Your homework assignment is to do SOAPS on this excerpt from George Bernard Shaw’s play, Caesar and Cleopatra. I have cited this excerpt using the MLA format. You need to do this every time you post any information that you have not originally created! We know that Shaw is the author of this piece, but I expect that you research more information about the author and include it in your SOAPS. The research that you do will help you uncover details about the occasion, audience, purpose, etc. I expect that this SOAP will be detailed, and it will be collected for a grade.
Shaw, George. Caesar and Cleopatra, 1898. Feedbooks: Cloud Publishing,
2006-2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2011.
As to Caesar himself, I have purposely avoided the usual anachronism
of going to Caesar's books, and concluding that the style is the man. That
is only true of authors who have the specific literary genius, and have
practised long enough to attain complete self-expression in letters. It is
not true even on these conditions in an age when literature is conceived
as a game of style, and not as a vehicle of self-expression by the author.
Now Caesar was an amateur stylist writing books of travel and campaign
histories in a style so impersonal that the authenticity of the later
volumes is disputed. They reveal some of his qualities just as the Voyage
of a Naturalist Round the World reveals some of Darwin's, without expressing
his private personality. An Englishman reading them would
say that Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning
thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
In exhibiting Caesar as a much more various person than the historian
of the Gallic wars, I hope I have not succumbed unconsciously to the
dramatic illusion to which all great men owe part of their reputation and
some the whole of it. I admit that reputations gained in war are specially
questionable. Able civilians taking up the profession of arms, like Caesar
and Cromwell, in middle age, have snatched all its laurels from opponent
commanders bred to it, apparently because capable persons engaged
in military pursuits are so scarce that the existence of two of them at the
same time in the same hemisphere is extremely rare. The capacity of any
conqueror is therefore more likely than not to be an illusion produced by
the incapacity of his adversary. At all events, Caesar might have won his
battles without being wiser than Charles XII or Nelson or Joan of Arc,
who were, like most modern "self-made" millionaires, half-witted geniuses,
enjoying the worship accorded by all races to certain forms of insanity.
But Caesar's victories were only advertisements for an eminence
that would never have become popular without them. Caesar is greater
off the battle field than on it. Nelson off his quarterdeck was so quaintly
out of the question that when his head was injured at the battle of the
Nile, and his conduct became for some years openly scandalous, the difference
was not important enough to be noticed. It may, however, be
said that peace hath her illusory reputations no less than war. And it is
certainly true that in civil life mere capacity for work—the power of
killing a dozen secretaries under you, so to speak, as a life-or-death courier
kills horses—enables men with common ideas and superstitions to
distance all competitors in the strife of political ambition. It was this
power of work that astonished Cicero as the most prodigious of Caesar's
gifts, as it astonished later observers in Napoleon before it wore him out.
How if Caesar were nothing but a Nelson and a Gladstone combined! A
prodigy of vitality without any special quality of mind! Nay, with ideas
that were worn out before he was born, as Nelson's and Gladstone's
were! I have considered that possibility too, and rejected it. I cannot cite
all the stories about Caesar which seem to me to show that he was genuinely
original; but let me at least point out that I have been careful to attribute
nothing but originality to him. Originality gives a man an air of
frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the
value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently
of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will not,
in the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody knows
to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of good taste to
tell). His lies are not found out: they pass for candors. He understands
the paradox of money, and gives it away when he can get most for it: in
other words, when its value is least, which is just when a common man
tries hardest to get it. He knows that the real moment of success is not
the moment apparent to the crowd. Hence, in order to produce an impression
of complete disinterestedness and magnanimity, he has only to
act with entire selfishness; and this is perhaps the only sense in which a
man can be said to be naturally great. It is in this sense that I have represented
Caesar as great. Having virtue, he has no need of goodness. He is
neither forgiving, frank, nor generous, because a man who is too great to
resent has nothing to forgive; a man who says things that other people
are afraid to say need be no more frank than Bismarck was; and there is
no generosity in giving things you do not want to people of whom you
intend to make use. This distinction between virtue and goodness is not
understood in England: hence the poverty of our drama in heroes. Our
stage attempts at them are mere goody-goodies. Goodness, in its popular
British sense of self-denial, implies that man is vicious by nature, and
that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom. Not sharing that pious
opinion, I have not given countenance to it in any of my plays. In this I
follow the precedent of the ancient myths, which represent the hero as
vanquishing his enemies, not in fair fight, but with enchanted sword, superequine
horse and magical invulnerability, the possession of which,
from the vulgar moralistic point of view, robs his exploits of any merit
whatever.
As to Caesar's sense of humor, there is no more reason to assume that
he lacked it than to assume that he was deaf or blind. It is said that on
the occasion of his assassination by a conspiracy of moralists (it is always
your moralist who makes assassination a duty, on the scaffold or off it),
he defended himself until the good Brutes struck him, when he exclaimed
"What! you too, Brutes!" and disdained further fight. If this be
true, he must have been an incorrigible comedian. But even if we waive
this story, or accept the traditional sentimental interpretation of it, there
is still abundant evidence of his lightheartedness and adventurousness.
Indeed it is clear from his whole history that what has been called his
ambition was an instinct for exploration. He had much more of Columbus
and Franklin in him than of Henry V.
However, nobody need deny Caesar a share, at least, of the qualities I
have attributed to him. All men, much more Julius Caesars, possess all
qualities in some degree. The really interesting question is whether I am
right in assuming that the way to produce an impression of greatness is
by exhibiting a man, not as mortifying his nature by doing his duty, in
the manner which our system of putting little men into great positions
(not having enough great men in our influential families to go round)
forces us to inculcate, but by simply doing what he naturally wants to
do. For this raises the question whether our world has not been wrong in
its moral theory for the last 2,500 years or so. It must be a constant puzzle
to many of us that the Christian era, so excellent in its intentions, should
have been practically such a very discreditable episode in the history of
the race. I doubt if this is altogether due to the vulgar and sanguinary
sensationalism of our religious legends, with their substitution of gross
physical torments and public executions for the passion of humanity.
Islam, substituting voluptuousness for torment (a merely superficial difference,
it is true) has done no better. It may have been the failure of
Christianity to emancipate itself from expiatory theories of moral responsibility,
guilt, innocence, reward, punishment, and the rest of it, that
baffled its intention of changing the world. But these are bound up in all
philosophies of creation as opposed to cosmism. They may therefore be
regarded as the price we pay for popular religion.
