Side by side with the problem drama there is the drama the sole object of which is either to move the sentiment of the spectator or to excite his laughter. Sardou is a master in the former art with his inexhaustible fecundity, his skill in weaving and unweaving a plot. and combining incidents. Labiche was the master of the second style with his vaudeville comedies, which, so to speak, mechanically aroused laughter. Now in this style we have Messrs. Courteline, Veber, and Tristan Bernard. This is all moving or amusing, but nearly always lacks depth. At the end of the play we are almost annoyed with ourselves for having been moved or for having wept, or laughed, so clearly do we perceive the superficiality of this puppet theatre.

Different entirely from these dramas is that of Bernard Shaw, and it is this difference which at first surprises, astounds, and shocks. Hence at the outset many a man among us, all being essentially haters of what is new, like the majority of humankind, will subscribe to the opinion of Monsieur Augustin Filon, who said 'Bernard Shaw serait peut-être un grand auteur dramatique, si ses pièces étaient . . . des pièces. For myself, being essentially a lover of the new, I have examined, scrutinised and analysed the dramatic work of Bernard Shaw, and his artistic beauty and philosophic depth were thus brought home to me. It is quite evident that Shaw is not a playwright in the romantic style, which was followed by all the European dramatists of the nineteenth century as faithful disciples. He has created a work imbued with the originality of genius. He created it regardless of the so-called rules of the art, to the great discomfiture of professional critics and the public which follow them like sheep. All, on seeing his plays, might have said with Lysidas in La Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes, Those who know their Aristotle and Horace see that in the first place this comedy sins against all the rules of Art.' Perhaps he would answer them with Dorante: You are amusing people with your rules, with which you bewilder the ignorant and which you din into our ears day by day. I should very much like to know whether to please is not the chief rule of all rules, and whether a play which has achieved its object has not chosen the right path.' I do not know whether he has given them this reply of Dorante's, but it is certain that he acts as though he had. Is he not still writing plays he has written sixteen now—which continue to be no plays according to the Lysidases of all nations?

When we examine what is meant by the Beautiful' and by 'Art,' we see with Tolstoi that every notion of beauty is reduced for us to the reception of a certain kind of pleasure.' Art, which is the mode of expression and manifestation of this beauty, has therefore precisely for its object pleasure, as was maintained by Bettaux and

Mario Pilo. The dramatic work of Bernard Shaw is therefore eminently beautiful and artistic, as it gives rise to extreme pleasure both in the hearer and reader. Moreover, it is amusing in the extreme, and consequently its style and character are excellent, if Voltaire's aphorism is true: Tous les genres sont bons, hors le genre ennuyeux.' Nor is this style any the less good because anyone reading or seeing a play of Bernard Shaw can understand it without difficulty and without inquiry, and because it produces a part or the whole of the effect which the author desires; for, as Tolstoi has said, 'All styles are good except that which is not understood or does not produce its effect.'

Therefore the dramatic work of Bernard Shaw is beautiful and artistic according to the definitions given of beauty and art. If at first this does not appear to be so to many onlookers, the reason is that Shaw is a precursor and not a follower, as is peremptorily brought home to us by an analysis of his drama, both as to form and substance. Like Molière, Bernard Shaw in his drama is essentially comical. From the point of view of manner this is the most evident characteristic of our writer's drama. At times, again as in Molière, this feature develops into buffoonery, farce, and burlesque, and on this point he reminds us more of Aristophanes and Plautus than of Terence. With the latter, contemplation of the actions of man takes the external form of humorous reflections, those which are born in the soul of the sage. In Shaw, just as in Molière, there is this same spirit of wisdom, but it by no means prevents critical reflection from frequently manifesting itself in the form of farce-whether the burlesque is produced by the ideas themselves, or by the language, or by the situations, or by action of the characters.

