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

Major Barbara 145
which he himself conspicuously belongs. His love of the poor is only pity,
which Undershaft contemptuously dismisses as the “scavenger of misery.”
His condemnation of the English and the intellectuals is self-hatred inspired
by guilty consciousness of his own privileges and comforts. His
attempt to achieve moral purity by avoiding contact with wickedness is
doomed. It is not only ruining his health, but when the strain is brought to
crisis at the conclusion of the second act, he suffers what amounts to a
moral nervous collapse and wallows hysterically in what he is convinced is
evil, even to the point of getting drunk with the man he calls the Prince of
Darkness (who stays characteristically sober). Unlike Barbara and Undershaft,
he views transgressions as debts to be repaid. He approves, to Barbara’s
dismay, of Bill’s attempt to pay for his misdeed, and rejects forgiveness,
not (like Shaw and Barbara) because the concept is fraudulent, but
because “we must pay our debts” (3: 114, 178). Many critics, themselves
liberal intellectuals, believe that Cusins will be an improvement on the old
Andrew Undershaft because of his commitment to arm the oppressed
rather than the establishment. This is a desperate hope at best. The new
Undershaft, like the old, will have to sell to whom he can in order to thrive,
and can no more make courage and conviction than his predecessor. Barbara
is the real hope, because the job at hand is to awaken dormant souls.
Revisions
There were two significant trends in the many changes Shaw made to the
final scene of the play: one was to make Cusins a strong and more steadfast
advocate of the idealist viewpoint. The other was to pull Barbara more into
the background. The portrayal of Cusins in the Derry manuscript is dramatically
unfocused; in the final version he is a stronger opponent to
Undershaft. Speeches are added to set him apart from Undershaft and others
deleted that had shown him coming over to the older man’s position.
The original ending was less ambiguous with respect to the struggle between
Cusins and Undershaft. Barbara, on the other hand, has considerably
less to say in the final version of the last scene. Some of her dialogue,
like her reproach to her father about robbing from her a human soul, is
moved to earlier in the play. Some minor lines are given to other characters,
and others are cut. Curiously, the effect of this is to give her greater
strength, as the men are engaged in a struggle for her—more specifically,
for the spiritual power and moral authority she represents. The parable is
also better served since some of her almost peevish objections to the muni-