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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara, by 
+George Bernard Shaw
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara
+
+Author: George Bernard Shaw
+
+Posting Date: May 19, 2009 [EBook #3789]
+Release Date: February, 2000
+First Posted: September 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAW'S PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eve Sobol.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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).
+
+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.
+
+For, be it noted, Bill has assaulted an old and starving woman also;
+and for this worse offence he feels no remorse whatever, because she
+makes it clear that her malice is as great as his own. "Let her have
+the law of me, as she said she would," says Bill: "what I done to her
+is no more on what you might call my conscience than sticking a pig."
+This shows a perfectly natural and wholesome state of mind on his part.
+The old woman, like the law she threatens him with, is perfectly ready
+to play the game of retaliation with him: to rob him if he steals, to
+flog him if he strikes, to murder him if he kills. By example and
+precept the law and public opinion teach him to impose his will on
+others by anger, violence, and cruelty, and to wipe off the moral score
+by punishment. That is sound Crosstianity. But this Crosstianity has
+got entangled with something which Barbara calls Christianity, and
+which unexpectedly causes her to refuse to play the hangman's game of
+Satan casting out Satan. She refuses to prosecute a drunken ruffian;
+she converses on equal terms with a blackguard whom no lady could be
+seen speaking to in the public street: in short, she behaves as
+illegally and unbecomingly as possible under the circumstances. Bill's
+conscience reacts to this just as naturally as it does to the old
+woman's threats. He is placed in a position of unbearable moral
+inferiority, and strives by every means in his power to escape from it,
+whilst he is still quite ready to meet the abuse of the old woman by
+attempting to smash a mug on her face. And that is the triumphant
+justification of Barbara's Christianity as against our system of
+judicial punishment and the vindictive villain-thrashings and "poetic
+justice" of the romantic stage.
+
+For the credit of literature it must be pointed out that the situation
+is only partly novel. Victor Hugo long ago gave us the epic of the
+convict and the bishop's candlesticks, of the Crosstian policeman
+annihilated by his encounter with the Christian Valjean. But Bill
+Walker is not, like Valjean, romantically changed from a demon into an
+angel. There are millions of Bill Walkers in all classes of society
+to-day; and the point which I, as a professor of natural psychology,
+desire to demonstrate, is that Bill, without any change in his
+character whatsoever, will react one way to one sort of treatment and
+another way to another.
+
+In proof I might point to the sensational object lesson provided by our
+commercial millionaires to-day. They begin as brigands: merciless,
+unscrupulous, dealing out ruin and death and slavery to their
+competitors and employees, and facing desperately the worst that their
+competitors can do to them. The history of the English factories, the
+American trusts, the exploitation of African gold, diamonds, ivory and
+rubber, outdoes in villainy the worst that has ever been imagined of
+the buccaneers of the Spanish Main. Captain Kidd would have marooned a
+modern Trust magnate for conduct unworthy of a gentleman of fortune.
+The law every day seizes on unsuccessful scoundrels of this type and
+punishes them with a cruelty worse than their own, with the result that
+they come out of the torture house more dangerous than they went in,
+and renew their evil doing (nobody will employ them at anything else)
+until they are again seized, again tormented, and again let loose, with
+the same result.
+
+But the successful scoundrel is dealt with very differently, and very
+Christianly. He is not only forgiven: he is idolized, respected, made
+much of, all but worshipped. Society returns him good for evil in the
+most extravagant overmeasure. And with what result? He begins to
+idolize himself, to respect himself, to live up to the treatment he
+receives. He preaches sermons; he writes books of the most edifying
+advice to young men, and actually persuades himself that he got on by
+taking his own advice; he endows educational institutions; he supports
+charities; he dies finally in the odor of sanctity, leaving a will
+which is a monument of public spirit and bounty. And all this without
+any change in his character. The spots of the leopard and the stripes
+of the tiger are as brilliant as ever; but the conduct of the world
+towards him has changed; and his conduct has changed accordingly. You
+have only to reverse your attitude towards him--to lay hands on his
+property, revile him, assault him, and he will be a brigand again in a
+moment, as ready to crush you as you are to crush him, and quite as
+full of pretentious moral reasons for doing it.
