ssness nowadays that a distinguished critic has summed up the
impression made on him by Mrs Warren's Profession, by declaring that
"the difference between the spirit of Tolstoy and the spirit of Mr
Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of
Euclid." But the epigram would be as good if Tolstoy's name were put in
place of mine and D'Annunzio's in place of Tolstoy. At the same time
I accept the enormous compliment to my reasoning powers with sincere
complacency; and I promise my flatterer that when he is sufficiently
accustomed to and therefore undazzled by problem on the stage to be able
to attend to the familiar factor of humanity in it as well as to the
unfamiliar one of a real environment, he will both see and feel that
Mrs Warren's Profession is no mere theorem, but a play of instincts
and temperaments in conflict with each other and with a flinty social
problem that never yields an inch to mere sentiment.

I go further than this. I declare that the real secret of the
cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the
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 comple