Preface to Major Barbara | Page 4

etext was produced by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA

PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS
BERNARD SHAW

N.B. The Euripidean verses in the second act of Major Barbara are not

by me, or even directly by Euripides. They are by Professor Gilbert
Murray, whose English version of The Baccha; came into our dramatic
literature with all the impulsive power of an original work shortly
before Major Barbara was begun. The play, indeed, stands indebted to
him in more ways than one. G. B. S.

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