+
+In short, when Major Barbara says that there are no scoundrels, she is
+right: there are no absolute scoundrels, though there are impracticable
+people of whom I shall treat presently. Every practicable man (and
+woman) is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a
+man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of
+what he does, depends on his circumstances. The characteristics that
+ruin a man in one class make him eminent in another. The characters
+that behave differently in different circumstances behave alike in
+similar circumstances. Take a common English character like that of
+Bill Walker. We meet Bill everywhere: on the judicial bench, on the
+episcopal bench, in the Privy Council, at the War Office and Admiralty,
+as well as in the Old Bailey dock or in the ranks of casual unskilled
+labor. And the morality of Bill's characteristics varies with these
+various circumstances. The faults of the burglar are the qualities of
+the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk
+his situation. In short, though character is independent of
+circumstances, conduct is not; and our moral judgments of character are
+not: both are circumstantial. Take any condition of life in which the
+circumstances are for a mass of men practically alike: felony, the
+House of Lords, the factory, the stables, the gipsy encampment or where
+you please! In spite of diversity of character and temperament, the
+conduct and morals of the individuals in each group are as predicable
+and as alike in the main as if they were a flock of sheep, morals being
+mostly only social habits and circumstantial necessities. Strong people
+know this and count upon it. In nothing have the master-minds of the
+world been distinguished from the ordinary suburban season-ticket
+holder more than in their straightforward perception of the fact that
+mankind is practically a single species, and not a menagerie of
+gentlemen and bounders, villains and heroes, cowards and daredevils,
+peers and peasants, grocers and aristocrats, artisans and laborers,
+washerwomen and duchesses, in which all the grades of income and caste
+represent distinct animals who must not be introduced to one another or
+intermarry. Napoleon constructing a galaxy of generals and courtiers,
+and even of monarchs, out of his collection of social nobodies; Julius
+Caesar appointing as governor of Egypt the son of a freedman--one who
+but a short time before would have been legally disqualified for the
+post even of a private soldier in the Roman army; Louis XI making his
+barber his privy councillor: all these had in their different ways a
+firm hold of the scientific fact of human equality, expressed by
+Barbara in the Christian formula that all men are children of one
+father. A man who believes that men are naturally divided into upper
+and lower and middle classes morally is making exactly the same mistake
+as the man who believes that they are naturally divided in the same way
+socially. And just as our persistent attempts to found political
+institutions on a basis of social inequality have always produced long
+periods of destructive friction relieved from time to time by violent
+explosions of revolution; so the attempt--will Americans please
+note--to found moral institutions on a basis of moral inequality can
+lead to nothing but unnatural Reigns of the Saints relieved by
+licentious Restorations; to Americans who have made divorce a public
+institution turning the face of Europe into one huge sardonic smile by
+refusing to stay in the same hotel with a Russian man of genius who has
+changed wives without the sanction of South Dakota; to grotesque
+hypocrisy, cruel persecution, and final utter confusion of conventions
+and compliances with benevolence and respectability. It is quite
+useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are
+born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of
+itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his
+moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every
+man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment, which any fool can
+trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or
+as a rascal. This is the lesson Democracy has to learn before it can
+become anything but the most oppressive of all the priesthoods.
+
+Let us now return to Bill Walker and his case of conscience against the
+Salvation Army. Major Barbara, not being a modern Tetzel, or the
+treasurer of a hospital, refuses to sell Bill absolution for a
+sovereign. Unfortunately, what the Army can afford to refuse in the
+case of Bill Walker, it cannot refuse in the case of Bodger. Bodger is
+master of the situation because he holds the purse strings. "Strive as
+you will," says Bodger, in effect: "me you cannot do without. You
+cannot save Bill Walker without my money." And the Army answers, quite
+rightly under the circumstances, "We will take money from the devil
+himself sooner than abandon the work of Salvation." So Bodger pays his
+conscience-money and gets the absolution that is refused to Bill. In
+real life Bill would perhaps never know this. But I, the dramatist,
+whose business it is to show the connexion between things that seem
+apart and unrelated in the haphazard order of events in real life, have
+contrived to make it known to Bill, with the result that the Salvation
+Army loses its hold of him at once.
