unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings,
instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage. The axioms and
postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so well known that it is
almost impossible for its slaves to write tolerable last acts to
their plays, so conventionally do their conclusions follow from their
premises. Because I have thrown this logic ruthlessly overboard, I am
accused of ignoring, not stage logic, but, of all things, human feeling.
People with completely theatrified imaginations tell me that no girl
would treat her mother as Vivie Warren does, meaning that no stage
heroine would in a popular sentimental play. They say this just as they
might say that no two straight lines would enclose a space. They do not
see how completely inverted their vision has become even when I throw
its preposterousness in their faces, as I repeatedly do in this very
play. Praed, the sentimental artist (fool that I was not to make him a
theatre critic instead of an architect!) burlesques them by expecting
all through the piece that the feelings of others will be logically
deducible from their family relationships and from his "conventionally
unconventional" social code. The sarcasm is lost on the critics: they,
saturated with the same logic, only think him the sole sensible person
on the stage. Thus it comes about that the more completely the dramatist
is emancipated from the illusion that men and women are primarily
reasonable beings, and the more powerfully he insists on the ruthless
indifference of their great dramatic antagonist, the external world, to
their whims and emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to
the very distinction on which his whole work is built. Far from ignoring
idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action,
I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen,
accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about
duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself in this way,
finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle's suggested painting of