Bernard Shaw has the most characteristic comic mentality. He can see nothing without straightway perceiving a comical side to it. He cannot speak or write of anything, however serious, without immediately adding a comical element to a lesser or greater extent. He knows how to bring out the comical side of everything and anything, even if profoundly sad. But this comicality is bitter with a deep bitterness, just as bitter as is that of Molière, rightly remarked by Brunetière. This bitterness, which is likewise characteristic of Irish gaiety, when it emanates from Swift, Sheridan, and Sterne, in reality shows the sympathy of these severe critics for human evils

and vices.

English comic writers of the time of Elizabeth sought their vis comica chiefly in actions and the situations of characters. Bernard Shaw, on the contrary, seeks it chiefly in the contrast of ideas themselves-and in this he is the rival of the greatest comiques of the pastor in the contrast between the idea and the position of the person expressing it. Thus the poet Eugene Marchbanks in Candida, the hotel waiter in You Never Can Tell, Bluntschli in Arms and the Manindeed, one would need to mention all his plays and a host of his

characters. This contrast of ideas is obtained above all by means of paradoxes. This is the method to which Bernard Shaw is particularly addicted, with a success which has no parallel. He is as paradoxical as Rabelais, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Proudhon, all the great educators and reformers of all times. The innovator is essentially paradoxical. He is so even by definition, since he professes opinions contrary to common opinions. The paradox of to-day is the commonplace of to-morrow. Bernard Shaw is an innovator. There never lived a man having a greater disdain for conventional opinions. He experiences a deep and intense joy in opposing these conventional opinions, and setting up in their place a different opinion which violently and brutally shocks common opinion. These paradoxes or these truths of to-morrow are handled by him with an elegance, a subtlety, and a charm unequalled. With a masterly hand our author knows how to insert into the free movement of life some mechanism of thought or situation in order to bring out the comic aspect, which is so pleasing to his satirical and sardonic mind, and which recalls that of Hogarth's pictures and engravings, though far exceeding it.

In all Bernard Shaw's plays we are surprised by a mixture of the tragical and the humorous which amuses in spite of oneself. This mixture, faithful to actual life, is found in all the good comic writersAristophanes, Plautus, and Molière, for instance; consequently they are realists par excellence, just as is our author. It is his aim to produce living true characters, to exhibit real ways and habits of human society. Did he not write in the Zeit: 'In my plays you will not be vexed and worried by happiness, goodness, virtue, or by crime and romance or any other stupid thing of that kind. My plays have only one subject-life, and only one quality-interest in life'? It is out of regard for truth that Shaw, like Molière, finds that it is not incompatible for a person to be ridiculous in certain things and an honest man in others. Thus Molière creates Alceste and Philinte in the Misanthrope, and Shaw creates Eugene Marchbanks in Candida. This truth to nature shocks and astounds the onlooker even more than the reader, as he is accustomed in the theatre to see individuals forming one united whole either entirely bad or entirely good, one of the most comic and false methods imaginable. It was concern for realism which sometimes led the great dramatists Aristophanes, Plautus, and Molière into buffoonery, just as it has led Bernard Shaw; for, if it had been combined with bitter criticism of humanity, it would have led to tragedy, as it led Ibsen, Björnstjerne Björnson, Augier, and Henry Becque, if the comic spirit within him had not perceived the humorous side of life. Shaw is an admirable realist, just as is Balzac. Like him, he has the gift of seeing men and things in their minute details, a marvellous facility of observation and evocation. He is thoroughly acquainted with

social classes and castes, and professional and national habits of mind. Shaw is in fact more a painter of collective characters than of individual characters. An exception must nevertheless be made as regards his female characters, who are individual characters rather. In a person he synthetises, in a greater degree than Molière did, a class, sect, caste, nation, or profession. One need only mention, in John Bull's Other Island, the Irishman personified in Doyle, the Englishman in Broadbent; in Widowers' Houses, the middle-class capitalist, in Sartorius, and in Candida, in the person of Burgess; in Arms and the Man, the profession of the soldier, in Bluntschli; the workman in the Straker of Man and Superman.

On this very ground of his concern for realism Bernard Shaw hates the romantic. Therefore I can say of him what M. Faguet says of Molière: 'Il est le moins romanesque des hommes et son œuvre la plus contre-romanesque qui soit.' In spite of his true realism, our author is necessarily compelled to modify it somewhat inasmuch as he paints collective characters. Nevertheless, in synthetising in an individuality national, professional, class or caste characters, he departs from actual nature in a less degree perhaps than Molière and Balzac in summing up a man in a single dominating quality, a single sentiment and a single passion. In real life the Harpagons, Alcestes, Tartuffes, and Mercadets are-though something of the making of them nevertheless exists in everybody-rarer than are the Crofts, Burgesses, Sartoriuses, and Bluntschlis, because synthesis of ideas and opinions is far more logical than synthesis of sentiments. Is not the differentiation of castes, classes, sects, and nations a result more of the ideas and opinions of men than of their sentiments?

Ibsen, painting individual characters above all, could in his tragedies represent characters of an abnormal pathological psychology. And he did not fail to do so, to such an

Strindberg also, but to a lesser extent that any psychiatrist could see that since Shakespeare no dramatist had painted abnormal psychical types with so much truth. Bernard Shaw painting by preference professional, national, caste or class types of mentality, could represent nothing but normal healthy characters, just as did Molière, but gave the preference to the depiction of types synthetising a single passion or a single sentiment. They were so much the more bound to do this, because both of them contemplated life in a comic, an intensely comic spirit. The depiction of the mentally unbalanced leads to tragedy, whilst that of sound minds leads to comedy.

There is no

comedy without criticism. Criticism is its life, and the more bitter it is the stronger is the comedy. Whilst Plautus and Molière deal above all in the follies and vices and the prejudices of men, Shaw confines himself chiefly to social principles, to the very organism of society. He penetrates deeper into our social organisation, per-`

ceives its faults and its vices, and shows them acting on his characters and guiding them. If, like the criticism of Aristophanes, that of Bernard Shaw embraces everything, morals, politics, religion, poetry, philosophy, education, and family, it goes even farther in its analysis. Thus it exposes the social evil wrought by the thirst of riches, and above all the system of individual property, and it does this as well as Balzac and better than Augier. It is this depth of critical analysis of our society which constitutes the great superiority of the comedy of our author over the contemporary French drama of Brieux, de Curel, even Henri Fabre, and above all Capus, Donnay, and Bernstein, whose criticism is only directed to superficial causes. Shaw's criticism goes down to the deep and real causes.

In our author's drama sentimental action is subordinate to the discussion of ideas and the description of characters. The result is that this drama is far and away removed from that of Scribe, in which everything is sacrificed to the plot and to situations, and is remote from the drama of Dumas junior, where the action is precise, and is resolved in well-combined and strong situations. On the contrary, Bernard Shaw with his disdain of plots and situations approaches astonishingly near to Molière. Who does not know that Les Précieuses Ridicules, L'Impromptu de Versailles, Les Fâcheux, Le Misanthrope, and La Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes have no plots? and this is also true of L'Ecole des Femmes, pièce tout en récits,' writes Voltaire, mais ménagée avec tant d'art que tout paraît être en action.' The same may be said as regards the drama of Bernard Shaw. The scenes are so animated, there is such a gradation of warmth that the absence of material action and plot is not in the least perceived. It is a succession of pleasing scenes, in which ideas clash and conflict. This is reminiscent somewhat of the vaudeville comedy made illustrious by Labiche, which was likewise a succession of pleasing or humorous scenes, but in which, instead of profound ideas, superficial characters come into contact, amplifying and distorting the true elements which the author borrowed from the foibles of his time.

This absence of or disdain for plots and coherent and probable situations, developing by rules of art and logic, which is observed in Molière and Bernard Shaw, and which previously existed in the Italian Ragionamenti, where the interest was sustained only by an animated discussion between several characters, is what astonishes professional critics, so greatly are they accustomed to the manner of Scribe and all the dramatists who followed him.

They are at a loss to understand the immense success of such a drama of ideas, which, according to them, must necessarily lack movement. It is with astonishment that they observe the powerful movement possessed by all Shaw's plays. This intense movement arises from the clash of ideas, and from a spirit and animation which carries the spectator away, as was very well remarked by M. Régis