was already unequivocally declared in books full of
what came, ten years later, to be perfunctorily labelled
Ibsenism. I was not Ibsenist even at second hand; for Lever,
though he may have read Henri Beyle, alias Stendhal, certainly
never read Ibsen. Of the books that made Lever popular, such as
Charles O'Malley and Harry Lorrequer, I know nothing but the
names and some of the illustrations. But the story of the day's
ride and life's romance of Potts (claiming alliance with Pozzo di
Borgo) caught me and fascinated me as something strange and
significant, though I already knew all about Alnaschar and Don
Quixote and Simon Tappertit and many another romantic hero mocked
by reality. From the plays of Aristophanes to the tales of
Stevenson that mockery has been made familiar to all who are
properly saturated with letters.
Where, then, was the novelty in Lever's tale? Partly, I think, in
a new seriousness in dealing with Potts's disease. Formerly, the
contrast between madness and sanity was deemed comic: Hogarth
shows us how fashionable people went in parties to Bedlam to
laugh at the lunatics. I myself have had a village idiot
exhibited to me as some thing irresistibly funny. On the stage
the madman was once a regular comic figure; that was how Hamlet
got his opportunity before Shakespear touched him. The
originality of Shakespear's version lay in his taking the lunatic
sympathetically and seriously, and thereby making an advance
towards the eastern consciousness of the fact that lunacy may be
inspiration in disguise, since a man who has more brains than his
fellows necessarily appears as mad to them as one who has less.
But Shakespear did not do for Pistol and Parolles what he did for
Hamlet. The particular sort of madman they represented, the
romantic makebeliever, lay outside the pale of sympathy in
literature: he was pitilessly despised and ridiculed here as he
was in the east under the name of Alnaschar, and was doomed to
be, centuries later, under the name of Simon Tappertit. When
Cervantes relented over Don Quixote, and Dickens relented over
Pickwick, they did not become impartial: they simply changed
sides, and became friends and apologists where they had formerly
been mockers.
In Lever's story there is a real change of attitude. There is no
relenting towards Potts: he never gains our affections like Don
Quixote and Pickwick: he has not even the infatuate courage of
Tappertit. But we dare not laugh at him, because, somehow, we
recognize ourselves in Potts. We may, some of us, have enough
nerve, enough muscle, enough luck, enough tact or skill or
address or knowledge to carry things off better than he did; to
impose on the people who saw through him; to fascinate Katinka
(who cut Potts so ruthlessly at the end of the story); but for
all that, we know that Potts plays an enormous part in ourselves
and in the world, and that the social problem is not a problem of
story-book heroes of the older pattern, but a problem of Pottses,
and of how to make men of them. To fall back on my old phrase, we
have the feeling--one that Alnaschar, Pistol, Parolles, and
Tappertit never gave us--that Potts is a piece of really
scientific natural history as distinguished from comic story
telling. His author is not throwing a stone at a creature of
another and inferior order, but making a confession, with the
effect that the stone hits everybody full in the conscience and
causes their self-esteem to smart very sorely. Hence the failure
of Lever's book to please the readers of Household Words. That
pain in the self-esteem nowadays causes critics to raise a cry of
Ibsenism. I therefore assure them that the sensation first came
to me from Lever and may have come to him from Beyle, or at least
out of the Stendhalian atmosphere. I exclude the hypothesis of
complete originality on Lever's part, because a man can no more
be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of
air.
Another mistake as to my literary ancestry is made whenever I
violate the romantic convention that all women are angels when
they are not devils; that they are better looking than men; that
their part in courtship is entirely passive; and that the human
female form is the most beautiful object in nature. Schopenhauer
wrote a splenetic essay which, as it is neither polite nor
profound, was probably intended to knock this nonsense violently
on the head. A sentence denouncing the idolized form as ugly has
been largely quoted. The English critics have read that sentence;
and I must here affirm, with as much gentleness as the
implication will bear, that it has yet to be proved that they
have dipped any deeper. At all events, whenever an English
playwright represents a young and marriageable woman as being
anything but a romantic heroine, he is disposed of without
further thought as an echo of Schopenhauer. My own case is a
specially hard one, because, when I implore the critics who are
obsessed with the Schopenhaurian formula to remember that
playwrights, like sculptors, study their figures from life, and
not from philosophic essays, they reply passionately that I am
not a playwright and that my stage figures do not live. But even
so, I may and do ask them why, if they must give the credit of my
plays to a philosopher, they do not give it to an English
philosopher? Long before I ever read a word by Schopenhauer, or
even knew whether he was a philosopher or a chemist, the
Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties brought me into
contact, both literary and personal, with Mr Ernest Belfort Bax,
an English Socialist and philosophic essayist, whose handling of
modern feminism would provoke romantic protests from Schopenhauer
himself, or even Strindberg. As a matter of fact I hardly noticed
Schopenhauer's disparagements of women when they came under my
notice later on, so thoroughly had Mr Bax familiarized me with
the homoist attitude, and forced me to recognize the extent to
which public opinion, and consequently legislation and
jurisprudence, is corrupted by feminist sentiment.
