Bernard Shaw

“ BARBARA. Father: do you love nobody?
UNDERSHAFT. I love my best friend.
LADY BRITOMART. And who is that, pray?
UNDERSHAFT. My bravest enemy. That is the man who keeps me up to the mark.
CUSINS. You know, the creature is really a sort of poet in his way. Suppose he is a great man, after all!
UNDERSHAFT. Suppose you stop talking and make up your mind, my young friend.
CUSINS. But you are driving me against my nature. I hate war.
UNDERSHAFT. Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated. Dare you make war on war? Here are the means: my friend Mr Lomax is sitting on them. ”

“ But as to your Armorer's faith, if I take my neck out of the noose of my own morality I am not going to put it into the noose of yours. I shall sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to whom I please. So there!
UNDERSHAFT. From the moment when you become Andrew Undershaft, you will never do as you please again. Don't come here lusting for power, young man.
CUSINS. If power were my aim I should not come here for it. YOU have no power.
UNDERSHAFT. None of my own, certainly.
CUSINS. I have more power than you, more will. You do not drive this place: it drives you. ”

“ CUSINS. I think all power is spiritual: these cannons will not go off by themselves. I have tried to make spiritual power by teaching Greek. But the world can never be really touched by a dead language and a dead civilization. The people must have power; and the people cannot have Greek. Now the power that is made here can be wielded by all men.
BARBARA. Power to burn women's houses down and kill their sons and tear their husbands to pieces.
CUSINS. You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes. ”

“ UNDERSHAFT. The son of a foundling! nonsense!
LADY BRITOMART. My son, Andrew! And even you may have good blood in your veins for all you know.
UNDERSHAFT. True. Probably I have. That is another argument in favor of a foundling.
LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: don't be aggravating. And don't be wicked. At present you are both.
UNDERSHAFT. This conversation is part of the Undershaft tradition, Biddy. Every Undershaft's wife has treated him to it ever since the house was founded. It is mere waste of breath. If the tradition be ever broken it will be for an abler man than Stephen. ”

“ I will never forgive you that. If I had a child, and you destroyed its body with your explosives—if you murdered Dolly with your horrible guns—I could forgive you if my forgiveness would open the gates of heaven to you. But to take a human soul from me, and turn it into the soul of a wolf! that is worse than any murder.
UNDERSHAFT. Does my daughter despair so easily? Can you strike a man to the heart and leave no mark on him?
BARBARA [her face lighting up] Oh, you are right: he can never be lost now: where was my faith?
CUSINS. Oh, clever clever devil!
BARBARA. You may be a devil ”

“ Do I understand you to imply that you can buy Barbara?
UNDERSHAFT. No; but I can buy the Salvation Army.
CUSINS. Quite impossible.
UNDERSHAFT. You shall see. All religious organizations exist by selling themselves to the rich.
CUSINS. Not the Army. That is the Church of the poor.
UNDERSHAFT. All the more reason for buying it.
CUSINS. I don't think you quite know what the Army does for the poor.
UNDERSHAFT. Oh yes I do. It draws their teeth: that is enough for me—as a man of business—
CUSINS. Nonsense! It makes them sober—
UNDERSHAFT. I prefer sober workmen. ”

“ I want to arm them against the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist, and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous, and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals, and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish.
BARBARA. Is there no higher power than that [pointing to the shell] ?
CUSINS. Yes: but that power can destroy the higher powers just as a tiger can destroy a man: therefore man must master that power first. ”

“ UNDERSHAFT. Do you play, Barbara?
BARBARA. Only the tambourine. But Cholly's teaching me the concertina.
UNDERSHAFT. Is Cholly also a member of the Salvation Army?
BARBARA. No: he says it's bad form to be a dissenter. But I don't despair of Cholly. I made him come yesterday to a meeting at the dock gates, and take the collection in his hat.
LADY BRITOMART. It is not my doing, Andrew. Barbara is old enough to take her own way. She has no father to advise her.
BARBARA. Oh yes she has. There are no orphans in the Salvation Army. ”

“ UNDERSHAFT. You know he will. Don't be a hypocrite, Barbara. He will be better fed, better housed, better clothed, better behaved; and his children will be pounds heavier and bigger. That will be better than an American cloth mattress in a shelter, chopping firewood, eating bread and treacle, and being forced to kneel down from time to time to thank heaven for it: knee drill, I think you call it. It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Mahometanism on the same terms. ”

“ BARBARA. How did you make that twopence?
UNDERSHAFT. As usual. By selling cannons, torpedoes, submarines, and my new patent Grand Duke hand grenade.
BARBARA. Put it back in your pocket. You can't buy your Salvation here for twopence: you must work it out.
UNDERSHAFT. Is twopence not enough? I can afford a little more, if you press me.
BARBARA. Two million millions would not be enough. There is bad blood on your hands; and nothing but good blood can cleanse them. Money is no use. Take it away. [She turns to Cusins] . Dolly: you must write another letter for me to the papers. ”

“ My morality—my religion—must have a place for cannons and torpedoes in it.
STEPHEN [coldly—almost sullenly] You speak as if there were half a dozen moralities and religions to choose from, instead of one true morality and one true religion.
UNDERSHAFT. For me there is only one true morality; but it might not fit you, as you do not manufacture aerial battleships. There is only one true morality for every man; but every man has not the same true morality. ”

