e find? It is the unity, not of a
continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order,
interrelation of parts--the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or
even of a living organism. The inorganic continuity of _Getting Married_
it does not possess. If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw
has it and Sophocles has not. The _Oedipus_ is as clearly divided into
acts as is _Hamlet_ or _Hedda Gabler_. In modern parlance, we should
probably call it a play in five acts and an epilogue. It so happened
that the Greek theatre did not possess a curtain, and did possess a
Chorus; consequently, the Greek dramatist employed the Chorus, as we
employ the curtain, to emphasize the successive stages of his action, to
mark the rhythm of its progress, and, incidentally, to provide
resting-places for the mind of the audience--intervals during which the
strain upon their attention was relaxed, or at any rate varied. It is
not even true that the Greeks habitually aimed at such continuity of
time as we find in _Getting Married_. They treated time ideally, the
imaginary duration of the story being, as a rule, widely different from
the actual time of representation. In this respect the _Oedipus_ is
something of an exception, since the events might, at a pinch, be
conceived as passing within the "two hours' traffick of the stage"; but
in many cases a whole day, or even more, must be understood to be
compressed within these two hours. It is true that the continuous
presence of the Chorus made it impossible for the Greeks to overleap
months and years, as we do on the modern stage; but they did not aim at
that strict coincidence of imaginary with actual time which Mr. Shaw
believes himself to have achieved.[1] Even he, however, subjects the
events which take place behind the scenes to a good deal of "ideal"
compression.

Of course, when Mr. Shaw protests that, in _Getting Married_, he did not
indulge in a "deliberate display of virtuosity of form," that is only
his fun. You cannot well have virtuosity of form where there is no form.
What he did was to rely upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to
dispense with form. Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of opinion
which does not at present concern us. The point to be noted is the
essential difference between the formless continuity of _Getting
Married_, and the sedulous ordering and balancing of clearly
differentiated parts, which went to the structure of a Gr