But Mr Bax's essays were not confined to the Feminist question.
He was a ruthless critic of current morality. Other writers have
gained sympathy for dramatic criminals by eliciting the alleged
"soul of goodness in things evil"; but Mr Bax would propound some
quite undramatic and apparently shabby violation of our
commercial law and morality, and not merely defend it with the
most disconcerting ingenuity, but actually prove it to be a
positive duty that nothing but the certainty of police
persecution should prevent every right-minded man from at once
doing on principle. The Socialists were naturally shocked, being
for the most part morbidly moral people; but at all events they
were saved later on from the delusion that nobody but Nietzsche
had ever challenged our mercanto-Christian morality. I first
heard the name of Nietzsche from a German mathematician, Miss
Borchardt, who had read my Quintessence of Ibsenism, and told me
that she saw what I had been reading: namely, Nietzsche's
Jenseits von Gut and Bose. Which I protest I had never seen, and
could not have read with any comfort, for want of the necessary
German, if I had seen it.
Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, is the victim in England of a
single much quoted sentence containing the phrase "big blonde
beast." On the strength of this alliteration it is assumed that
Nietzsche gained his European reputation by a senseless
glorification of selfish bullying as the rule of life, just as it
is assumed, on the strength of the single word Superman
(Ubermensch) borrowed by me from Nietzsche, that I look for the
salvation of society to the despotism of a single Napoleonic
Superman, in spite of my careful demonstration of the folly of
that outworn infatuation. But even the less recklessly
superficial critics seem to believe that the modern objection to
Christianity as a pernicious slave-morality was first put forward
by Nietzsche. It was familiar to me before I ever heard of
Nietzsche. The late Captain Wilson, author of several queer
pamphlets, propagandist of a metaphysical system called
Comprehensionism, and inventor of the term "Crosstianity" to
distinguish the retrograde element in Christendom, was wont
thirty years ago, in the discussions of the Dialectical Society,
to protest earnestly against the beatitudes of the Sermon on the
Mount as excuses for cowardice and servility, as destructive of
our will, and consequently of our honor and manhood. Now it is
true that Captain Wilson's moral criticism of Christianity was
not a historical theory of it, like Nietzsche's; but this
objection cannot be made to Mr Stuart-Glennie, the successor of
Buckle as a philosophic historian, who has devoted his life to
the elaboration and propagation of his theory that Christianity
is part of an epoch (or rather an aberration, since it began as
recently as 6000BC and is already collapsing) produced by the
necessity in which the numerically inferior white races found
themselves to impose their domination on the colored races by
priestcraft, making a virtue and a popular religion of drudgery
and submissiveness in this world not only as a means of achieving
saintliness of character but of securing a reward in heaven. Here
you have the slave-morality view formulated by a Scotch
philosopher long before English writers began chattering about
Nietzsche.
As Mr Stuart-Glennie traced the evolution of society to the
conflict of races, his theory made some sensation among
Socialists--that is, among the only people who were seriously
thinking about historical evolution at all--by its collision with
the class-conflict theory of Karl Marx. Nietzsche, as I gather,
regarded the slave-morality as having been invented and imposed
on the world by slaves making a virtue of necessity and a
religion of their servitude. Mr Stuart-Glennie regards the
slave-morality as an invention of the superior white race to
subjugate the minds of the inferior races whom they wished to
exploit, and who would have destroyed them by force of numbers if
their minds had not been subjugated. As this process is in
operation still, and can be studied at first hand not only in our
Church schools and in the struggle between our modern proprietary
classes and the proletariat, but in the part played by Christian
missionaries in reconciling the black races of Africa to their
subjugation by European Capitalism, we can judge for ourselves
whether the initiative came from above or below. My object here
is not to argue the historical point, but simply to make our
theatre critics ashamed of their habit of treating Britain as an
intellectual void, and assuming that every philosophical idea,
every historic theory, every criticism of our moral, religious
and juridical institutions, must necessarily be either imported
from abroad, or else a fantastic sally (in rather questionable
taste) totally unrelated to the existing body of thought. I urge
them to remember that this body of thought is the slowest of
growths and the rarest of blossomings, and that if there is such
a thing on the philosophic plane as a matter of course, it is
that no individual can make more than a minute contribution to
it. In fact, their conception of clever persons
parthenogenetically bringing forth complete original cosmogonies
by dint of sheer "brilliancy" is part of that ignorant credulity
which is the despair of the honest philosopher, and the
opportunity of the religious impostor.
