The meaning of Mr. Shaw’s play, as I understand it, is that natural man, driven on by passion and vain glory, attempts to live as his fancy bids him but is awakened to the knowledge of God by finding himself stopped, perhaps suddenly, by something within himself.1 This something which is God’s care for man, does not temper the wind to the shorn lamb, as a false and sentimental piety would have it, but is a terrible love that awakens the soul amidst catastrophes and trains it by conquest and labour.
The essential incidents of the play are Blanco’s giving up the horse, the harlot’s refusal to name the thief, and the child’s death of the croup. Without the last of these Mr. Shaw’s special meaning would be lost, for he wants us to understand that God’s love will not do the work of the Doctor, or any work that man can do, for it acts by awakening the intellect and the soul whether in some man of science or philosopher or in violent Posnet.