"It is the old story of the ugly sorceress in the child's book of fables. 'If you praise the beauty of yonder little girl in the garden, I will transform you into a guinea-pig; and if you still continue doing so, I will make an old cock of you.' Even so Raina is changed into a viper, a liar, a dissimulator, a senseless changer of lovers, an--anything, without the slightest inner coherence, or what the philosophers call, psychological connection. "The same old witch's wand is used, with the freedom of a clown, with regard to the _fiancé_ of Raina, the young military hero. He had by a bold cavalry charge captured a battery or two of the enemy's artillery. How can he be forgiven such an execrable deed? How dare he succeed? Out with the old sauce of Antisthenes! It is, of course, exceedingly stale by this time. But the English, it appears, are so thoroughly used to stale sauces. They will not notice it at all. And thus all the threadbare arguments of Antisthenes are dished up again. I jubilated in my pride. "The _fiancé_, Sergius, took the batteries of cannon because, we are told, by a mistake of their commander, they were--not charged. How witty! How clever! Antisthenes merely said that the Persians were much inferior to the Athenians, so the latter easily got the better of the former. But this twentieth-century dapper little Cynic goes one better. He says, as it were, the Persians had no weapons to strike with. Who would have thought of such an ingenious satire? "Please, Hermes (Mercury), do not interrupt me! I know very well what you mean to say. In all actions of men, victory depends more on the shortcomings of their rivals and competitors than on their own genius. It is no special feature of military victories. Of two grocers in the same street, one succeeds mainly because the other is neglectful and unbusinesslike. Of two dramatists in the same country, one succeeds because he gives the people what _they_ want, and not, as does the other, what dramatic Art wants. And so forth _ad infinitum_. "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_.