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.