The Project Gutenberg EBook of Great Catherine, by George Bernard Shaw

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Great Catherine

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Posting Date: February 1, 2009 [EBook #3488]
Release Date: October, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT CATHERINE ***

Produced by Eve Sobol

GREAT CATHERINE (WHOM GLORY STILL ADORES)

By George Bernard Shaw

"In Catherine's reign, whom Glory still adores"
BYRON

THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY FOR GREAT CATHERINE

Exception has been taken to the title of this seeming tomfoolery on the
ground that the Catherine it represents is not Great Catherine, but the
Catherine whose gallantries provide some of the lightest pages of modern
history. Great Catherine, it is said, was the Catherine whose diplomacy,
whose campaigns and conquests, whose plans of Liberal reform, whose
correspondence with Grimm and Voltaire enabled her to cut such a
magnificent figure in the eighteenth century. In reply, I can only
confess that Catherine's diplomacy and her conquests do not interest
me. It is clear to me that neither she nor the statesmen with whom she
played this mischievous kind of political chess had any notion of
the real history of their own times, or of the real forces that were
moulding Europe. The French Revolution, which made such short work of
Catherine's Voltairean principles, surprised and scandalized her as much
as it surprised and scandalized any provincial governess in the French
chateaux.

The main difference between her and our modern Liberal Governments was
that whereas she talked and wrote quite intelligently about Liberal
principles before she was frightened into making such talking and
writing a flogging matter, our Liberal ministers take the name of
Liberalism in vain without knowing or caring enough about its meaning
even to talk and scribble about it, and pass their flogging Bills, and
institute their prosecutions for sedition and blasphemy and so forth,
without the faintest suspicion that such proceedings need any apology
from the Liberal point of view.

It was quite easy for Patiomkin to humbug Cathe