the
problems. The world instead of being a knot so tangled as to need
unravelling, would simply become a piece of clockwork too complicated to
be touched. I cannot think that this untutored worry was what Ibsen
meant; I have my doubts as to whether it was what Shaw meant; but I do
not think that it can be substantially doubted that it was what he said.

In any case it can be asserted that the general aim of the work was to
exalt the immediate conclusions of practice against the general
conclusions of theory. Shaw objected to the solution of every problem in
a play being by its nature a general solution, applicable to all other
such problems. He disliked the entrance of a universal justice at the
end of the last act; treading down all the personal ultimatums and all
the varied certainties of men. He disliked the god from the
machine--because he was from a machine. But even without the machine he
tended to dislike the god; because a god is more general than a man. His
enemies have accused Shaw of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the
roof-tree. But in this sense Shaw may be called almost madly domestic.
He wishes each private problem to be settled in private, without
reference to sociological ethics. And the only objection to this kind of
gigantic casuistry is that the theatre is really too small to discuss
it. It would not be fair to play David and Goliath on a stage too small
to admit Goliath. And it is not fair to discuss private morality on a
stage too small to admit the enormous presence of public morality; that
character which has not appeared in a play since the Middle Ages; whose
name is Everyman and whose honour we have all in our keeping.

_The Dramatist_

No one who was alive at the time and interested in such matters will
ever forget the first acting of _Arms and the Man_. It was applauded by
that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the
genuine thing prevail against the plausible; that element which rejoices
that even its enemies are alive. Apart from the problems raised in the
play, the very form of it was an attractive and forcible innovation.
Classic plays which were wholly heroic, comic plays which were wholly
and even heartlessly ironical, were common enough. Commonest of all in
this particular time was the play that began playfully, with plenty of
comic business, and was gradually sobered by sentiment until it ended on
a note of romance or even of pathos. A commonplace littl