of unity is that of most novels and some plays.  They present a series of events, more or less closely intertwined or interlinked with one another, but not built up into any symmetrical interdependence.  This unity of longitudinal extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or Sophocles.  Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand—­the unity of a number of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour—­that is precisely the unity of Getting Married.  A jumble of ideas, prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from without.  In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head.  At the same time it is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room, talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of a given theme.  If this be unity, then he has achieved it.  In the theatre, as a matter of fact, the plum-pudding was served up in three chunks instead of one; but this was a mere concession to human weakness.  The play had all the globular unity of a pill, though it happened to be too big a pill to be swallowed at one gulp.

Turning now to the Oedipus—­I choose that play as a typical example of Greek tragedy—­what sort of unity do we find?  It is the unity, not of a continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order, interrelation of parts—­the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or even of a living organism.  The inorganic continuity of Getting Married it does not possess.  If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw has it and Sophocles has not.  The Oedipus is as clearly divided into acts as is Hamlet or Hedda Gabler.  In modern parlance, we should probably call it a play in five acts and an epilogue.  It so happened that the Greek theatre did not possess a curtain, and did possess a Chorus; consequently, the Greek dramatist employed the Chorus, as we employ the curtain, to emphasize the successive stages of his action, to mark the rhythm of its progress, and, incidentally, to provide resting-places for the mind of the audience—­intervals during which the strain upon their attention was relaxed, or at any rate varied.  It is not even true that the Greeks habitually aimed at such continuity of time as we find in Getting Married.  They treated time ideally, the imaginary duration of the story being, as a rule, widely different from the actual time of representation.  In this respect the Oedipus