Preface to Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

When Major Barbara was produced in London, the second act was reported / in an important northern newspaper as a withering attack on the / Salvation Army, and the despairing ejaculation of Barbara deplored by a / London daily as a tasteless blasphemy. And they were set right, not by / the professed critics of the theatre, but by religious and / philosophical publicists like Sir Oliver Lodge and Dr Stanton Coit, and / strenuous Nonconformist journalists like Mr William Stead, who not only / understood the act as well as the Salvationists themselves, but also / saw it in its relation to the religious life of the nation, a life / which seems to lie not only outside the sympathy of many of our theatre / critics, but actually outside their knowledge of society. Indeed / nothing could be more ironically curious than the confrontation Major / Barbara effected of the theatre enthusiasts with the religious / enthusiasts. On the one hand was the playgoer, always seeking pleasure, / paying exorbitantly for it, suffering unbearable discomforts for it, / and hardly ever getting it. On the other hand was the Salvationist, / repudiating gaiety and courting effort and sacrifice, yet always in the / wildest spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing, drumming, and / tambourining: his life flying by in a flash of excitement, and his / death arriving as a climax of triumph. And, if you please, the playgoer / despising the Salvationist as a joyless person, shut out from the / heaven of the theatre, self-condemned to a life of hideous gloom; and / the Salvationist mourning over the playgoer as over a prodigal with / vine leaves in his hair, careering outrageously to hell amid the / popping of champagne corks and the ribald laughter of sirens! Could / misunderstanding be more complete, or sympathy worse misplaced?

Fortunately, the Salvationists are more accessible to the religious / character of the drama than the playgoers to the gay energy and / artistic fertility of religion. They can see, when it is pointed out to / them, that a theatre, as a place where two or three are gathered / together, takes from that divine presence an inalienable sanctity of / which the grossest and profanest farce can no more deprive it than a / hypocritical sermon by a snobbish bishop can desecrate Westminster / Abbey. But in our professional playgoers this indispensable preliminary / conception of sanctity seems wanting. They talk of actors as mimes and / mummers, and, I fear, think of dramatic authors as liars and pandars, / whose main business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city / speculator when what he calls the serious business of the day is over. / Passion, the life of drama, means nothing to them but primitive sexual / excitement: such phrases as "impassioned poetry" or "passionate love of / truth" have fallen quite out of their vocabulary and been replaced by / "passional crime" and the like. They assume, as far as I can gather, / that people in whom passion has a larger scope are passionless and / therefore uninteresting. Consequently they come to think of religious / people as people who are not interesting and not amusing. And so, when / Barbara cuts the regular Salvation Army jokes, and snatches a kiss from / her lover across his drum, the devotees of the theatre think they ought / to appear shocked, and conclude that the whole play is an elaborate / mockery of the Army. And then either hypocritically rebuke me for / mocking, or foolishly take part in the supposed mockery! Even the / handful of mentally competent critics got into difficulties over my / demonstration of the economic deadlock in which the Salvation Army / finds itself.