ists
have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to
suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were
right and society was wrong. Of course it would be impossible to base a
play upon the thesis that, in a given conflict between the individual and
society, society was indisputably right and the individual indubitably
wrong; because the essential element of struggle would be absent. Our
modern dramatists, therefore, have been forced to deal with _exceptional_
outcasts of society,--outcasts with whom the audience might justly
sympathise in their conflict with convention. The task of finding such
justifiable outcasts has of necessity narrowed the subject-matter of the
modern drama. It would be hard, for instance, to make out a good case
against society for the robber, the murderer, the anarchist. But it is
comparatively easy to make out a good case for a man and a woman involved
in some sexual relation which brings upon them the censure of society but
which seems in itself its own excuse for being. Our modern serious
dramatists have been driven, therefore, in the great majority of cases, to
deal almost exclusively with problems of sex.

This necessity has pushed them upon dangerous ground. Man is, after all, a
social animal. The necessity of maintaining the solidarity of the family--a
necessity (as the late John Fiske luminously pointed out) due to the long
period of infancy in man--has forced mankind to adopt certain social laws
to regulate the interrelations of men and women. Any strong attempt to
subvert these laws is dangerous not only to that tissue of convention
called society but also to the development of the human race. And here we
find our dramatists forced--first by the spirit of the times, which gives
them their theme, and second by the nature of the dramatic art, which
demands a special treatment of that theme--to hold a brief for certain men
and women who have shuffled off the coil of those very social laws that man
has devised, with his best wisdom, for the preservation of his race. And
the question naturally follows: Is a drama that does this moral or immoral?

But the philosophical basis for this question is usually not understood at
all by those critics who presume to answer the question off-hand in a spasm
of polemics. It is interesting, as an evidence of the shallowness of most
contemporary dramatic criticism, to read over, in the course of Mr. Shaw's
nimbl