“ UNDERSHAFT. Oh, that's everybody's birthright. Look at poor little Jenny Hill, the Salvation lassie! she would think you were laughing at her if you asked her to stand up in the street and teach grammar or geography or mathematics or even drawingroom dancing; but it never occurs to her to doubt that she can teach morals and religion. You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter; but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives ”

“ LADY BRITOMART. Well, dear, there were other differences. I really cannot bear an immoral man. I am not a Pharisee, I hope; and I should not have minded his merely doing wrong things: we are none of us perfect. But your father didn't exactly do wrong things: he said them and thought them: that was what was so dreadful. He really had a sort of religion of wrongness just as one doesn't mind men practising immorality so long as they own that they are in the wrong by preaching morality; so I couldn't forgive Andrew for preaching immorality while he practised morality. ”

“ Lady Britomart meets him in the middle of the room behind the settee.
Andrew is, on the surface, a stoutish, easygoing elderly man, with kindly patient manners, and an engaging simplicity of character. But he has a watchful, deliberate, waiting, listening face, and formidable reserves of power, both bodily and mental, in his capacious chest and long head. His gentleness is partly that of a strong man who has learnt by experience that his natural grip hurts ordinary people unless he handles them very carefully, and partly the mellowness of age and success. ”

“ CUSINS. Take care! Barbara is in love with the common people. So am I. Have you never felt the romance of that love?
UNDERSHAFT [cold and sardonic] Have you ever been in love with Poverty, like St Francis? Have you ever been in love with Dirt, like St Simeon? Have you ever been in love with disease and suffering, like our nurses and philanthropists? Such passions are not virtues, but the most unnatural of all the vices. This love of the common people may please an earl's granddaughter and a university professor; but I have been a common man and a poor man ”

“ BARBARA. It's too melancholy. You get saved, Cholly; and you'll pass hence, my brother, without making such a fuss about it.
LADY BRITOMART. Really, Barbara, you go on as if religion were a pleasant subject. Do have some sense of propriety.
UNDERSHAFT. I do not find it an unpleasant subject, my dear. It is the only one that capable people really care for.
LADY BRITOMART [looking at her watch] Well, if you are determined to have it, I insist on having it in a proper and respectable way. Charles: ring for prayers. [General amazement. Stephen rises in dismay] .
LOMAX [rising] Oh I say! ”

“ Undershaft and Bodger: their hands stretch everywhere: when we feed a starving fellow creature, it is with their bread, because there is no other bread; when we tend the sick, it is in the hospitals they endow; if we turn from the churches they build, we must kneel on the stones of the streets they pave. As long as that lasts, there is no getting away from them. Turning our backs on Bodger and Undershaft is turning our backs on life.
CUSINS. I thought you were determined to turn your back on the wicked side of life.
BARBARA. There is no wicked side: life is all one. ”

“ I enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty.
CUSINS. Do you call poverty a crime?
UNDERSHAFT. The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? ”

“ UNDERSHAFT. Well you see, my dear boy, when you are organizing civilization you have to make up your mind whether trouble and anxiety are good things or not. If you decide that they are, then, I take it, you simply don't organize civilization; and there you are, with trouble and anxiety enough to make us all angels! But if you decide the other way, you may as well go through with it. However, Stephen, our characters are safe here. A sufficient dose of anxiety is always provided by the fact that we may be blown to smithereens at any moment. ”

“ You are welcome to my secret since I have discovered yours. But I am astonished. Can a madman make cannons?
UNDERSHAFT. Would anyone else than a madman make them? And now [with surging energy] question for question. Can a sane man translate Euripides?
CUSINS. No.
UNDERSHAFT [reining him by the shoulder] Can a sane woman make a man of a waster or a woman of a worm?
CUSINS [reeling before the storm] Father Colossus—Mammoth Millionaire—
UNDERSHAFT [pressing him] Are there two mad people or three in this Salvation shelter to-day?
CUSINS. You mean Barbara is as mad as we are! ”

“ The parapet stops short of the shed, leaving a gap which is the beginning of the path down the hill through the foundry to the town. Behind the cannon is a trolley carrying a huge conical bombshell, with a red band painted on it. Further from the parapet, on the same side, is a deck chair, near the door of an office, which, like the sheds, is of the lightest possible construction.
Cusins arrives by the path from the town.
BARBARA. Well?
CUSINS. Not a ray of hope. Everything perfect, wonderful, real. It only needs a cathedral to be a heavenly city instead of a hellish one. ”

“ STEPHEN. I was certainly rather taken aback when I heard they were engaged. Cusins is a very nice fellow, certainly: nobody would ever guess that he was born in Australia; but—
LADY BRITOMART. Oh, Adolphus Cusins will make a very good husband. After all, nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman. And my family, thank Heaven, is not a pig-headed Tory one. We are Whigs, and believe in liberty. Let snobbish people say what they please: Barbara shall marry, not the man they like, but the man I like. ”

“ There is Stephen.
UNDERSHAFT. That's just it: all the foundlings I can find are exactly like Stephen.
LADY BRITOMART. Andrew!!
UNDERSHAFT. I want a man with no relations and no schooling: that is, a man who would be out of the running altogether if he were not a strong man. And I can't find him. Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnardo homes, or School Board officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability, he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse ”