istic of Bernard Shaw, and is
indeed so much of a summary of his most interesting assertion and his
most interesting error, that it deserves a word by itself, though it is
a word which must be remembered in connection with nearly all the other
plays.

His primary and defiant proposition is the Calvinistic proposition: that
the elect do not earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of a man does
not consist in trying to be good, but in being good. Julius Caesar
prevails over other people by possessing more _virtus_ than they; not by
having striven or suffered or bought his virtue; not because he has
struggled heroically, but because he is a hero. So far Bernard Shaw is
only what I have called him at the beginning; he is simply a
seventeenth-century Calvinist. Caesar is not saved by works, or even by
faith; he is saved because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately for
himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back further than the seventeenth
century; and professing his opinion to be yet more antiquated, invoked
the original legends of mankind. He argued that when the fairy tales
gave Jack the Giant Killer a coat of darkness or a magic sword it
removed all credit from Jack in the "common moral" sense; he won as
Caesar won only because he was superior. I will confess, in passing, to
the conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of his whole simple and
strenuous life was never quite so near to hell as at the moment when he
wrote down those words. But in this question of fairy tales my immediate
point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from
fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the
superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child,
boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer.
Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack's fairy sword and
invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight at all
with something which is by nature stronger. They are a rough, savage
substitute for psychological descriptions of special valour or unwearied
patience. But no one in his five wits can doubt that the idea of "Jack
the Giant Killer" is exactly the opposite to Shaw's idea. If it were not
a tale of effort and triumph hardly earned it would not be called "Jack
the Giant Killer." If it were a tale of the victory of natural
advantages it would be called "Giant the Jack Killer." If the teller of
fairy tales had merely wanted to urge that some b