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

A Playwright’s Progress 113
Amiable Incompetents and Clever Clowns
Like Candida, then, but in a different way, Man of Destiny presents a conflict,
not of good and evil but of different stages of the same force, different
manifestations of the world-will. It demonstrates the developing Shavian
approach in its presentation of minor characters as well. Napoleon and the
Strange Lady are extraordinary characters; Giuseppe the innkeeper and
the nameless lieutenant are marked mediocrities, but they are not quite
ordinary. Shaw discovered in the unpleasant plays that audiences dislike
ordinary characters honestly portrayed, perhaps in the same way that we
all find mirrors unpleasant when the light is too harsh. Giuseppe and the
lieutenant are creatures defined by their limitations, but they are highly
theatricalized. They are, in a strictly technical sense, fools. That is, they are
theatrical embodiments of certain common human failings or limitations
whose very shortcomings are endearing to us because, as creatures of the
theater, they turn their liabilities into assets. They can do this, paradoxically,
precisely because of certain essentially human qualities that they
lack such as shame or self-awareness. The fool’s defining quality and supreme
weapon is his imperviousness to pain. The crudest and most obvious
examples are the denizens of the world of children’s cartoons who endure
all sorts of physical assaults that would be lethal in real life but are to them
mere inconveniences. The two minor characters of Man of Destiny are
more complex, but their secret is the same. The pain in this case is moral
and psychological rather than physical. They are distinctly different personalities
and are given correspondingly different moral anaesthetics.
They represent in a certain fashion two poles defined by the themes of the
play: role-acting and freedom from ideals. The lieutenant is the play’s sole
idealist; Giuseppe is a pragmatist untroubled by ideals or much else. The
lieutenant is stupid and dense but eager and energetic; Giuseppe is clever
and observant yet phlegmatic and devoid of ambition. It is no wonder that
Napoleon admires Giuseppe and despises the lieutenant: the lieutenant is
both an incompetent soldier and a deluded idealist, while Giuseppe, curiously,
seems to personify the traits Napoleon assigns to those he calls “the
high people.” The high are like the low in that “they have no scruples, no
morality,” but the “low are unscrupulous without knowledge, . . . whilst
the high are unscrupulous without purpose” (1:657). Napoleon is doubtless
not thinking of people like Giuseppe but of materialist intellectuals to
whom morality is superstition contrived to keep fools in check (in this
speech Napoleon reveals a point of view quite different from Shaw’s own),
yet the description objectively fits Giuseppe well. The innkeeper treats life