I, the dramatist, whose business it is to show the connection between things that seem apart and unrelated in the haphazard order of events in real life…
(Shaw describes his role in the Preface to Major Barbara)

George Bernard Shaw became notorious for the long prefaces he attached to his many plays. The preface to Major Barbara is one of the longest, at 40 pages long! So long it is divided into sections with their own headings. I’d heard so much about Shaw’s prefaces that I was really looking forward to their wit and wisdom, to learning something but this one felt like 40 pages of often dazzling, sometimes incomprehensible, but ultimately pointless rhetoric.

First aid to critics

Shaw has a very poor opinion of British critics and so explains that his preface is so long because he is going to explain the major themes of his play to them and how to think and write about it.

For starters, as a prologue, Shaw takes critics to task who, whenever he tackles a serious subject, accuse him of being influenced by Ibsen or Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or some fancy Continental thinker. Shaw irritably declares that he was much more influenced by little-known British writers such as:

• the Irish novelist Charles Lever, whose novel ‘A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance’ contains the theme of the clash between romantic ideals and harsh reality
• the amoral antinomianism of Ernest Belfort Bax who defended the positive value of crime
• Captain Wilson who criticised Christianity for its slave morality who criticised the Sermon on the Mount as a justification of cowardice and servility
• or the historian Stuart-Glennie who argued that Christianity was invented by white races to subjugate all the other races of the world

The Gospel of Andrew Undershaft

Here beginneth Shaw’s explanation of his play. He tells us that he conceived the character of Andrew Undershaft as a man who has grasped that the greatest human value is to avoid being poor. He picks up the typical middle-class comment ‘Let him [the working man] be poor’ and asks what it means in practice:

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.

Shaw turns to the play and says he conceived of Undershaft, ‘resolute and clearsighted’, as a man who has grasped the great truth that you ought to do anything, anything at all, to avoid being poor. Against him is contrasted Peter Shirley, a feeble specimen of the weak-willed ‘deserving poor’ who is incapable of bettering himself and always complaining about his lot.

Shaw lambasts high-minded do-gooders like William Morris with his fancy arts and crafts for not grasping the basic fact that most people do not want hand-designed wallpaper or expensive editions of Chaucer, they want more money.

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honour, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness.

Thus:

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.

The Salvation Army

Critics thought he was mocking the Salvation Army or took Barbara’s view that it should never accept tainted money, but Shaw spends several pages explaining that all money is tainted, none of us can stand all of from the exploitation inherent in our society, and the real life Salvation Army officer who exclaimed that of course they’d accept the donations of a distiller and an arms manufacturer, ‘they would take money from the devil himself and be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into God’s.’ Army officers he quizzed questioned the plausibility of the play not because Mrs Baines accepted the tainted money but because Barbara refused it. The fact that so many playgoers and critics saw her gesture as noble and good indicates how out of touch with ‘the life of the nation’ so many playgoers and critics are.

Barbara’s Return to the Colours

Shaw makes the simple but striking point that fine writing changes nothing, only physical force changes society. It is a truism to claim that Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopedists caused the French Revolution but it’s also wrong. When Voltaire was at the peak of his career, French society only became more repressive and barbaric. The simple truth is that only physical force changes things. Likewise the nineteenth century in Britain had the high-minded writings of its Utilitarians, its Christian Socialists, its Fabians, of Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, Butler, Henry George and Morris but they changed nothing. Only strikes and illegal organisation among working men changed anything.

Which is why Shaw finds it extremely significant that the Salvation Army is named and organised as an army, and that its chief campaign is for money. Both of these aspects denote a realism about how society needs to be changed.

Weaknesses of the Salvation Army

That said, he bemoans its Christianity, its ties to arch conservatives and old-school evangelists. This section disappears into squabbles about whether Salvationists do or don’t believe in an afterlife, what kind of afterlife, whether belief in an afterlife robs death of its sting etc, all of which feels like dancing on a pinhead which has been stomped into the ground millions of times over the past two thousand years.

He disapproves their habit of sinners making a grand confession of their previous sinful lives before they saw the light, as this just encourages exaggeration or downright lies. He goes on to attack Christianity (as far as I can make out) claiming that:

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.

Who cares. Christianity has no place in modern public life which is, as I write in 2024, more dogged by worries about Judaism and Islam. But it was 120 years ago and the play is about the Salvation Army so Shaw continues with his paradoxical and provocative views:

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 can see how this chimes with his view that imprisoning people for crime is barbaric, simply returning one crime for another. the trouble with all Shaw’s clever demolitions of contemporary social values is it’s hard to make out what he would put in their place. If we don’t lock up rapists and murderers, what should we do with them?

It gets, in my opinion, worse, as Shaw rambles on to talk about super successful millionaire businessmen.

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.

We might all agree about the exploitation of Africa, but did English factory owners, mine owners, big businessmen deal out ‘ruin and death and slavery to their competitors and employees’? No, not really. And the unreliable exaggeration of this renders everything which follows flaky and invalid. For he goes on to describe the type of the successful tycoon who believes his own propaganda, writes books of advice, sponsors charitable foundations etc. I guess he’s describing the John D Rockefellers of his age. Would the same apply to our modern leading charitable millionaires, Elton John, David Sainsbury, Dame Janet de Botton, Sigrid Rausing?

