to Bernard Shaw to say that he does not
attempt to make his Caesar superior except in this naked and negative
sense. There is no suggestion, as there is in the Jehovah of the Old
Testament, that the very cruelty of the higher being conceals some
tremendous and even tortured love. Caesar is superior to other men not
because he loves more, but because he hates less. Caesar is magnanimous
not because he is warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because he is not
warm-hearted enough to avenge. There is no suggestion anywhere in the
play that he is hiding any great genial purpose or powerful tenderness
towards men. In order to put this point beyond a doubt the dramatist has
introduced a soliloquy of Caesar alone with the Sphinx. There if anywhere
he would have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or burning pity for
the people. But in that scene between the Sphinx and Caesar, Caesar is as
cold and as lonely and as dead as the Sphinx.

But whether the Shavian Caesar is a sound ideal or no, there can be
little doubt that he is a very fine reality. Shaw has done nothing
greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the man is a little like a
statue, it is a statue by a great sculptor; a statue of the best
period. If his nobility is a little negative in its character, it is the
negative darkness of the great dome of night; not as in some "new
moralities" the mere mystery of the coal-hole. Indeed, this somewhat
austere method of work is very suitable to Shaw when he is serious.
There is nothing Gothic about his real genius; he could not build a
mediaeval cathedral in which laughter and terror are twisted together in
stone, molten by mystical passion. He can build, by way of amusement, a
Chinese pagoda; but when he is in earnest, only a Roman temple. He has a
keen eye for truth; but he is one of those people who like, as the
saying goes, to put down the truth in black and white. He is always
girding and jeering at romantics and idealists because they will not put
down the truth in black and white. But black and white are not the only
two colours in the world. The modern man of science who writes down a
fact in black and white is not more but less accurate than the mediaeval
monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet, sea-green and turquoise.
Nevertheless, it is a good thing that the more austere method should
exist separately, and that some men should be specially good at it.
Bernard Shaw is specially good at it; he is pre-eminently a bl