Sainthood for Millionaires: Major Barbara

SAINTHOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES: MAJOR BARBARA THE MAJOR DIFFICULTY OF Major Barbara lies in its simple and necessary irony, which is only the irony of life istelf. Shaw, in his preface to the play, gives copious "First Aid to Critics," but the confusion remains, partly because, as he himself points out, if you tell the truth nobody will believe you, andpartly because this preface deals with ideas rather than with dramatic method. That method is, as Cheserton calls it, "the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play itself was written,"1 an irony designed to show that we may not accept the least of capitalism's benefits without acceping the last of its depredations: also that the damage it does and the audacity of its excuses beggar invective and so thoroughly satirize themselves that no response is left but irony, a weapon Shaw wields as superbly as Swift. There is even a modest echo of "A Modest Proposal" in the preface: Suppose we were to abolish all penalties for such actIvIties as burglary, arson, rape and murder, and decide that poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate-that every adult with less than, say, £ 365 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?2 But the philosophy of the play is far from being a "materialistic pessimism" as Chesterton claims.3 Chesterton, a Christian, was poignantlyaware that Barbara's belief in her work for the Salvation Army comes down in ruins, although the nobility and the sincerity of that belief remain standing. Money and power rise triumphant. But, as the play shows once its irony is understood, neither the Christian thesis nor the capitalist anti-thesis carries the ultimate day. That belongs to the third religion in the play, Shaw's secular religion of Creative Evolution, which is closely related to his socialism. It is the Life Force that wants the marriage of Cusins and Barbara. It is also the 1 G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (New York, 1956), p. 146. 2 John Bull's Other Island with How He Lied To Her Husband and Major Barbara (London, 1931), p. 211. All later references to this volume are listed as Major Barbara. 3 Chesterton, p. 148. 227 228 MODERN DRAMA December Life Force that has led Undershaft to adopt his religion and his success--one and the same-for in the vital genius the Life Force runs powerfully towards its objects-and attracts others irresistibly. The central conflict of the play is between the ideas of Andrew Undershaft on the one hand, and the ideas of the whole society, represented by his whole family, on the other. St. Andrew (canonized in Shaw's preface, not in the play) lives by money and gunpowder; nothing remarkable in that, except that he is not ashamed to admit it. Opposed to him stand his daughter, a major in the Salvation Army, who believes intensely in the Christian virtues and not at all in money; his estranged wife, Lady Britomart, an aristocrat with no nonsense about her; his lesser children, Stephen, a worldly weakling , and Sarah, a nonentity; and Barbara's fiance, a professor of Greek and something of a poet. Given the fact that Barbara, the central force in this opposition, is a realist like her father, in spite of being a missionary, the outcome of the drama is inevitable. Undershaft has (sometimes silently) the last word in every argument. And he has something better than the last word: he has the last act. He has, in other words, not only convincing arguments, which would always be countered by other convincing arguments (Chesterton offers a few, cogent in themselves, but dramatically false4), but also the reversal of all the stubbornly held opinions of his opponents. In a clean sweep of the board, Undershaft converts to his own view the representatives of Christian spirituality, of academic classicism, of the old aristocracy, and even the limp indifference of the idle rich. All are forced...