THAT characteristic tendency to look at the under side of things and to explore the depths beneath the obvious surface markings, which Shaw displays in “Cæsar and Cleopatra,” “Arms and the Man” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” is shown at the full in “The Man of Destiny.” The play is in one act and in intent it is a mere bravura piece, written, as the author says, “to display the virtuosity of the two principal performers.” But its picture of Napoleon Bonaparte, the principal character, is a startlingly novel one, and the little drama is remarkable alike for its fantastic character drawing, its cameo craftsmanship, its ingenious incident and its fairly dazzling dialogue. There is more of the quality called “brilliancy” in its one scene than in most three-act society comedies of the day. Some of its episodes are positive gems.
The Napoleon of the play is not the emperor of popular legend and Meissonier’s painting, but the young general of 1796, but recently come to opportunity and still far from immortality. The scene is the parlor of a little inn on the road from Lodi to Milan and the young general—he is but twenty-seven—is waiting impatiently for a packet of despatches. He has defeated the Austrians at Lodi, but they are yet foes to be feared and he is very eager to know whether General Massena will make his next stand at Mantua or at Peschiera. A blundering jackass of a lieutenant, the bearer of the expected despatches, comes staggering in with the information that he has been met on the road and outwitted and robbed of them by a boyish young officer of the enemy’s. Napoleon flies into a rage, very naturally, but after all it is an incident of the wars and, the papers being lost, he resigns himself to doing without them.
Almost simultaneously there appears from upstairs a handsome young woman. The lieutenant, seeing her, is instantly struck with her remarkable resemblance to the youthful officer who cajoled and robbed him. Napoleon pricks up his ears and orders the half-witted lieutenant out of the room. And then begins a struggle of wits. The young woman and the young officer are one person. Bonaparte knows it and demands the dispatches. But she is a nimble one, this patriot in skirts, and it seems for a while that he will have to play the dragoon and tear them from her bodice. Even when she yields and he has the papers in his hands, she is the victor. There is one letter that he dare not read. It is a billet-doux from a woman to a man who is not her husband and it has been sent from Paris by a well-meaning blunderer that the husband may read it and learn. Josephine is the woman, the director Barras is the other man—and Napoleon himself is the husband.
Here we have Bonaparte the man, facing a crisis in his affairs more appalling than any he has ever encountered on the field of war. There is no gleam of a crown ahead to cheer him on and no crash of artillery to hearten him. It is a situation far more terrifying than the fight about the bridge at Lodi, but he meets it squarely and resolutely. And in the end he outplays and vanquishes his fair conqueror.
She tells the blundering lieutenant that the officer boy who outwitted him was her brother.
“If I undertake to place him in your hands, a prisoner,” she says, “will you promise me on your honor as an officer and a gentleman not to fight with him or treat him unkindly in any way?”
The simple-minded lieutenant promises—and the young woman slips out and once more discards her skirts for the uniform of a young officer. Then she reappears and surrenders.
“Where are the dispatches?” demands Napoleon, with heavy dissembling.
“My sister has bewitched the general,” says the protean stranger. “General: open your coat; you will find the dispatches in the breast of it....”
And lo! they are even there—and all agree that as papers bearing the gristly finger-prints of a witch, they must be burnt. Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion.
“I read them the first thing....” whispers the witch’s alter ego; “So you see I know what’s in them; and you don’t.”
“Excuse me,” replies Napoleon blandly. “I read them when I was out there in the vineyard ten minutes ago.”
It would be impossible to exaggerate the humor and delicacy of this little play. Napoleon, it must be remembered, is still a youngster, who has scarcely dared to confess to himself the sublime scope of his ambitions. But the man of Austerlitz and St. Helena peeps out, now and then, from the young general’s flashing eyes, and the portrait, in every detail, is an admirable one. Like Thackeray, Shaw is fond of considering great men in their ordinary everyday aspects. He knows that Marengo was but a day, and that there were thousands of other days in the Little Corporal’s life. It is such week-days of existence that interest him, and in their light he has given us plays that offer amazingly searching studies of Cæsar and of Bonaparte, not to speak of General Sir John Burgoyne.