THE GOSPEL OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT
It is this credulity that drives me to help my critics out with
Major Barbara by telling them what to say about it. In the
millionaire Undershaft I have represented a man who has become
intellectually and spiritually as well as practically conscious
of the irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and
repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of evils and the worst of
crimes is poverty, and that our first duty--a duty to which every
other consideration should be sacrificed--is not to be poor.
"Poor but honest," "the respectable poor," and such phrases are
as intolerable and as immoral as "drunken but amiable,"
"fraudulent but a good after-dinner speaker," "splendidly
criminal," or the like. Security, the chief pretence of
civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger
of poverty, hangs over everyone's head, and where the alleged
protection of our persons from violence is only an accidental
result of the existence of a police force whose real business is
to force the poor man to see his children starve whilst idle
people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might feed and
clothe them.
It is exceedingly difficult to make people realize that an evil
is an evil. For instance, we seize a man and deliberately do him
a malicious injury: say, imprison him for years. One would not
suppose that it needed any exceptional clearness of wit to
recognize in this an act of diabolical cruelty. But in England
such a recognition provokes a stare of surprise, followed by an
explanation that the outrage is punishment or justice or
something else that is all right, or perhaps by a heated attempt
to argue that we should all be robbed and murdered in our beds if
such senseless villainies as sentences of imprisonment were not
committed daily. It is useless to argue that even if this were
true, which it is not, the alternative to adding crimes of our
own to the crimes from which we suffer is not helpless
submission. Chickenpox is an evil; but if I were to declare that
we must either submit to it or else repress it sternly by seizing
everyone who suffers from it and punishing them by inoculation
with smallpox, I should be laughed at; for though nobody could
deny that the result would be to prevent chickenpox to some
extent by making people avoid it much more carefully, and to
effect a further apparent prevention by making them conceal it
very anxiously, yet people would have sense enough to see that
the deliberate propagation of smallpox was a creation of evil,
and must therefore be ruled out in favor of purely humane and
hygienic measures. Yet in the precisely parallel case of a man
breaking into my house and stealing my wife's diamonds I am
expected as a matter of course to steal ten years of his life,
torturing him all the time. If he tries to defeat that monstrous
retaliation by shooting me, my survivors hang him. The net result
suggested by the police statistics is that we inflict atrocious
injuries on the burglars we catch in order to make the rest take
effectual precautions against detection; so that instead of
saving our wives' diamonds from burglary we only greatly decrease
our chances of ever getting them back, and increase our chances
of being shot by the robber if we are unlucky enough to disturb
him at his work.
But the thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of
imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed,
and flogging, on moral invalids and energetic rebels, is as
nothing compared to the stupid levity with which we tolerate
poverty as if it were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or
else a virtue to be embraced as St Francis embraced it. If a man
is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor.
If he is not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he is addicted to
the fine arts or to pure science instead of to trade and finance,
let him be poor. If he chooses to spend his urban eighteen
shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen shillings a week on
his beer and his family instead of saving it up for his old age,
let him be poor. Let nothing be done for "the undeserving": let
him be poor. Serve him right! Also--somewhat inconsistently--
blessed are the poor!
Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be
weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease.
Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and
dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him
drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do their
work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous
congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our young men with
the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him by turning
the nation's manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty,
hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits of
oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving become still
less deserving; and let the deserving lay up for himself, not
treasures in heaven, but horrors in hell upon earth. This being
so, is it really wise to let him be poor? Would he not do ten
times less harm as a prosperous burglar, incendiary, ravisher or
murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity's comparatively
negligible impulses in these directions? Suppose we were to
abolish all penalties for such activities, and decide that
poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate--that every adult
with less than, say, 365 pounds a year, shall be painlessly but
inexorably killed, and every hungry half naked child forcibly
fattened and clothed, would not that be an enormous improvement
on our existing system, which has already destroyed so many
civilizations, and is visibly destroying ours in the same way?
Is there any radicle of such legislation in our parliamentary
system? Well, there are two measures just sprouting in the
political soil, which may conceivably grow to something valuable.
One is the institution of a Legal Minimum Wage. The other, Old
Age Pensions. But there is a better plan than either of these.
