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

112 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
proach change immediately. She clearly, if indirectly, lets him know that
the letter reveals his wife’s involvement with the Director Barras and even
challenges him to read it. He regards her with suspicion:
napoleon. You seem to have forgotten your solicitude for the honor
of your old friend.
lady. I do not think she runs any risk now. She does not quite understand
her husband. (1:641)
She realizes that she can get what she wants—to protect Josephine from
scandal and humiliation—because Napoleon cannot harm her without
harming himself, and he is too pragmatic, too free of ideals, to be willing to
do that.
Their contest is not yet over. To avoid scandal Napoleon needs to establish
evidence that he never received the letter; he thus implements a
scheme that will destroy the unfortunate lieutenant’s career. The Strange
Lady finds she cannot permit that. The same generous impulse that led her
to risk death to protect a faithless, lying, selfishly manipulative woman
impels her to further risk to save the career of a foolish and incompetent
officer.
In his second play built around a “great” man of history, Caesar and
Cleopatra, Shaw shows us two intensely willful persons, where one more
advanced in natural ethics than the other acts as mentor to the less advanced
person. Cleopatra has learned much from Caesar but will never be
a Caesar because her nature is bound by its bloodthirsty and vengeful
lusts. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Shaw anticipated that relationship
in Man of Destiny, with the Strange Lady as the evolutionary superior
of Napoleon. Napoleon misjudges her at the end as at the beginning:
she is not comparable to the English idealist he describes. She does not
cloak her own selfish ends with a glorifying “principle”; she does what she
does, regardless of danger to herself, because she is driven by something
within her that is larger than herself. She admires his freedom from principle
because her own freedom from such artificial restraints is even more
thorough, although she may not recognize it. She admires his selfishness,
partly no doubt because it is the expression of a magnificent will quite
like her own, but also because, much different from her own, it is not
constrained by something larger that she may (her sincerity can be questioned
whenever she praises him) regard as a “womanish” failing. Napoleon
may be the “man of destiny,” but the Strange Lady is a clearer expression
of the world-will.