+
+But Bill may not be lost, for all that. He is still in the grip of the
+facts and of his own conscience, and may find his taste for
+blackguardism permanently spoiled. Still, I cannot guarantee that happy
+ending. Let anyone walk through the poorer quarters of our cities when
+the men are not working, but resting and chewing the cud of their
+reflections; and he will find that there is one expression on every
+mature face: the expression of cynicism. The discovery made by Bill
+Walker about the Salvation Army has been made by every one of them.
+They have found that every man has his price; and they have been
+foolishly or corruptly taught to mistrust and despise him for that
+necessary and salutary condition of social existence. When they learn
+that General Booth, too, has his price, they do not admire him because
+it is a high one, and admit the need of organizing society so that he
+shall get it in an honorable way: they conclude that his character is
+unsound and that all religious men are hypocrites and allies of their
+sweaters and oppressors. They know that the large subscriptions which
+help to support the Army are endowments, not of religion, but of the
+wicked doctrine of docility in poverty and humility under oppression;
+and they are rent by the most agonizing of all the doubts of the soul,
+the doubt whether their true salvation must not come from their most
+abhorrent passions, from murder, envy, greed, stubbornness, rage, and
+terrorism, rather than from public spirit, reasonableness, humanity,
+generosity, tenderness, delicacy, pity and kindness. The confirmation
+of that doubt, at which our newspapers have been working so hard for
+years past, is the morality of militarism; and the justification of
+militarism is that circumstances may at any time make it the true
+morality of the moment. It is by producing such moments that we produce
+violent and sanguinary revolutions, such as the one now in progress in
+Russia and the one which Capitalism in England and America is daily and
+diligently provoking.
+
+At such moments it becomes the duty of the Churches to evoke all the
+powers of destruction against the existing order. But if they do this,
+the existing order must forcibly suppress them. Churches are suffered
+to exist only on condition that they preach submission to the State as
+at present capitalistically organized. The Church of England itself is
+compelled to add to the thirty-six articles in which it formulates its
+religious tenets, three more in which it apologetically protests that
+the moment any of these articles comes in conflict with the State it is
+to be entirely renounced, abjured, violated, abrogated and abhorred,
+the policeman being a much more important person than any of the
+Persons of the Trinity. And this is why no tolerated Church nor
+Salvation Army can ever win the entire confidence of the poor. It must
+be on the side of the police and the military, no matter what it
+believes or disbelieves; and as the police and the military are the
+instruments by which the rich rob and oppress the poor (on legal and
+moral principles made for the purpose), it is not possible to be on the
+side of the poor and of the police at the same time. Indeed the
+religious bodies, as the almoners of the rich, become a sort of
+auxiliary police, taking off the insurrectionary edge of poverty with
+coals and blankets, bread and treacle, and soothing and cheering the
+victims with hopes of immense and inexpensive happiness in another
+world when the process of working them to premature death in the
+service of the rich is complete in this.
+
+
+
+CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHISM
+
+Such is the false position from which neither the Salvation Army nor
+the Church of England nor any other religious organization whatever can
+escape except through a reconstitution of society. Nor can they merely
+endure the State passively, washing their hands of its sins. The State
+is constantly forcing the consciences of men by violence and cruelty.
