on.

It is, if I may so phrase it, a double-barrelled illusion. _Getting
Married_ has not the unity of the Greek drama, and the Greek drama has
not the unity of _Getting Married_. Whatever "unity" is predicable of
either form of art is a wholly different thing from whatever "unity" is
predicable of the other. Mr. Shaw, in fact, is, consciously or
unconsciously, playing with words, very much as Lamb did when he said to
the sportsman, "Is that your own hare or a wig?" There are, roughly
speaking, three sorts of unity: the unity of a plum-pudding, the unity
of a string or chain, and, the unity of the Parthenon. Let us call them,
respectively, unity of concoction, unity of concatenation, and
structural or organic unity. The second form of unity is that of most
novels and some plays. They present a series of events, more or less
closely intertwined or interlinked with one another, but not built up
into any symmetrical interdependence. This unity of longitudinal
extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or
Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand--the unity of a number
of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain
consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour--that
is precisely the unity of _Getting Married_. A jumble of ideas,
prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of
marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous
fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at
once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from
without. In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to
the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due
proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw
flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head. At the same time it
is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room,
talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of
a given theme. If this be unity, then he has achieved it. In the
theatre, as a matter of fact, the plum-pudding was served up in three
chunks instead of one; but this was a mere concession to human weakness.
The play had all the globular unity of a pill, though it happened to be
too big a pill to be swallowed at one gulp.

Turning now to the _Oedipus_--I choose that play as a typical example of
Greek tragedy--what sort of unity do w