marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw
had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that
there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this
particular problem much more clearly. The old playwrights have left us
plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age. _Othello_ is as much about
what follows the wedding-bells as _The Doll's House_. _Macbeth_ is about
a middle-aged couple as much as _Little Eyolf_. But if we ask ourselves
what is the real difference, we shall, I think, find that it can fairly
be stated thus. The old tragedies of marriage, though not love stories,
are like love stories in this, that they work up to some act or stroke
which is irrevocable as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death or
of adultery.

Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the middle-aged
and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very simple one; it
was that a play is a very bad place for discussing that topic. You
cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a
marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of
an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably
observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a drama simply
because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy
marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were. The
essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself an intense
question; but the essence of a sensible wife is that she is much too
sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All the things that make
monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic things, the silent
growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories,
the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane
marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore not surprising that
most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to insane marriage.

To summarise; before touching the philosophy which Shaw has ultimately
adopted, we must quit the notion that we know it already and that it is
hit off in such journalistic terms as these three. Shaw does not wish to
multiply problem plays or even problems. He has such scepticism as is
the misfortune of his age; but he has this dignified and courageous
quality, that he does not come to ask questions but to answer them. He
is not a paradox-monger; he is a wild logician, far to