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

Major Barbara 131
goes his own way, showing a healthy ability to learn from his mistakes by
apologizing to his father about his prejudices regarding Perivale St.
Andrews, he reveals his naïveté afresh. Like the educated gentleman he is,
he caps his admiration for the wonderfully organized town with a quotation
from Milton: “Peace hath her victories no less renowned than War”
(3:160). This is a stark contrast to Cusins, whose “it’s all horribly, frightfully,
immorally, unanswerably perfect” shows him to be as painfully sensitive
to irony as Stephen is unconscious of it (3:158). Stephen’s hypocrisy
is only slightly obscured by his confusion about the inconsistencies in his
position. These particular victories of peace are, of course, made possible
only by war. And why does he applaud the operation now that he has
found it to be clean and respectable? His objection was to the exploitation
of war and destruction; that has not changed. Did he imagine, like his sister,
that just because Perivale St. Andrews is engaged in the manufacture of
weapons it must have been “a sort of pit where lost creatures with blackened
faces stirred up smoky fires and were driven and tormented by
[Unershaft]” (3:154)? Yet he cannot escape his moralistic conviction that
pain is good for the soul. The pampered son of wealth and breeding worries
that too much luxury will destroy the workers’ independence and sense of
responsibility. Unlike Barbara, he has no comprehension that responsibility
means having something to do and knowing that if you do not do it
it will not be done, not from having experienced egregious suffering. This
superstition of the English upper classes allowed them to believe that having
run a gauntlet of floggings at the hands of sadistic schoolmasters qualified
them to govern an empire.
Parents and Children
If Stephen’s independence of his mother is questionable, the same question
can be raised about the succession of the Undershaft inheritance by Barbara
and Adolphus. The closing line of the play—“Six o’clock tomorrow
morning, Euripides”—underscores the unsettled nature of that question
by reminding us that Cusins had not even agreed to the working hours
Undershaft demanded. 3 How much will the next Andrew Undershaft be
like or different from the present one? How much will the necessities imposed
by the world and the realities of manufacturing and selling arms
change the ideals of the saver of souls and the humanitarian professor of
Greek? This is what the play is about: the spiritual and moral contest between
father and daughter—solemnly agreed upon like a medieval joust.
The overturned expectations are nowhere more complex and enigmatic