ack and
white artist.

And as a study in black and white nothing could be better than this
sketch of Julius Caesar. He is not so much represented as "bestriding the
earth like a Colossus" (which is indeed a rather comic attitude for a
hero to stand in), but rather walking the earth with a sort of stern
levity, lightly touching the planet and yet spurning it away like a
stone. He walks like a winged man who has chosen to fold his wings.
There is something creepy even about his kindness; it makes the men in
front of him feel as if they were made of glass. The nature of the
Caesarian mercy is massively suggested. Caesar dislikes a massacre, not
because it is a great sin, but because it is a small sin. It is felt
that he classes it with a flirtation or a fit of the sulks; a senseless
temporary subjugation of man's permanent purpose by his passing and
trivial feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for a great purpose,
just as he plunges into the sea. But to be stung into such action he
deems as undignified as to be tipped off the pier. In a singularly fine
passage Cleopatra, having hired assassins to stab an enemy, appeals to
her wrongs as justifying her revenge, and says, "If you can find one
man in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will be crucified by my
own slaves." "If you can find one man in all the world," replies Caesar,
"who can see that you did wrong, he will either conquer the world as I
have done or be crucified by it." That is the high water mark of this
heathen sublimity; and we do not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw,
when a few minutes afterwards the hero is saluted with a blaze of
swords.

As usually happens in the author's works, there is even more about
Julius Caesar in the preface than there is in the play. But in the
preface I think the portrait is less imaginative and more fanciful. He
attempts to connect his somewhat chilly type of superman with the heroes
of the old fairy tales. But Shaw should not talk about the fairy tales;
for he does not feel them from the inside. As I have said, on all this
side of historic and domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and
deficient. He does not approach them as fairy tales, as if he were four,
but as "folk-lore" as if he were forty. And he makes a big mistake about
them which he would never have made if he had kept his birthday and hung
up his stocking, and generally kept alive inside him the firelight of a
home. The point is so peculiarly character