“After a while, I wrote a play which I called Mrs. Warren's Profession. I showed that women were driven to prostitution, not at all as the result of excessive female concupiscence, but because the economic conditions of modern capitalistic society forced them into a life from which, in another state of society, they would have shrunk with horror. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of prostitution.
“Finally, there came Major Barbara. Perhaps a more suitable title for this play, save for the fact of repetition, would have been Andrew Undershaft's Profession. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of dealing in death and destruction to one's fellow-creatures. I have shown the conflict between the naturally religious soul, Barbara, and Undershaft, with his gospel of money, of force, of power and his doctrine not only that money controls morality, but that it is a crime not to have money. The tragedy results from the collision of Undershaft's philosophy with Barbara's.”
Major Barbara is Shaw's presentment, as Socialist, of the problem of social determinism. Undershaft began as an East Ender, moralizing and starving, until he swore that he would be a full-fed free man at all costs. “I said, 'Thou shalt starve ere I starve'; and with that word I became free and great.” As in the case of Mrs. Warren, “Undershaft 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.” The doctrine of the direct functionality of money and morality is no new doctrine. Colonel Sellers maintained that every man has his price. Becky Sharp averred that any woman can be virtuous on five thousand pounds a year. The penniless De Rastignac on the heights of Montmartre, shaking his fist at the city that never sleeps, bitterly exclaimed: “Money is morality.” Shaw has declared again and again in the public prints and on the platform, that money controls morality, that money is the most important thing in the world, and that all sound and successful personal and social morality should have this fact for its basis. So Undershaft, asked if he calls poverty a crime, replies:
“The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtue beside it: all the other dishonours are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities: spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society; they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. Pah! you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham; you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose League meeting, and join the Conservative party.... It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread-and-butter in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Mahommedanism on the same terms.... I had rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a slave. I don't want to be either; but if you force the alternative on me, then, by Heaven! I'll choose the braver and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any other crime whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't preach at them: don't reason with them. Kill them.”
Now it is patent on reflection that poverty per se is not a crime, but frequently an incentive to crime; poverty is an evil that must be remedied by social reforms.[191] The casuistry of Undershaft's arguments lies in the assumption that good ends justify the worst of crimes; but the very strongest case can be made out against this materialist Socialism, inasmuch as it leaves out of consideration all sense of individual integrity and personal honour. The implication of Major Barbara is that the summum bonum vitæ is not virtue, or honour, or goodness, or personal worth, but material well-being, if not worldly prosperity. Undershaft expresses the doctrine of those industrial captains of the predatory rich class whom Mr. Roosevelt has entitled “malefactors of great wealth.” Mr. John D. Rockefeller is publicly quoted as preaching to his Sunday School class that it is every man's religious duty to make as much money as he possibly can—adding the sardonic parenthesis, “honestly, of course.” Undershaft, whose motto is “Unashamed,” finds the parenthesis superfluous—his expressed doctrine is to acquire money at all hazards—recte si possit, si non, quocumque modo rem. He would displace the Christian doctrine of submission with the Shavian doctrine of self-assertion. If the present practice of the Christian religion is found inadequate to modern social conditions, Undershaft asserts, why, scrap the Christian morality, and try another—the Undershaft morality, say, faute de mieux. But with that comic irony which never deserts Shaw even in treating the characters most akin to himself in temperament, he betrays the discrepancy in Undershaft's position: the lack of connection between his “tall talk” and his perfectly legitimate actions. There is no evidence that Undershaft employed dishonest means in the acquisition of his wealth, or committed any violence in the furtherance of his commercial ambition. Lady Britomart acutely pricks the bubble in the assertion that she could not get along with Undershaft because he gave the most immoral reasons for the most moral conduct!
Shaw suffered the customary fate of the dramatist in having Undershaft's Nietzschean doctrine of the “will to power” laid at his own door. It is an historic fact that Shaw once dissuaded a mob from going on another window-smashing excursion in the West End, by convincing them of its futility: and yet in the preface to Major Barbara he says, “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 domination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression.” As a Fabian, Shaw is a strict advocate of procedure by constitutional means; he constitutionally agitated for Old Age Pensions, threatening the Liberal Party all the while with speedy dissolution if this measure were not carried into effect. It is quite evident that in Major Barbara, Shaw is endeavouring to awake public thought and arouse public sentiment in England upon the momentous problems of poverty and the unemployed. To rich and poor alike, he quite consistently and impartially preaches Socialism, finding this to be most effectively accomplished by putting in the mouths of his dramatic characters extremes of opinion expressed in the extremest ways. Shaw advises the malefactor of great wealth, after acquiring a swollen fortune, to turn Socialist and, emulating the examples of Carnegie and Rhodes in educational and other fields, to employ his wealth in improving the conditions of life for the working classes.[192] To the poor, Shaw points out the inadequacy of the “paper apostles and artist magicians,” and the imperative necessity of militant opposition to oppression, revolt against subjection and poverty. In speaking of Undershaft's “hideous gospel,” Sir Oliver Lodge pertinently says, “Perhaps, after all, it is only the wealthy cannon-maker's gospel that is being preached to us; why should we take it as the gospel of Shaw himself? Shaw must have a better gospel than that in the future, and some day he will tell it us, but not yet. As yet, perhaps, it has not dawned clearly on him.... In nearly all Bernard Shaw's writings ... the background of strenuous labour, of poverty and overwork, which constitutes the foundation of modern society, is kept present to the consciousness all the time, is borne in upon the mind even of the most thoughtless: it is not possible to overlook it, and that is why his writings are so instructive and so welcome.”[193]
From the dramatic standpoint, Major Barbara is the most remarkable demonstration yet given by Shaw of the vitality of a type of entertainment in complete contradistinction to the classical model. Shaw has created a form of stage representation, not differing externally from the conventional form of drama, in which material action attains its irreducible minimum, and the conflict takes place absolutely within the minds and souls of the characters. Major Barbara consists in a succession of logical demonstrations, flowing from conflicting reactions set up in the souls of the leading characters by the simplest actions, externally trivial but subjectively of vital significance. In this play Shaw fully justifies his cardinal tenet of dramatic criticism that illumination of life is the prime function of the dramatist, and that the life of drama is not merely the passion of sexual excitement, but the social, religious and humanitarian passions. The drama of the future will concern itself with the passion of humanity for all great ends.
