Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

110 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
and is merely the incipient emperor, while the wife under suspicion is
Josephine). He obtains a letter, reads it, and it turns out to be perfectly
innocent: the evil genie of sexual impropriety is returned to the lamp.
Shaw’s Strange Lady, like Sardou’s Madame San-Gêne, is trying to protect
a friend whose reputation and honor are endangered by the revelation of
an indiscretion. Both women “lose” in that Napoleon gets the information
he demands and they wished to keep from him, but whereas Sardou plays
a theatrical trick on the audience, Shaw’s ending provokes subtle questioning
of the idols of honor and respectability—indeed, of morality itself. The
issue in Shaw’s play is the function of ideals—specifically those of morality
and respectability—in the world of public action: do they help or hinder
in getting things done? Both the Strange Lady and Napoleon disparage
moral idealism, and each accuses the other of being enthralled by them,
although at the very end the Strange Lady claims to pay “homage” to him
because she “adore[s] a man who is not afraid to be mean and selfish”
(1:656). Napoleon thereupon accuses her of being “English,” explaining
that she shares with the English the ability to use ideals to achieve one’s
own ends:
Every Englishman is born with a certain miraculous power that
makes him master of the world. When he wants a thing, he never tells
himself that he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his
mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and
religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants. Then
he becomes irresistible. . . . There is nothing so bad or so good that you
will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman
in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on
patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves
you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles.
(1:658–59)
The Englishman, in other words, is the master of the technique, discussed
in chapter 2, of using ideals “as excuses for doing what we like” (Quintessence
177). We can safely accept Napoleon’s speech as accurately presenting
Shaw’s view of the English, but there is some question whether his
assessment of the character of the Strange Lady is to be trusted. Tied to the
question of which of the two “wins” their little game is the deeper question
about which of the two is more free of slavery to ideals. In the initial stage
direction Shaw describes Napoleon as “imaginative without illusions, and
creative without religion, loyalty, patriotism, or any of the common ideals.