the
newspaper critics rather than the Shaw of reality. There are indeed
present in the play two of the writer's principal moral conceptions.
The first is the idea of a great heroic action coming in a sense from
nowhere; that is, not coming from any commonplace motive; being born in
the soul in naked beauty, coming with its own authority and testifying
only to itself. Shaw's agent does not act towards something, but from
something. The hero dies, not because he desires heroism, but because he
has it. So in this particular play the Devil's Disciple finds that his
own nature will not permit him to put the rope around another man's
neck; he has no reasons of desire, affection, or even equity; his death
is a sort of divine whim. And in connection with this the dramatist
introduces another favourite moral; the objection to perpetual playing
upon the motive of sex. He deliberately lures the onlooker into the net
of Cupid in order to tell him with salutary decision that Cupid is not
there at all. Millions of melodramatic dramatists have made a man face
death for the woman he loves; Shaw makes him face death for the woman he
does not love--merely in order to put woman in her place. He objects to
that idolatry of sexualism which makes it the fountain of all forcible
enthusiasms; he dislikes the amorous drama which makes the female the
only key to the male. He is Feminist in politics, but Anti-feminist in
emotion. His key to most problems is, "Ne cherchez pas la femme."

As has been observed, the incidental felicities of the play are frequent
and memorable, especially those connected with the character of General
Burgoyne, the real full-blooded, free-thinking eighteenth century
gentleman, who was much too much of an aristocrat not to be a liberal.
One of the best thrusts in all the Shavian fencing matches is that which
occurs when Richard Dudgeon, condemned to be hanged, asks rhetorically
why he cannot be shot like a soldier. "Now there you speak like a
civilian," replies General Burgoyne. "Have you formed any conception of
the condition of marksmanship in the British Army?" Excellent, too, is
the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in
America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England,
snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one
sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial
comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; "it takes all
s