Preface to Major Barbara | Page 6

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.
THE GOSPEL OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT
It is this credulity that drives me to help my critics out with Major
Barbara by telling them what to say about it. In the millionaire
Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and
spiritually as well