Some time ago I mentioned the subject of Universal Old Age
Pensions to my fellow Socialist Mr Cobden-Sanderson, famous as an
artist-craftsman in bookbinding and printing. "Why not Universal
Pensions for Life?" said Cobden-Sanderson. In saying this, he
solved the industrial problem at a stroke. At present we say
callously to each citizen: "If you want money, earn it," as if
his having or not having it were a matter that concerned himself
alone. We do not even secure for him the opportunity of earning
it: on the contrary, we allow our industry to be organized in
open dependence on the maintenance of "a reserve army of
unemployed" for the sake of "elasticity." The sensible course
would be Cobden-Sanderson's: that is, to give every man enough to
live well on, so as to guarantee the community against the
possibility of a case of the malignant disease of poverty, and
then (necessarily) to see that he earned it.
Undershaft, the hero of Major Barbara, is simply a man who,
having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when
society offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative
trade in death and destruction, it offered him, not a choice
between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between energetic
enterprise and cowardly infamy. His conduct stands the Kantian
test, which Peter Shirley's does not. Peter Shirley is what we
call the honest poor man. Undershaft is what we call the wicked
rich one: Shirley is Lazarus, Undershaft Dives. Well, the misery
of the world is due to the fact that the great mass of men act
and believe as Peter Shirley acts and believes. If they acted and
believed as Undershaft acts and believes, the immediate result
would be a revolution of incalculable beneficence. To be wealthy,
says Undershaft, is with me a point of honor for which I am
prepared to kill at the risk of my own life. This preparedness
is, as he says, the final test of sincerity. Like Froissart's
medieval hero, who saw that "to rob and pill was a good life," he
is not the dupe of that public sentiment against killing which is
propagated and endowed by people who would otherwise be killed
themselves, or of the mouth-honor paid to poverty and obedience
by rich and insubordinate do-nothings who want to rob the poor
without courage and command them without superiority. Froissart's
knight, in placing the achievement of a good life before all the
other duties--which indeed are not duties at all when they
conflict with it, but plain wickednesses--behaved bravely,
admirably, and, in the final analysis, public-spiritedly.
Medieval society, on the other hand, behaved very badly indeed in
organizing itself so stupidly that a good life could be achieved
by robbing and pilling. If the knight's contemporaries had been
all as resolute as he, robbing and pilling would have been the
shortest way to the gallows, just as, if we were all as resolute
and clearsighted as Undershaft, an attempt to live by means of
what is called "an independent income" would be the shortest way
to the lethal chamber. But as, thanks to our political imbecility
and personal cowardice (fruits of poverty both), the best
imitation of a good life now procurable is life on an independent
income, all sensible people aim at securing such an income, and
are, of course, careful to legalize and moralize both it and all
the actions and sentiments which lead to it and support it as an
institution. What else can they do? They know, of course, that
they are rich because others are poor. But they cannot help that:
it is for the poor to repudiate poverty when they have had enough
of it. The thing can be done easily enough: the demonstrations to
the contrary made by the economists, jurists, moralists and
sentimentalists hired by the rich to defend them, or even doing
the work gratuitously out of sheer folly and abjectness, impose
only on the hirers.
The reason why the independent income-tax payers are not solid in
defence of their position is that since we are not medieval
rovers through a sparsely populated country, the poverty of those
we rob prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice
them. Rich men or aristocrats with a developed sense of life--men
like Ruskin and William Morris and Kropotkin--have enormous
social appetites and very fastidious personal ones. They are not
content with handsome houses: they want handsome cities. They are
not content with bediamonded wives and blooming daughters: they
complain because the charwoman is badly dressed, because the
laundress smells of gin, because the sempstress is anemic,
because every man they meet is not a friend and every woman not a
romance. They turn up their noses at their neighbors' drains, and
are made ill by the architecture of their neighbors' houses.
Trade patterns made to suit vulgar people do not please them (and
they can get nothing else): they cannot sleep nor sit at ease
upon "slaughtered" cabinet makers' furniture. The very air is not
good enough for them: there is too much factory smoke in it. They
even demand abstract conditions: justice, honor, a noble moral
atmosphere, a mystic nexus to replace the cash nexus. Finally
they declare that though to rob and pill with your own hand on
horseback and in steel coat may have been a good life, to rob and
pill by the hands of the policeman, the bailiff, and the soldier,
and to underpay them meanly for doing it, is not a good life, but
rather fatal to all possibility of even a tolerable one. They
call on the poor to revolt, and, finding the poor shocked at
their ungentlemanliness, despairingly revile the proletariat for
its "damned wantlessness" (verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit).