otatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology that men should
deify domesticity in girls as something dainty and magical; but all men
do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing at all; but that is another
argument. The argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aiming at mere
realism, makes a big mistake in reality. Misled by his great heresy of
looking at emotions from the outside, he makes Eugene a cold-blooded
prig at the very moment when he is trying, for his own dramatic
purposes, to make him a hot-blooded lover. He makes the young lover an
idealistic theoriser about the very things about which he really would
have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is
much more right than the very rational one; and there is far more truth
to life as it is in Lover's couplet--

"And envied the chicken
That Peggy was pickin'."

than in Eugene's solemn, aesthetic protest against the potato-skins and
the lamp-oil. For dramatic purposes, G. B. S., even if he despises
romance, ought to comprehend it. But then, if once he comprehended
romance, he would not despise it.

The series contained, besides its more substantial work, tragic and
comic, a comparative frivolity called _The Man of Destiny_. It is a
little comedy about Napoleon, and is chiefly interesting as a
foreshadowing of his after sketches of heroes and strong men; it is a
kind of parody of _Caesar and Cleopatra_ before it was written. In this
connection the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of interest. All
Shaw's generation and school of thought remembered Napoleon only by his
late and corrupt title of "The Man of Destiny," a title only given to
him when he was already fat and tired and destined to exile. They forgot
that through all the really thrilling and creative part of his career he
was not the man of destiny, but the man who defied destiny. Shaw's
sketch is extraordinarily clever; but it is tinged with this unmilitary
notion of an inevitable conquest; and this we must remember when we come
to those larger canvases on which he painted his more serious heroes. As
for the play, it is packed with good things, of which the last is
perhaps the best. The long duologue between Bonaparte and the Irish lady
ends with the General declaring that he will only be beaten when he
meets an English army under an Irish general. It has always been one of
Shaw's paradoxes that the English mind has the force to fulfil orders,
while the Irish mind