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

A Playwright’s Progress 111
Not that he is incapable of these ideals: on the contrary, he has swallowed
them all in his boyhood, and now, having a keen dramatic faculty, is extremely
clever at playing upon them by the arts of the actor and stage
manager” (1:608). Despite this characterization, the action suggests that
part of him at least is enthralled by ideals. In his back and forth game with
the Strange Lady, he has all the advantages: his superior physical strength,
his position of command, and the fact that the letters in dispute belong to
him by law and custom. Yet the Strange Lady generally manages to preserve
the upper hand. She does so partly by using “common ideals,” notably
by playing the role of the weak female rapturously adoring a masculine
conquering hero, but when he proves insusceptible to the more
obvious ploys of feminine helplessness, she plays on his own ideal of himself
as a man above ideals, telling him, “You are not afraid of your own
destiny. . . . And . . . that is why we all begin to worship you” (1:633). Yet he
is not quite ready to accept the image of himself as utterly above morality
and similar ideals; at several points he checks himself and lapses into conventional
oratory about “self-sacrifice” and service to the French republic.
The lady contrasts herself to Napoleon by insisting that she is a slave:
“My courage is mere slavishness: it is of no use to me for my own purposes.
It is only through love, through pity, through the instinct to save
and protect someone else, that I can do the things that terrify me” (1:631).
Note that she does not say she is a slave to morality, respectability, duty, or
anything of the sort. She is the abject subject of “love,” “pity,” and “the
instinct to save and protect someone else.” But in the pursuit of the goals
demanded by those tyrants she is utterly unscrupulous. She is also more
resourceful and observant than her opponent. Both she and the general
turn what they learn from the other into weapons. At one point she incautiously
uses a phrase she had employed earlier in her deception of the lieutenant
and thus tips her hand to Napoleon, but while he learns from the
exposure of her acting, she learns from his exposure of his true self. She
learns from his contempt for her “feminine weakness” ploy his pride in
being above such ideals and promptly uses that against him. When he obtains
the letters by convincing her that he would not hesitate to rip them
from her bosom, she tells him as much of the truth as she dares but is
naturally speechless when he asks: “Then why not send it [the incriminating
letter] to her husband instead of to me?” (1:637). Concluding that she
is lying, but lying ineptly, he instructs her how to answer such a question:
say that the husband would not read it because it would result in public
humiliation, a checked career, and a possible duel. Her attitude and ap-