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

Major Barbara 143
eryone else in the play expresses some idealist notion, but the most important
advocates of the idealist viewpoint are Stephen, his mother, and especially
Cusins.
Cusins
Yes, Cusins is an idealist. He is the best example of that superior variety of
the human species to be found in all of Shaw’s plays. He is highly intelligent,
strong in will, conscientious to the point of self-destruction, and remarkably
perceptive. He illustrates in an extreme degree both the admirable
and the pernicious traits Shaw saw as the marks of an idealist. The
principle difference between his idealism and that of Lady Britomart or
Stephen is that he is far more perceptive and clear-headed, so that idealism
leads him to bitter irony and cynicism rather than hypocrisy and self-deception.
Cusins is set apart ethically from Lady Brit and Stephen by the
fact that they are moralists while he is conscientious. Undershaft makes
the difference clear when he says to his wife: “My dear: you are the incarnation
of morality. Your conscience is clear and your duty done when you
have called everybody names.” Morality tells us to condemn those whose
behavior we find disagreeable; conscience tells us how we ourselves should
or should not behave. Stephen’s concern that too much pampering will be
bad for the souls of workers is a more subtle form of morality because it is
unconscious of any similar deleterious effect his own privileges might
have on his character. Stephen regards a clear conscience as his birthright;
Cusins knows he has to work for his. Stephen worries about maintaining
the character of others (especially those in the lower orders); Cusins worries
about his own. Undershaft, however, classes Cusins as a moralist along
with his wife. Cusins’s lust for a clear conscience he calls “patronizing
people who are not so lucky as yourself” (3: 177). This is an interesting
statement of the principle of moral equality, implying that a person born
with a flawed character is unlucky in the same way as one born with a club
foot. Bill Walker is a ruffian largely as a result of his circumstances, according
to Undershaft, for he ventures that he could save his soul more effectively
than Barbara just by giving him a job and a decent income. Environment
is not the only culprit: there are congenital character defects as well
as physical ones, but a person born with a murderous temper is quite as
unfortunate as one born with a withered arm. A moral disability is as worthy
of compassion as a physical one. That is why Undershaft equates the
lust for personal righteousness with “patronizing people not so lucky as
yourself.” It is Undershaft’s equivalent of the Christian “There but for the