l epigram which is the centre and purpose of the play. It is
generally possible, even amid that blinding jewellery of a million
jokes, to discover the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play
itself was written.

The ultimate epigram of _Major Barbara_ can be put thus. People say that
poverty is no crime; Shaw says that poverty is a crime; that it is a
crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it, that it is the mother
of all crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If a man says to Shaw
that he is born of poor but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the very
word "but" shows that his parents were probably dishonest. In short, he
maintains here what he had maintained elsewhere: that what the people at
this moment require is not more patriotism or more art or more religion
or more morality or more sociology, but simply more money. The evil is
not ignorance or decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is poverty. The
point of this particular drama is that even the noblest enthusiasm of
the girl who becomes a Salvation Army officer fails under the brute
money power of her father who is a modern capitalist. When I have said
this it will be clear why this play, fine and full of bitter sincerity
as it is, must in a manner be cleared out of the way before we come to
talk of Shaw's final and serious faith. For his serious faith is in the
sanctity of human will, in the divine capacity for creation and choice
rising higher than environment and doom; and so far as that goes, _Major
Barbara_ is not only apart from his faith but against his faith. _Major
Barbara_ is an account of environment victorious over heroic will. There
are a thousand answers to the ethic in _Major Barbara_ which I should
be inclined to offer. I might point out that the rich do not so much buy
honesty as curtains to cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy
health as cushions to comfort disease. And I might suggest that the
doctrine that poverty degrades the poor is much more likely to be used
as an argument for keeping them powerless than as an argument for making
them rich. But there is no need to find such answers to the
materialistic pessimism of _Major Barbara_. The best answer to it is in
Shaw's own best and crowning philosophy, with which we shall shortly be
concerned.

_John Bull's Other Island_ represents a realism somewhat more tinged
with the later transcendentalism of its author. In one sense, of course,
it is a satire on the con