Preface

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