tely the dramatist
is emancipated from the illusion that men and women are primarily
reasonable beings, and the more powerfully he insists on the ruthless
indifference of their great dramatic antagonist, the external world, to
their whims and emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to
the very distinction on which his whole work is built. Far from ignoring
idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action,
I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen,
accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about
duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself in this way,
finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle's suggested painting of
parliament sitting without its clothes.

I now come to those critics who, intellectually baffled by the problem
in Mrs Warren's Profession, have made a virtue of running away from it.
I will illustrate their method by quotation from Dickens, taken from the
fifth chapter of Our Mutual Friend:

"Hem!" began Wegg. "This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of
the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off----" here he looked hard
at the book, and stopped.

"What's the matter, Wegg?"

"Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir," said Wegg with an air of
insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book), "that
you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set you
right in; only something put it out of my head. I think you said Rooshan
Empire, sir?"

"It is Rooshan; ain't it, Wegg?"

"No, sir. Roman. Roman."

"What's the difference, Wegg?"

"The difference, sir?" Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking
down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. "The difference, sir?
There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe,
that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs
Boffin does not honor us with her company. In Mrs Boffin's presence,
sir, we had better drop it."

Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air,
and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy,
"In Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it!" turned the
disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a very
painful manner.

I am willing to let Mr Wegg drop it on these terms, provided I am
allowed to mention here that Mrs Warren's Profession is a play for
women; that it was written for women;