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.