+Not content with exacting money from us for the maintenance of its
+soldiers and policemen, its gaolers and executioners, it forces us to
+take an active personal part in its proceedings on pain of becoming
+ourselves the victims of its violence. As I write these lines, a
+sensational example is given to the world. A royal marriage has been
+celebrated, first by sacrament in a cathedral, and then by a bullfight
+having for its main amusement the spectacle of horses gored and
+disembowelled by the bull, after which, when the bull is so exhausted
+as to be no longer dangerous, he is killed by a cautious matador. But
+the ironic contrast between the bullfight and the sacrament of marriage
+does not move anyone. Another contrast--that between the splendor, the
+happiness, the atmosphere of kindly admiration surrounding the young
+couple, and the price paid for it under our abominable social
+arrangements in the misery, squalor and degradation of millions of
+other young couples--is drawn at the same moment by a novelist, Mr
+Upton Sinclair, who chips a corner of the veneering from the huge meat
+packing industries of Chicago, and shows it to us as a sample of what
+is going on all over the world underneath the top layer of prosperous
+plutocracy. One man is sufficiently moved by that contrast to pay his
+own life as the price of one terrible blow at the responsible parties.
+Unhappily his poverty leaves him also ignorant enough to be duped by
+the pretence that the innocent young bride and bridegroom, put forth
+and crowned by plutocracy as the heads of a State in which they have
+less personal power than any policeman, and less influence than any
+chairman of a trust, are responsible. At them accordingly he launches
+his sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but scattering the
+bowels of as many horses as any bull in the arena, and slaying
+twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine. And of all these,
+the horses alone are innocent of the guilt he is avenging: had he blown
+all Madrid to atoms with every adult person in it, not one could have
+escaped the charge of being an accessory, before, at, and after the
+fact, to poverty and prostitution, to such wholesale massacre of
+infants as Herod never dreamt of, to plague, pestilence and famine,
+battle, murder and lingering death--perhaps not one who had not helped,
+through example, precept, connivance, and even clamor, to teach the
+dynamiter his well-learnt gospel of hatred and vengeance, by approving
+every day of sentences of years of imprisonment so infernal in its
+unnatural stupidity and panic-stricken cruelty, that their advocates
+can disavow neither the dagger nor the bomb without stripping the mask
+of justice and humanity from themselves also. Be it noted that at this
+very moment there appears the biography of one of our dukes, who, being
+Scotch, could argue about politics, and therefore stood out as a great
+brain among our aristocrats. And what, if you please, was his grace's
+favorite historical episode, which he declared he never read without
+intense satisfaction? Why, the young General Bonapart's pounding of the
+Paris mob to pieces in 1795, called in playful approval by our
+respectable classes "the whiff of grapeshot," though Napoleon, to do
+him justice, took a deeper view of it, and would fain have had it
+forgotten. And since the Duke of Argyll was not a demon, but a man of
+like passions with ourselves, by no means rancorous or cruel as men go,
+who can doubt that all over the world proletarians of the ducal kidney
+are now revelling in "the whiff of dynamite" (the flavor of the joke
+seems to evaporate a little, does it not?) because it was aimed at the
+class they hate even as our argute duke hated what he called the mob.
+
+In such an atmosphere there can be only one sequel to the Madrid
+explosion. All Europe burns to emulate it. Vengeance! More blood! Tear
+"the Anarchist beast" to shreds. Drag him to the scaffold. Imprison him
+for life. Let all civilized States band together to drive his like off
+the face of the earth; and if any State refuses to join, make war on
+it. This time the leading London newspaper, anti-Liberal and therefore
+anti-Russian in politics, does not say "Serve you right" to the
+victims, as it did, in effect, when Bobrikofl; and De Plehve, and Grand
+Duke Sergius, were in the same manner unofficially fulminated into
+fragments. No: fulminate our rivals in Asia by all means, ye brave
+Russian revolutionaries; but to aim at an English princess-monstrous!
+hideous! hound down the wretch to his doom; and observe, please, that
+we are a civilized and merciful people, and, however much we may regret
+it, must not treat him as Ravaillac and Damiens were treated. And
+meanwhile, since we have not yet caught him, let us soothe our
+quivering nerves with the bullfight, and comment in a courtly way on
+the unfailing tact and good taste of the ladies of our royal houses,
+who, though presumably of full normal natural tenderness, have been so
+effectually broken in to fashionable routine that they can be taken to
+see the horses slaughtered as helplessly as they could no doubt be
+taken to a gladiator show, if that happened to be the mode just now.
