orts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers." If Shaw had
remembered that sentence on other occasions he would have avoided his
mistake about Caesar and Brutus. It is not only true that it takes all
sorts to make a world; but the world cannot succeed without its
failures. Perhaps the most doubtful point of all in the play is why it
is a play for Puritans; except the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home
is meant to destroy Puritanism. And indeed in this connection it is
constantly necessary to fall back upon the facts of which I have spoken
at the beginning of this brief study; it is necessary especially to
remember that Shaw could in all probability speak of Puritanism from the
inside. In that domestic circle which took him to hear Moody and Sankey,
in that domestic circle which was teetotal even when it was intoxicated,
in that atmosphere and society Shaw might even have met the monstrous
mother in _The Devil's Disciple_, the horrible old woman who declares
that she has hardened her heart to hate her children, because the heart
of man is desperately wicked, the old ghoul who has made one of her
children an imbecile and the other an outcast. Such types do occur in
small societies drunk with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism. It is
possible that there were among Irish Calvinists people who denied that
charity was a Christian virtue. It is possible that among Puritans there
were people who thought a heart was a kind of heart disease. But it is
enough to make one tear one's hair to think that a man of genius
received his first impressions in so small a corner of Europe that he
could for a long time suppose that this Puritanism was current among
Christian men. The question, however, need not detain us, for the batch
of plays contained two others about which it is easier to speak.

The third play in order in the series called _Plays for Puritans_ is a
very charming one; _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. This also turns,
as does so much of the Caesar drama, on the idea of vanity of
revenge--the idea that it is too slight and silly a thing for a man to
allow to occupy and corrupt his consciousness. It is not, of course, the
morality that is new here, but the touch of cold laughter in the core of
the morality. Many saints and sages have denounced vengeance. But they
treated vengeance as something too great for man. "Vengeance is Mine,
saith the Lord; I will repay." Shaw treats vengeance as something too
small for man