SHAW AND PIRANDELLO
591
carriage-trade. Lady Brit is an absurd but likeable pillar of society;
her estranged husband, Undershaft, a fabulously wealthy munitions–
maker of great wisdom and kindliness: her daughter Barbara a sincere
but misguided Major in the Salvation Army. She is in love with
Cousins, a professor of Greek, a character suggested by Professor Gil–
bert Murray. The main issues are between Barbara and her father:
the relative merits of the Salvation Army and munitions-making as
ways to be saved. Cousins disapproves both of the Salvation Army
and the Undershaft industry of destruction, but at the end he marries
Barbara and places his Greek-trained intellect together with her re–
vivalistic fervor in the service of bigger and better bombs. Shaw ap–
parently wants us to believe in Barbara as a real human being in the
round, instead of a caricature, and to take her dramatic conversion
to her father's business seriously. At any rate he rejoices and bids us
sentimentally rejoice at the end of his fable when the girl, the man
and the money are at last brought together. The audience may go
home (in spite of the witty dialectics it has heard) in laughter, tears
and complacency, spiced, at most, with a touch of the shocking–
for the secure basis of their little world, the eternity of the drawing
room, is never seriously questioned. Where, in all this, is the Shavian
quality?
The play may be read as a thesis, a proof that munitions-making
is the way to be saved; and this
is
in fact one of the bases of the many
witty debates. It is a wonderfully farcical idea, but Shaw is far from
offering it as Brieux offers his theses.
As
he uses it, it has depths of
irony which Brieux never dreamed of: Shaw neither believes nor
disbelieves it; its relation to reality is never digested-nor its relation
to the sentimental story that Shaw puts with it. Its usefulness lies in
its theatrical fertility: it is a paradox which may be endlessly debated,
but it is in no sense the truth as Brieux thought he was proving the
truth. The characters are conceived on a similar basis of paradox–
except Barbara, who, as I have said, is supposed to be real. But Lady
Brit, Undershaft, and each of the minor
char~cters
clearly has his
paradoxical platform. Lady Brit's is that she must have both the
Undershaft money and the creed of the Church of England. The
two are logically incompatible; but granted this non-Euclidean pos–
tulate, everything she does follows with unanswerable logic. And so
for Undershaft, who presents himself as wise, kind, and completely
