chronicle of the fashionable enterprises of the only realities left on
the stage: that is, the performers in their own persons. In this
phase the playwright who attempts to revive genuine drama produces the
disagreeable impression of the pedant who attempts to start a serious
discussion at a fashionable at-home. Later on, when he has driven the
tea services out and made the people who had come to use the theatre as
a drawing-room understand that it is they and not the dramatist who are
the intruders, he has to face the accusation that his plays ignore human
feeling, an illusion produced by that very resistance of fact and law to
human feeling which creates drama. It is the _deus ex machina_ who, by
suspending that resistance, makes the fall of the curtain an immediate
necessity, since drama ends exactly where resistance ends. Yet the
introduction of this resistance produces so strong an impression of
heartlessness nowadays that a distinguished critic has summed up the
impression made on him by Mrs Warren's Profession, by declaring that
"the difference between the spirit of Tolstoy and the spirit of Mr
Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of
Euclid." But the epigram would be as good if Tolstoy's name were put in
place of mine and D'Annunzio's in place of Tolstoy. At the same time
I accept the enormous compliment to my reasoning powers with sincere
complacency; and I promise my flatterer that when he is sufficiently
accustomed to and therefore undazzled by problem on the stage to be able
to attend to the familiar factor of humanity in it as well as to the
unfamiliar one of a real environment, he will both see and feel that
Mrs Warren's Profession is no mere theorem, but a play of instincts
and temperaments in conflict with each other and with a flinty social
problem that never yields an inch to mere sentiment.

I go further than this. I declare that the real secret of the
cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the