Anyway, all this degenerates into the kind of wordy gibberish Shaw is so prone to:

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.

‘To found moral institutions on a basis of moral inequality’ 1) I don’t quite understand what ‘moral institutions’ are or what ‘moral inequality’ means so 2) I can’t see any way it applies to anything in the real world.

Shaw comes out with sweeping but schoolboy criticisms of society:

Churches are suffered to exist only on condition that they preach submission to the State as at present capitalistically organized.

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)…

These sound like the childish nostrums of 1960s radicals who all grew up and went into advertising, silly on so many levels. Would you expect the state religion to preach violent overthrow of the status quo? How would that work? And as we discovered during the Thatcher years, sometimes the greatest opposition to the government’s policy came from senior figures in the Church of England.

As to the police, it is another old chestnut that they oppress the poor but 1) what happens if you defund the police and withdraw any force of law and order from inner cities? Do they become paradises of ‘moral equality’? Nope. Surely the police are the least worst option in terms of trying to curb the evil instincts of so many men. And 2) it is 40 years of neo-liberal economics, with its casualisation of millions of low-paid jobs, the lack of social housing and the demonisation of benefits scroungers which oppress the poor, not cops whizzing round in fancy cars.

Christianity and Anarchism

Thus, according to Shaw, the Salvation Army and all organised religions are placed in a false position until society is comprehensibly restructured. Shaw refers to the Morral Affair without (as is the habit of him and so many of the authors of his age) giving the necessary names or details. The reader has to turn to Wikipedia to find out what he’s on about.

On May 31, 1906, Mateu Morral threw a bomb at King Alfonso XIII’ of Spains car as he returned with Victoria Eugenie from their wedding in Madrid. It was a year to the date following a similar attack on his carriage. The bomb was concealed in a bouquet of flowers. While the King and Queen emerged unscathed, 24 bystanders and soldiers were killed and over 100 more wounded. A British colonel observing the scene compared it to one of war. The bride’s wedding gown was splattered with horse blood.

But Shaw seems to imply that the attack was justified.

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 clamour, 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.

So do I deserve to be blown up by a terrorist bomb because I acquiesce in all the poverty and exploitation to be found in contemporary London? As he continues his narrative, Shaw seems to sympathise with the Madrid newspaper editor who helped the assassin escape, at least temporarily, from the Spanish police, while his bile is especially reserved for public opinion across Europe – ‘the raging fire of malice’ – which was horrified at the mass murder of the bombing.

Maybe Shaw would have approved of 9/11 on the basis of his claim that none of us are innocent? Or, closer to home, of the 7 July 2005 London bombings? That seems to be the logical consequence of his claim that no one who lives in a capitalist society is innocent of the exploitation inherent in capitalism. We all deserve to be blown up.

Sane Conclusions

Shaw continues with his hobbyhorse against the police and against any form of judicial punishment, especially the ‘barbarity’ of imprisonment. Instead he suggests every man is an anarchist when it comes to laws which are against their consciences. At times of great social change, institutions and laws need to change with them but rarely do, end up being 50 years or more out of date with the result that most sane men break them with a clean conscience.

As so many writers of this ilk do, he appeals not to data or facts, but to his own personality:

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 but I cannot help that…

Schoolboy rubbish. Do our ‘liberties destroy all freedom’? No, rubbish. Is property organised robbery? No. Is our morality an impudent hypocrisy? Well, take the general moral agreement that murder is bad, is that some kind of hypocrisy?

It feels intolerably weak, lame and inadequate that all the preceding bombast of this 40-page effusion ends up with this combination of crass exaggeration and egotistical self obsession.

Shaw’s solutions

And his two solutions for all this? Are close to incomprehensible.

First, 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.

This is nonsense. Nearly half the adult population of Britain is incapable of productive work due to long-term sickness, mental illness, addiction or caring responsibilities for children or others. Next?

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 be absolutely clear:

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.

So there are Shaw’s solutions to Britain’s social problems: everyone must be forced to work; any criminal will be tolerated until their behaviour becomes completely unacceptable at which point they will be liquidated. Any goodwill Shaw generated earlier in this grotesque essay surely evaporates at this point. On the last page he explains at length that the churches and Christianity, by offering unlimited redemption, only encourage lowlife criminals or criminal capitalists like Bodger to carry on with their crime indefinitely. The only way to stop it is not endless fol-de-rol of atonement and forgiveness but the iron law of annihilation. To ensure there’s no doubt he repeats his two key points:

We shall never have real moral responsibility until everyone knows 1) that his deeds are irrevocable, and 2) that his life depends on his usefulness.

Is this Swiftian satire or does he mean it? In which case, surely he was a proto-Nazi?

Related links

• Major Barbara on Planet Gutenberg
• Preface to Major Barbara on Planet Gutenberg

Bernard Shaw reviews

• Arms and the Man (1894)
• Candida (1894)
• John Bull’s Other Island (1904)
• Major Barbara (1905)
• Preface to Major Barbara (1905)
• The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906)
• Pygmalion (1913)
• Heartbreak House (1919)

• More play reviews