Preface to Major Barbara | Page 5

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