because unworkable, obsolete, cramping-and that man cannot be good until he has ceased trying to act up to them. On the correctness of this theory of life it is no business of mine to offer an opinion. But it is a theory of life; and that is the stimulating, the fascinating thing about "Arms and the Man." In the form of a droll, fantastic farce, it presents us with a criticism of conduct, a theory of life.

And now I think it is possible to see what Mr. Shaw is aiming at in those three odd personages-odd, until Mr. Shaw's theory of the falsehood of current ideals gives us the clue-Raina, and Saranoff, and Bluntschli. The two first are idealists. Raina believes in all forms of heroism, as delineated in the fancy pictures-heroic war, heroic young ladyhood, heroic love. Her chocolatecream soldier dispels the first illusion; her own natural instincts expose the second; Saranoff's behaviour to Louka, and, again, her own natural instincts, destroy the third. "I have told a lie," she says at one moment in awestruck tones; "the second in my life." "Isn't that rather a short allowance, young lady?” replies Bluntschli. “It wouldn't last me out a single morning." She gasps. "How did you find me out?" dialogue I have already quoted. If Raina has been "found out". - that is, if she has been to some extent a poseuse, only half-believing in her own idealism Saranoff is on the other hand an idealist pur sang. He has the chivalric ideal. He is really brave "In the charge I found I was brave; that, at least,

The rest of this

is real about me”—and with a strong sense of honour, shown not only in his dismay at finding himself slipping, behind Raina's back, into dishonourable conduct with Louka, but still more strongly, and indeed pathetically, in the catastrophe of his "reparation" (to use Professor Bellac's word, Je reparerai, chère mees, je reparerai) to Louka. "Damnation!" he exclaims, "mockery everywhere! Everything that I think is mocked by everything that I do." This, from the standpoint of Shawism, is the true tragedy of your idealist. Bluntschli (from the same point of view-remember that I am all along trying to explain Shawism, neither accepting nor rejecting it) is the real hero, the "man" of the title: sincere, capable, practical, unaffected, who sees that the current ideals won't work and dismisses them sans phrase—or, rather, is blessed with a temperament which has never been able to accept them. One might go on to consider the others from this point of view-Louka, for instance, who might then turn out to be something else than the mere designing chambermaid she appears at first glance to be. But enough, I hope, has been said to show that this play of Mr. Shaw's is a very remarkable and almostforgive the upholsterer's adjective-unique piece of work. And yet, even as I write the word "unique," I am tempted to delete it, for what, after all, is the lesson of this very new kind of farce but that of the old kind, from Molière down to Labiche: the injunction naturam sequere-due regard being had to the difference between nature as Mr. Shaw sees it and nature as Molière and Labiche saw it?

Sex in Play-writing

"The Ambassador."—You may call "The Ambassador " a brilliant and delicate comedy, but you are bound to add that it is extremely thin. Its personages have more

"" manner than solid character. We have no intimate knowledge of them. They do not get the chance of

confiding in us. We see them in their social relations The very last moment of the play is

only, never alone.

typical of the whole.

A man and woman have declared

their love; it is a culminating point; some show of passion is clearly "indicated." But the convenances

of the ball-room must be respected, and so we are fobbed off with this :

ST. ORBYN.-Juliet! (He moves to embrace her.)

(At this moment music is heard within: last valse beginning. Couples emerge from behind every bush, and out of every corner.) ST. ORBYN.-Aren't we alone? (Looking round.) JULIET (nervously).—Oughtn't one to be dancing?

You think of the timidly shirked wooing in some novel of Miss Austen's. "John Oliver Hobbes" is of the sex of the gentle Jane. But so was Mrs. Aphra

Behn, who went to the other extreme, and "fairly put all characters to bed." As usual, it is dangerous to generalise.

And yet the temptation to find-or to fancy-the influence of sex in the writer's work is too strong to be resisted. It must be remembered that female dramatists are rare, very rare, notoriously rare. They are like the "strong women" of the music-halls, women doctors, women journalists, and other ladies who compete with men on what has hitherto been held to be men's peculiar ground. One is curious to see the difference resulting from sex-or, if one cannot see it, to see if one cannot invent it. Where, then, do I find the feminine touch in "The Ambassador"? First of all, in its eponymous hero. St. Orbyn should not have given the play its title. For as an ambassador he does not exist for us, nor even as a man of the world, but only as an inhabitant of the Pays de Tendre. only side of him we see is the side shown to women. All his life, according to the Princess Vendramini, he has "let women make fools of themselves about him," and now at five-and-forty he is prepared to make a fool of himself about a woman. Either way, he is never free from the obsession of woman. It is characteristic of him that the only reference this ambassador makes to the Powers of Europe concerns women: "The Powers of Europe are getting sick of these devoted wives who think that governments can be dissolved by inviting the right people to a dinner, or the wrong people to a

The

crush." L'homme à femmes, the man in whose life there must always be a woman, if not a score of women, is, of course, an actual type. One thinks of Mérimée, and of how many more! But the Mérimée of the letters to Jenny Dacquin was also the Mérimée of the letters to Stendhal. St. Orbyn is a Mérimée who has been invented-all of a piece-by Jenny Dacquin.

Το

Take, again, the rake of the play, that "dreadful man," as the good ladies call him, Hugo Lascelles. be seen in his company is fatal to any girl's reputation. In reality he is only a sheep in wolfs clothing. His supper-party is the mildest of orgies. An American damsel performs a decorous skirt dance under the eye of her " mommer." It is the undergraduate's idea of dissipation his aunt's bottle of gooseberry wine. A dramatist of the coarser sex would hardly have been content with offering us so insipid a beverage.

:

And is there not a trace of the feminine in the indulgent view taken of Vivian Beauvedere's freak? He has stolen a cheque for a large sum, and then forged the endorsement. Poor boy! He is so thoughtless ! But Vivian is not Nora Helmer. He must have had much more precise notions of what he was doing. One remembers that women have not to administer justice, and have always been curiously tender towards lawbreakers.

But it is by the women of the drama that one unerringly detects the woman in the dramatist. Naturally John Oliver Hobbes is less respectful to women than a