"This trait is delicious. I have frequently been in Mysia, or what these people now call Bulgaria, where Shaw's scene is laid. The idea of a Bulgarian gentleman of the highest standing marrying a kitchen-maid gave me a fit of laughter. In eccentric England a high-born gentleman may very well marry a barmaid. In Bulgaria a nobleman will no more marry a servant-girl than his own mother. He has known too many of them; he can study her carefully, encyclopædically, without marrying her in the least. For, she will never love him.
"Of course, my acolyte full well knows that the English are not at all conversant with any nation south of Dover Straits, and that one may tell them anything one pleases about nations other than themselves, They will believe it. And so Sergius marries the girl by the same necessity that a mouse may be said to have married the trap into which it drops.
"Is not this fun indeed? To call marrying what simple people call getting morally insane? How clever! How bright!
"This is precisely what we Cynics used to do in ancient Greece. We turned humanity inside out, and then I walked in day-time in the streets with a lamp in my hand in search of a normal man, of a human being. If you vitriole a person's face or character first, how can you expect him to have unscathed features? But that is precisely the point with us Cynics. We take human nature; we then vitriole it out of all shape, and afterwards cry out in sheer indignation, 'How awful!' 'How absurd!' This reminds me of my lawyer pupil who once, in the defence of a fellow who had murdered his parents, pathetically exclaimed to the jury: 'And finally, gentlemen, have pity on this poor, orphaned boy!'
"Not content with Sergius, another 'type' of soldier is dragged up to the stage; a Swiss. Now I do not here mean to repeat our old Greek jokes about people similar to the Swiss, such as the Paphlagonians or Cilicians. I will only remark that the French, who have for over four hundred years had intimate knowledge of the Swiss, put the whole of Swiss character into the famous mot: 'Which animal resembles a human being most?' Answer: 'A Swiss.'
"From a Swiss you may expect anything. He talks three languages; all in vile German. He is to his beautiful country like a wart on a perfect face. In the midst of paradise he is worse than a Prussian yokel born in the dreary heaths of North Germany. He is a Swiss. He has been a mercenary soldier to Popes and Lutheran princes alike. His aim was money; is money; will always be nothing but money. He sells his blood as he does the milk of his cows, by the litre or the decilitre; preferably by the latter. He likes war well enough; but he prefers truces and cessation of arms. He thinks the best part of death is the avoidance thereof. He is, when a mercenary, a military Cynic.
"I like him dearly; he does me honour. Whenever I see him on the grand staircase in the Vatican, I grin 'way down in my heart. Here is a Cynic dressed up like a parrot in gorgeous plumage. Diogenes in Rococo-dress! It is intensely amusing.
"Now this Swiss is made by Shaw a 'type' of a soldier. This is quite in accordance with the procedure of the Cynical School. First, all real soldierly qualities are vitrioled out of the man by making him a Swiss mercenary; and then he is shown up in all his callous indifference to Right, Love, or Justice; which is tantamount to saying 'a distinguished Belgian lady patrolling Piccadilly after midnight.' That Swiss mercenary proves no more against the worth of soldiers, than that Belgian woman proves anything in disgrace of the women of Belgium. If Shaw's figure proves anything, it proves the worthlessness of mercenaries in general, and of Swiss mercenaries in particular. That is, it proves something quite different from what it means to prove. This too is arch-Cynical. Why, who knows it better than I, that we Cynics were not infrequently instrumental in bringing about the very reverse of what we were aiming at? But the more perverse, the better the fun.
"And the fun is excellent beyond words. It is, in fact, as grim as the grimmest Welshman. On my way home from the theatre I thought of it, and started laughing in the street with such violence that a policeman wanted to take me to the station. The grimness of the fun was this: inquiring about the author, I learnt that he was an Irishman. I had no sooner made sure of the truth of this statement than I could not control myself for laughter.
"An Irishman reviling war, and soldiers, and the military spirit! How unutterably grim,—how unspeakably grimy! The Irish, endowed by nature with gifts of the body as well as the mind incomparably superior to those of the English, have made the most atrocious failure of their history, of their possibilities, of their chances, for that one and only reason, that they never found means of character and endurance to fight for their rights and hopes in bitter and unrelenting wars. Not having made a single effort in any way comparable to the sustained armed resistance of the Scotch, the Dutch, the Hungarians, or the Boers, in the course of over three hundred years, they have fallen under the yoke of a nation whom they detest. This naturally demoralised them, as it demoralises a mere husband when he is yoked to a hated wife. Being demoralised, they have never, oh never, reached that balance of internal powers without which nothing great can be achieved. The English with lesser powers, being undemoralised, got their powers into far greater balance. So did the Scot through sustained, reckless fighting for their ideals. Hence the misery of the Irish, who are like their fairies, enchanting, but fatal to themselves and to others; unbalanced, unsteady in mind and resolution to a sickening degree; fickle, and resembling altogether sweet kisses from one's lady-love intermingled with knocks in the face from one's vilest creditors.