author - "George Bernard Shaw"
o which many of my critics have fallen.Whenever my view strikes them as being at all outside the rangeof, say, an ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that Iam 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 inmy accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as aphilosopher. But I cannot tolerate the assumption that life andliterature is so poor in these islands that we must go abroad forall dramatic material that is not common and all ideas that arenot superficial. I therefore venture to put my critics inpossession of certain facts concerning my contact with modernideas.
About half a century ago, an Irish novelist, Charles Lever, wrotea story entitled A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. It was publishedby Charles Dickens in Household Words, and proved so strange tothe public taste that Dickens pressed Lever to make short work ofit. I read scraps of this novel when I was a child; and it madean enduring impression on me. The hero was a very romantic hero,trying to live bravely, chivalrously, and powerfully by dintof mere romance-fed imagination, without courage, without means,without knowledge, without skill, without anything real excepthis bodily appetites. Even in my childhood I found in this poordevil's unsuccessful encounters with the facts of life, apoignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The book, in spiteof its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the other dayin the catalogue of Tauchnitz.
Now why is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony ofthe conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, nocritic ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediateforerunner, Charles Lever, whilst they confidently derive me froma Norwegian author of whose language I do not know three words,and of whom I knew nothing until years after the ShavianAnschauung was already unequivocally declared in books full ofwhat came, t
ave himself from cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real hero, inartic
obviously disregards all the canons and unities and other things which every well-bred dramatist is bound to respect that his work is really unworthy of serious criticism (orthodox). Indeed he knows no more about the dramatic art than, according to his own story in "The Man of Destiny," Napoleon at Tavazzano knew of the Art of War. But both men were successes each in his way--the latter won victories and the former gained audiences, in the very teeth of the accepted theories of war and the theatre. Shaw does not know that it is unpardonable sin to have his characters make long speeches at one another, apparently thinking that this embargo applies only to long speeches which consist mainly of bombast and rhetoric. There never was an author who showed less predilection for a specific medium by which to accomplish his results. He recognized, early in his days, many things awry in the world and he assumed the task of mundane reformation with a confident spirit. It seems such a small job at twenty to set the times
ion, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford an
Description
Major Barbara is a three-act play that premiered at the Court Theatre in 1905, and was subsequently published in 1907. It portrays idealist Barbara Undershaft, a Major in the Salvation Army, and her encounter with her long-estranged father who has made his fortune as a “dealer of death” in the munitions industry. Barbara doesn’t wish to be associated with her father’s ill-gotten wealth, but can’t prevent him from donating to the Salvation Army and eventually converting her family to his capitalist views on how best to help the poor.
In the preface, Shaw addresses his critics and explicates his actual attitudes towards the Salvation Army, versus the attitudes and fates portrayed by his characters and responded to by the critics. He continues on to discuss the issues of wealth and poverty, religion and science, and how they all fit into his views of society.
Major Barbara is one of the most controversial of Shaw’s work and was greeted with decidedly mixed reviews, yet it endures as one of his most famous plays.
o which many of my critics have fallen.Whenever my view strikes them as being at all outside the rangeof, say, an ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that Iam 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 inmy accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as aphilosopher. But I cannot tolerate the assumption that life andliterature is so poor in these islands that we must go abroad forall dramatic material that is not common and all ideas that arenot superficial. I therefore venture to put my critics inpossession of certain facts concerning my contact with modernideas.
About half a century ago, an Irish novelist, Charles Lever, wrotea story entitled A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. It was publishedby Charles Dickens in Household Words, and proved so strange tothe public taste that Dickens pressed Lever to make short work ofit. I read scraps of this novel when I was a child; and it madean enduring impression on me. The hero was a very romantic hero,trying to live bravely, chivalrously, and powerfully by dintof mere romance-fed imagination, without courage, without means,without knowledge, without skill, without anything real excepthis bodily appetites. Even in my childhood I found in this poordevil's unsuccessful encounters with the facts of life, apoignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The book, in spiteof its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the other dayin the catalogue of Tauchnitz.
Now why is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony ofthe conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, nocritic ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediateforerunner, Charles Lever, whilst they confidently derive me froma Norwegian author of whose language I do not know three words,and of whom I knew nothing until years after the ShavianAnschauung was already unequivocally declared in books full ofwhat came, t
ave himself from cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real hero, inartic
obviously disregards all the canons and unities and other things which every well-bred dramatist is bound to respect that his work is really unworthy of serious criticism (orthodox). Indeed he knows no more about the dramatic art than, according to his own story in "The Man of Destiny," Napoleon at Tavazzano knew of the Art of War. But both men were successes each in his way--the latter won victories and the former gained audiences, in the very teeth of the accepted theories of war and the theatre. Shaw does not know that it is unpardonable sin to have his characters make long speeches at one another, apparently thinking that this embargo applies only to long speeches which consist mainly of bombast and rhetoric. There never was an author who showed less predilection for a specific medium by which to accomplish his results. He recognized, early in his days, many things awry in the world and he assumed the task of mundane reformation with a confident spirit. It seems such a small job at twenty to set the times
ion, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford an
Description
Major Barbara is a three-act play that premiered at the Court Theatre in 1905, and was subsequently published in 1907. It portrays idealist Barbara Undershaft, a Major in the Salvation Army, and her encounter with her long-estranged father who has made his fortune as a “dealer of death” in the munitions industry. Barbara doesn’t wish to be associated with her father’s ill-gotten wealth, but can’t prevent him from donating to the Salvation Army and eventually converting her family to his capitalist views on how best to help the poor.
In the preface, Shaw addresses his critics and explicates his actual attitudes towards the Salvation Army, versus the attitudes and fates portrayed by his characters and responded to by the critics. He continues on to discuss the issues of wealth and poverty, religion and science, and how they all fit into his views of society.
Major Barbara is one of the most controversial of Shaw’s work and was greeted with decidedly mixed reviews, yet it endures as one of his most famous plays.