+
+Strangely enough, in the midst of this raging fire of malice, the one
+man who still has faith in the kindness and intelligence of human
+nature is the fulminator, now a hunted wretch, with nothing,
+apparently, to secure his triumph over all the prisons and scaffolds of
+infuriate Europe except the revolver in his pocket and his readiness to
+discharge it at a moment's notice into his own or any other head. Think
+of him setting out to find a gentleman and a Christian in the multitude
+of human wolves howling for his blood. Think also of this: that at the
+very first essay he finds what he seeks, a veritable grandee of Spain,
+a noble, high-thinking, unterrified, malice-void soul, in the guise--of
+all masquerades in the world!--of a modern editor. The Anarchist wolf,
+flying from the wolves of plutocracy, throws himself on the honor of
+the man. The man, not being a wolf (nor a London editor), and therefore
+not having enough sympathy with his exploit to be made bloodthirsty by
+it, does not throw him back to the pursuing wolves--gives him, instead,
+what help he can to escape, and sends him off acquainted at last with a
+force that goes deeper than dynamite, though you cannot make so much of
+it for sixpence. That righteous and honorable high human deed is not
+wasted on Europe, let us hope, though it benefits the fugitive wolf
+only for a moment. The plutocratic wolves presently smell him out. The
+fugitive shoots the unlucky wolf whose nose is nearest; shoots himself;
+and then convinces the world, by his photograph, that he was no
+monstrous freak of reversion to the tiger, but a good looking young man
+with nothing abnormal about him except his appalling courage and
+resolution (that is why the terrified shriek Coward at him): one to
+whom murdering a happy young couple on their wedding morning would have
+been an unthinkably unnatural abomination under rational and kindly
+human circumstances.
+
+Then comes the climax of irony and blind stupidity. The wolves, balked
+of their meal of fellow-wolf, turn on the man, and proceed to torture
+him, after their manner, by imprisonment, for refusing to fasten his
+teeth in the throat of the dynamiter and hold him down until they came
+to finish him.
+
+Thus, you see, a man may not be a gentleman nowadays even if he wishes
+to. As to being a Christian, he is allowed some latitude in that
+matter, because, I repeat, Christianity has two faces. Popular
+Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a
+sanguinary execution after torture, for its central mystery an insane
+vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and
+profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of Equality,
+and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance, often politely
+called punishment or justice. The gibbet part of Christianity is
+tolerated. The other is criminal felony. Connoisseurs in irony are well
+aware of the fact that the only editor in England who denounces
+punishment as radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity; calls his
+paper The Freethinker; and has been imprisoned for two years for
+blasphemy.
+
+
+
+SANE CONCLUSIONS
+
+And now I must ask the excited reader not to lose his head on one side
+or the other, but to draw a sane moral from these grim absurdities. It
+is not good sense to propose that laws against crime should apply to
+principals only and not to accessories whose consent, counsel, or
+silence may secure impunity to the principal. If you institute
+punishment as part of the law, you must punish people for refusing to
+punish. If you have a police, part of its duty must be to compel
+everybody to assist the police. No doubt if your laws are unjust, and
+your policemen agents of oppression, the result will be an unbearable
+violation of the private consciences of citizens. But that cannot be
+helped: the remedy is, not to license everybody to thwart the law if
+they please, but to make laws that will command the public assent, and
+not to deal cruelly and stupidly with lawbreakers. Everybody
+disapproves of burglars; but the modern burglar, when caught and
+overpowered by a householder usually appeals, and often, let us hope,
+with success, to his captor not to deliver him over to the useless
+horrors of penal servitude. In other cases the lawbreaker escapes
+because those who could give him up do not consider his breech of the
+law a guilty action. Sometimes, even, private tribunals are formed in
+opposition to the official tribunals; and these private tribunals
+employ assassins as executioners, as was done, for example, by Mahomet
+before he had established his power officially, and by the Ribbon
+lodges of Ireland in their long struggle with the landlords. Under such
+circumstances, the assassin goes free although everybody in the
+district knows who he is and what he has done. They do not betray him,
+partly because they justify him exactly as the regular Government
+justifies its official executioner, and partly because they would
+themselves be assassinated if they betrayed him: another method learnt
+from the official government. Given a tribunal, employing a slayer who
+has no personal quarrel with the slain; and there is clearly no moral
+difference between official and unofficial killing.
