Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

126 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
of countenance and successfully evades the issue. Andrew’s entrance in the
third act is very different; he barely has time to draw a breath before Lady
Brit peremptorily and emphatically demands more money for the girls.
Undershaft agrees without a murmur. Strife occurs when she demands the
inheritance of the factory for Stephen, but as Undershaft is resolute that it
will go to a foundling as the tradition demands, and Stephen immediately
renounces his claim, that conflict, too, disappears. Then the only difficulty—obviously
not the central conflict of the play—is for Undershaft to
find a suitable profession for Stephen, whose priggishly aristocratic upbringing
has made him unfit for almost all gainful employment. But just
as Stephen’s inheritance of the factory is put entirely out of question, we
casually learn that Undershaft has yet to find a foundling to inherit the
munitions works. In the middle of the last act a new “action” is introduced.
Then that is forgotten for the moment, as they gather together to accompany
Barbara on her promised visit to the factory of death. It turns out to
be a model of cleanliness and respectability rather than the pit of Hell, and
Cusins, the neurasthenic and bespectacled professor of Greek, claims by a
quibble to be an eligible foundling, offering himself as a candidate for the
inheritance. His proposal is accepted virtually without hesitation. The conflict
is not Cusins’s trying to persuade Undershaft to accept a weak, inexperienced
academic as his apprentice; it is not about his struggle to become
the master of an arms empire that dominates Europe. No, it is Cusins’s
inner struggle with his conscience over the moral propriety of acceptance.
The battle between Undershaft and Cusins at the end of the play is about
the arms manufacturer’s attempt to persuade the professor to abandon his
moral standards. So many strange things have happened by now that we
are not surprised when he accepts, or even when Barbara tells him that if
he turned it down she would jilt him for the man who accepted. The “big”
question at the end of the play is whether the young idealists will take on
the factory; Cusins is the only one who asks the eminently sensible question:
Why would Undershaft take on Cusins?
There is a sense in which we are being overly scrupulous here; it is a
little like looking at the complexion of a beautiful woman with a powerful
magnifying glass so as to “prove” how grotesque she really looks. The play
is not incoherent, for the overall action is limpid: the mutual challenge of
father and daughter and its conclusion in the father’s favor. But there are
many digressions and extraneous details whose purpose is not immediately
apparent. We might expect that in a historical epic like Caesar and
Cleopatra, where the busy pattern of historic fact is apt to clutter up the