Major Barbara is epoch-making in virtue of its theme: the evolutional struggle of the religious consciousness in a single personality. The stage upon which the drama is enacted is the soul of the Salvation Army devotee. “Since I saw the Passion Play at Oberammergau,” said Mr. W. T. Stead in writing of Major Barbara, “I have not seen any play which represented so vividly the pathos of Gethsemane, the tragedy of Calvary.”[194] I do not see how anyone can read this story of a soul's tragedy, or see the play upon the stage, without a quickening of the nobler emotions, and a realization that Bernard Shaw is a man of profound feeling and of sentiment, in the best sense. The second act is the acme of great art, alike in the validity of its emotive power and the marvellous portraiture of true practical Christianity in the character of Major Barbara. The sanity and sweetness of her noble nature, the positive divination of her religious sense which inspires her to sink self and go straight to the heart of the religious problem, are revelations in the art of character-portrayal. Her loss of faith appears insufficiently motived in the play; her conversion in the last act is even less convincing. Undershaft's intellectuality dominates Barbara's emotionality; slight reflection might well have convinced her that the Salvation Army accepted Undershaft's and Bodger's “tainted money” without explicit or tacit obligation of any sort whatsoever.[195] But perhaps she saw—as Shaw intends us to see—that the Salvation Army is foredoomed to failure so long as its chief means of support is derived from the very class against which it animadverts. If the Salvation Army goes so far as actually to threaten the incomes of the predatory rich, it will at once discover that its means of support derived from that quarter, will be forthcoming no longer.
Not without its significance is the fact that, in Major Barbara, leading dramatic critics found fantastic and absurd what leading publicists found momentous and profound. To Mr. Walkley, Major Barbara was a “farrago,” to Mr. Archer, a play in which there are “no human beings.” On the other hand, Sir Oliver Lodge and Mr. W. T. Stead were immensely impressed with this play as a vital study of contemporary religious and social manifestations. These contrasted views tend to emphasize the facts that the plot of Major Barbara is quite obviously fantastic, and Undershaft a mystic whose ideas are dangerously unpractical. And yet the separate characters in the play, with the exception of Undershaft—and even in his case, we should remember that no character is impossible in a world which holds a Bernard Shaw—are all perfectly natural and perfectly comprehensible. Shaw's practically unlimited acquaintance with all ranks of society enables him to exhibit characters so diametrically diverse as Bill Walker and Major Barbara, Lady Britomart and Mrs. Baines, Undershaft and Cusins, Lomax and “Snobby” Price. The play's greatest faults are the fantastic plot, the exaggerated discursiveness degenerating toward the close into rather wearisome prolixity, and the lack of conviction inspired by Barbara's “conversion” to Undershaftism at the close. The seriousness of the theme is everywhere lightened by the brilliancy of the dialogue, the deadly accuracy of the paradoxes, and the satiric portraiture of social types. But Shaw's incorrigible dialecticism leaves something to be desired; and we feel toward Shaw the playwright much as Lady Britomart felt towards Undershaft. “Stop making speeches, Andrew,” she says. “This is not the place for them”; to which Undershaft (punctured) replies: “My dear, I have no other way of conveying my ideas.”
Shaw recently asserted that the “way to get the real English public into the theatre was to give them plenty of politics, to suffuse the politics with religion, and have as many long speeches as possible. I knew this because I was in the habit of delivering long speeches to British audiences myself.” At the Court Theatre, and later at the Savoy, Shaw drew the real English public to the theatre with the politics of John Bull's Other Island, the religion of Major Barbara, and the long speeches of these two and Man and Superman. In his next play, which he told me he regarded as his most human and most rational drama, Shaw's active and long-continued interest in modern medicine found full vent. “The theme of my new play is modern serumpathy; and the hero is a doctor,” he wrote me while engaged upon the first act of The Doctor's Dilemma.