+
+In short, all men are anarchists with regard to laws which are against
+their consciences, either in the preamble or in the penalty. In London
+our worst anarchists are the magistrates, because many of them are so
+old and ignorant that when they are called upon to administer any law
+that is based on ideas or knowledge less than half a century old, they
+disagree with it, and being mere ordinary homebred private Englishmen
+without any respect for law in the abstract, naively set the example of
+violating it. In this instance the man lags behind the law; but when
+the law lags behind the man, he becomes equally an anarchist. When some
+huge change in social conditions, such as the industrial revolution of
+the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, throws our legal and
+industrial institutions out of date, Anarchism becomes almost a
+religion. The whole force of the most energetic geniuses of the time in
+philosophy, economics, and art, concentrates itself on demonstrations
+and reminders that morality and law are only conventions, fallible and
+continually obsolescing. Tragedies in which the heroes are bandits, and
+comedies in which law-abiding and conventionally moral folk are
+compelled to satirize themselves by outraging the conscience of the
+spectators every time they do their duty, appear simultaneously with
+economic treatises entitled "What is Property? Theft!" and with
+histories of "The Conflict between Religion and Science."
+
+Now this is not a healthy state of things. The advantages of living in
+society are proportionate, not to the freedom of the individual from a
+code, but to the complexity and subtlety of the code he is prepared not
+only to accept but to uphold as a matter of such vital importance that
+a lawbreaker at large is hardly to be tolerated on any plea. Such an
+attitude becomes impossible when the only men who can make themselves
+heard and remembered throughout the world spend all their energy in
+raising our gorge against current law, current morality, current
+respect ability, and legal property. The ordinary man, uneducated in
+social theory even when he is schooled in Latin verse, cannot be set
+against all the laws of his country and yet persuaded to regard law in
+the abstract as vitally necessary to society. Once he is brought to
+repudiate the laws and institutions he knows, he will repudiate the
+very conception of law and the very groundwork of institutions,
+ridiculing human rights, extolling brainless methods as "historical,"
+and tolerating nothing except pure empiricism in conduct, with dynamite
+as the basis of politics and vivisection as the basis of science. That
+is hideous; but what is to be done? Here am I, for instance, by class a
+respectable man, by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by
+intellectual constitution legally minded to the verge of pedantry, and
+by temperament apprehensive and economically disposed to the limit of
+old-maidishness; yet I am, and have always been, and shall now always
+be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our
+liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our
+morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by
+inexperienced or malexperienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and
+weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the
+existing order for good reasons; but that does not make my attacks any
+less encouraging or helpful to people who are its enemies for bad
+reasons. The existing order may shriek that if I tell the truth about
+it, some foolish person may drive it to become still worse by trying to
+assassinate it. I cannot help that, even if I could see what worse it
+could do than it is already doing. And the disadvantage of that worst
+even from its own point of view is that society, with all its prisons
+and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in
+the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in
+the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating
+explosives which every Russian student can make, and every Russian
+grenadier has learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that
+brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their
+skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough
+to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their
+consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, simply not to
+outrage their consciences.
+
+Do not be afraid that they will not make allowances. All men make very
+large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in a war to
+the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the millennium. But
+there are two things that must be set right, or we shall perish, like
+Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire. The first is, that the daily
+ceremony of dividing the wealth of the country among its inhabitants
+shall be so conducted that no crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults
+who are not producing by their personal exertions not only a full
+equivalent for what they take, but a surplus sufficient to provide for
+their superannuation and pay back the debt due for their nurture.
