60 Plays: The George Bernard Shaw Edition (Illustrated). GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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СКАЧАТЬ common ideas and superstitions to distance all competitors in the strife of political ambition. It was this power of work that astonished Cicero as the most prodigious of Caesar’s gifts, as it astonished later observers in Napoleon before it wore him out. How if Caesar were nothing but a Nelson and a Gladstone combined! A prodigy of vitality without any special quality of mind! Nay, with ideas that were worn out before he was born, as Nelson’s and Gladstone’s were! I have considered that possibility too, and rejected it. I cannot cite all the stories about Caesar which seem to me to show that he was genuinely original; but let me at least point out that I have been careful to attribute nothing but originality to him. Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will not, in the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody knows to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of good taste to tell). His lies are not found out: they pass for candors. He understands the paradox of money, and gives it away when he can get most for it: in other words, when its value is least, which is just when a common man tries hardest to get it. He knows that the real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd. Hence, in order to produce an impression of complete disinterestedness and magnanimity, he has only to act with entire selfishness; and this is perhaps the only sense in which a man can be said to be naturally great. It is in this sense that I have represented Caesar as great. Having virtue, he has no need of goodness. He is neither forgiving, frank, nor generous, because a man who is too great to resent has nothing to forgive; a man who says things that other people are afraid to say need be no more frank than Bismarck was; and there is no generosity in giving things you do not want to people of whom you intend to make use. This distinction between virtue and goodness is not understood in England: hence the poverty of our drama in heroes. Our stage attempts at them are mere goody-goodies. Goodness, in its popular British sense of self-denial, implies that man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom. Not sharing that pious opinion, I have not given countenance to it in any of my plays. In this I follow the precedent of the ancient myths, which represent the hero as vanquishing his enemies, not in fair fight, but with enchanted sword, superequine horse and magical invulnerability, the possession of which, from the vulgar moralistic point of view, robs his exploits of any merit whatever.

      As to Caesar’s sense of humor, there is no more reason to assume that he lacked it than to assume that he was deaf or blind. It is said that on the occasion of his assassination by a conspiracy of moralists (it is always your moralist who makes assassination a duty, on the scaffold or off it), he defended himself until the good Brutes struck him, when he exclaimed “What! you too, Brutes!” and disdained further fight. If this be true, he must have been an incorrigible comedian. But even if we waive this story, or accept the traditional sentimental interpretation of it, there is still abundant evidence of his lightheartedness and adventurousness. Indeed it is clear from his whole history that what has been called his ambition was an instinct for exploration. He had much more of Columbus and Franklin in him than of Henry V.

      However, nobody need deny Caesar a share, at least, of the qualities I have attributed to him. All men, much more Julius Caesars, possess all qualities in some degree. The really interesting question is whether I am right in assuming that the way to produce an impression of greatness is by exhibiting a man, not as mortifying his nature by doing his duty, in the manner which our system of putting little men into great positions (not having enough great men in our influential families to go round) forces us to inculcate, but by simply doing what he naturally wants to do. For this raises the question whether our world has not been wrong in its moral theory for the last 2,500 years or so. It must be a constant puzzle to many of us that the Christian era, so excellent in its intentions, should have been practically such a very discreditable episode in the history of the race. I doubt if this is altogether due to the vulgar and sanguinary sensationalism of our religious legends, with their substitution of gross physical torments and public executions for the passion of humanity. Islam, substituting voluptuousness for torment (a merely superficial difference, it is true) has done no better. It may have been the failure of Christianity to emancipate itself from expiatory theories of moral responsibility, guilt, innocence, reward, punishment, and the rest of it, that baffled its intention of changing the world. But these are bound up in all philosophies of creation as opposed to cosmism. They may therefore be regarded as the price we pay for popular religion.

       The Gadfly Or The Son of the Cardinal (1898)

       Table of Contents

Table of Contents

       ACT I.

       ACT II.

       ACT III.

       ACT IV.

      SCENE I

      SCENE II

      Period — 1846. Italy

      ACT I. The Conversazione at Grassini’s.

      Florence, a night in July

      ACT II The Steps of the Cathedral.

      Brisighella, sunset

      ACT III A Room in the Cardinal’s Palace.

      Brisighella

      ACT IV Scene I: The condemned cell.

      Brisighella, night Scene 2: The Courtyard of the Prison

      ACT I.

       Table of Contents

      SIGNORA GRASSINI. Our friend Martini doubts whether it is safe to plot anything here.

      GRASSINI. Quite safe, Martini, provided you plot at the top of your voice. Have you brought the Gadfly?

      SIGNORA GRASSINI. The Gadfly! What’s that? A newspaper?

      MARTINI. No, Signora: a man. A comrade.

      SIGNORA GRASSINI. A young man?

      MARTINI [taking out a paper] Here is a description of him — a police description [offering it].

      SIGNORA GRASSINI. No: we mustn’t pass papers about. Read it.

      GRASSINI. At the top of your voice, please.

      MARTINI [reads] “Felice Rivarez, called ‘the Gadfly.’

      Age about 30, birthplace and parentage unknown, probably South American; profession, journalist.

      Short in stature with black hair, black beard and dark skin. Eyes blue; forehead broad and square; nose, mouth, chin” — but I am preventing this lady [indicating Gemma, who has come forward from the balustrade and is listening] from speaking to her hostess.

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