The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara, by
George Bernard Shaw

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Title: Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Posting Date: May 19, 2009 [EBook #3789]
Release Date: February, 2000
First Posted: September 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAW'S PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA ***

Produced by Eve Sobol. HTML version by Al Haines.

PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS

BERNARD SHAW

N.B. The Euripidean verses in the second act of Major Barbara are not
by me, or even directly by Euripides. They are by Professor Gilbert
Murray, whose English version of The Baccha; came into our dramatic
literature with all the impulsive power of an original work shortly
before Major Barbara was begun. The play, indeed, stands indebted to
him in more ways than one.

G. B. S.

Before dealing with the deeper aspects of Major Barbara, let me, for
the credit of English literature, make a protest against an unpatriotic
habit into which many of my critics have fallen. Whenever my view
strikes them as being at all outside the range of, say, an ordinary
suburban churchwarden, they conclude that I am echoing Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, or some other heresiarch in
northern or eastern Europe.

I confess there is something flattering in this simple faith in my
accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a philosopher. But I
cannot tolerate the assumption that life and literature is so poor in
these islands that we must go abroad for all dramatic material that is
not common and all ideas that are not superficial. I therefore venture
to put my critics in possession of certain facts concerning my contact
with modern ideas.

About half a century ago, an Irish novelist, Charles Lever, wrote a
story entitled A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance. It was published by
Charles Dickens in Household Words, and proved so strange to the public
taste that Dickens pressed Lever to make short work of it. I read
scraps of this novel when I was a child; and it made an enduring
impression on me. The hero was a very ro