t; for it was the first lesson of life. In
after years we may make up what code or compromise about sex we like;
but we all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are
natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see
them either in a murder or in a valentine. We may or may not see wisdom
in early marriages; but we know quite well that wherever the thing is
genuine at all, early loves will mean early marriages. But Shaw had not
learnt about this tragedy of the sexes, what the rustic ballads of any
country on earth would have taught him. He had not learnt, what
universal common sense has put into all the folk-lore of the earth,
that love cannot be thought of clearly for an instant except as
monogamous. The old English ballads never sing the praises of "lovers."
They always sing the praises of "true lovers," and that is the final
philosophy of the question.

The same is true of Mr. Shaw's refusal to understand the love of the
land either in the form of patriotism or of private ownership. It is the
attitude of an Irishman cut off from the soil of Ireland, retaining the
audacity and even cynicism of the national type, but no longer fed from
the roots with its pathos or its experience.

This broader and more brotherly rendering of convention must be applied
particularly to the conventions of the drama; since that is necessarily
the most democratic of all the arts. And it will be found generally that
most of the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic basis. The
Greek Unities, for instance, were not proper objects of the meticulous
and trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. But still less were
they the right objects for the equally trivial and far more vulgar
impatience of men like Macaulay. That a tale should, if possible, be
told of one place or one day or a manageable number of characters is an
ideal plainly rooted in an aesthetic instinct. But if this be so with the
classical drama, it is yet more certainly so with romantic drama,
against the somewhat decayed dignity of which Bernard Shaw was largely
in rebellion. There was one point in particular upon which the Ibsenites
claimed to have reformed the romantic convention which is worthy of
special allusion.

Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in
the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding-bells. Against
this they set the modern drama of middle-age, the drama which described