+
+The second is that the deliberate infliction of malicious injuries
+which now goes on under the name of punishment be abandoned; so that
+the thief, the ruffian, the gambler, and the beggar, may without
+inhumanity be handed over to the law, and made to understand that a
+State which is too humane to punish will also be too thrifty to waste
+the life of honest men in watching or restraining dishonest ones. That
+is why we do not imprison dogs. We even take our chance of their first
+bite. But if a dog delights to bark and bite, it goes to the lethal
+chamber. That seems to me sensible. To allow the dog to expiate his
+bite by a period of torment, and then let him loose in a much more
+savage condition (for the chain makes a dog savage) to bite again and
+expiate again, having meanwhile spent a great deal of human life and
+happiness in the task of chaining and feeding and tormenting him, seems
+to me idiotic and superstitious. Yet that is what we do to men who bark
+and bite and steal. It would be far more sensible to put up with their
+vices, as we put up with their illnesses, until they give more trouble
+than they are worth, at which point we should, with many apologies and
+expressions of sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their
+last wishes, then, place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of
+them. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to expiate their
+misdeeds by a manufactured penalty, to subscribe to a charity, or to
+compensate the victims. If there is to be no punishment there can be no
+forgiveness. We shall never have real moral responsibility until
+everyone knows that his deeds are irrevocable, and that his life
+depends on his usefulness. Hitherto, alas! humanity has never dared
+face these hard facts. We frantically scatter conscience money and
+invent systems of conscience banking, with expiatory penalties,
+atonements, redemptions, salvations, hospital subscription lists and
+what not, to enable us to contract-out of the moral code. Not content
+with the old scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, we deify human saviors,
+and pray to miraculous virgin intercessors. We attribute mercy to the
+inexorable; soothe our consciences after committing murder by throwing
+ourselves on the bosom of divine love; and shrink even from our own
+gallows because we are forced to admit that it, at least, is
+irrevocable--as if one hour of imprisonment were not as irrevocable as
+any execution!
+
+If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will never
+know what it really is, or combat it effectually. The few men who have
+been able (relatively) to do this have been called cynics, and have
+sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in themselves, corresponding to
+the abnormal strength of their minds; but they have never done mischief
+unless they intended to do it. That is why great scoundrels have been
+beneficent rulers whilst amiable and privately harmless monarchs have
+ruined their countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus of innocence and
+guilt, reward and punishment, virtuous indignation and pardon, instead
+of standing up to the facts without either malice or mercy. Major
+Barbara stands up to Bill Walker in that way, with the result that the
+ruffian who cannot get hated, has to hate himself. To relieve this
+agony be tries to get punished; but the Salvationist whom he tries to
+provoke is as merciless as Barbara, and only prays for him. Then he
+tries to pay, but can get nobody to take his money. His doom is the
+doom of Cain, who, failing to find either a savior, a policeman, or an
+almoner to help him to pretend that his brother's blood no longer cried
+from the ground, had to live and die a murderer. Cain took care not to
+commit another murder, unlike our railway shareholders (I am one) who
+kill and maim shunters by hundreds to save the cost of automatic
+couplings, and make atonement by annual subscriptions to deserving
+charities. Had Cain been allowed to pay off his score, he might
+possibly have killed Adam and Eve for the mere sake of a second
+luxurious reconciliation with God afterwards. Bodger, you may depend on
+it, will go on to the end of his life poisoning people with bad whisky,
+because he can always depend on the Salvation Army or the Church of
+England to negotiate a redemption for him in consideration of a
+trifling percentage of his profits. There is a third condition too,
+which must be fulfilled before the great teachers of the world will
+cease to scoff at its religions. Creeds must become intellectually
+honest. At present there is not a single credible established religion
+in the world. That is perhaps the most stupendous fact in the whole
+world-situation. This play of mine, Major Barbara, is, I hope, both
+true and inspired; but whoever says that it all happened, and that
+faith in it and understanding of it consist in believing that it is a
+record of an actual occurrence, is, to speak according to Scripture, a
+fool and a liar, and is hereby solemnly denounced and cursed as such by
+me, the author, to all posterity.
+
+London, June 1906.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara, by 
+George Bernard Shaw
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