"But my Cynical Shavian does not heed these inconsistencies; he knows the public will not notice them. He wants simply to ridicule War, and the whole military spirit. Accordingly out with the witch's wand, and let us change the hero first into a whimpering calf, and then suddenly into a lewd he-goat, and then, for no reason whatever, into the most mendacious magpie flying about, and finally into a little mouse caught in a trap laid by a kitchen-maid. For this is precisely what happens to the hero Sergius.
"Returning from war, he is sick of it with a nauseating sea-sickness. Why? Unknown; or, as Herbert Spencer, the next best replica of Antisthenes in Britannia, would have said, _unknowable_.
"Sergius is sentimentally idiotic about the nullity of his military glory. A few moments later he cannot resist the rustic beauties of a kitchen-maid, one minute after he had disentangled himself out of the embraces of his beautiful, young, and worshipped _fiancé_. The he-goat is upon him. Why? Unknown, unknowable.
"Here in our fourth dimension we know very well (do we not, Ares?) that soldiers have done similar _escapades_? But have barristers done less? Have all solicitors proved bosom-proof? Has no dramatist ever been sorely tempted by buxomness and vigorous development of youthful flesh? One wonders.
"Why then bring up such stuff, without the slightest reason, without the slightest need, internal or external? But the soldier, do you not see, must be run down. He must be ridiculed. It must be shown that he is only a cowardly mouse caught in the trap laid for him by that very kitchen-maid whom at first he treats merely as a well-ordered mass of tempting flesh, and whom in the end he--marries.
"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_.