he is an Irishman that he has transplanted the art of talking to the soil of the stage:  Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, our only modern comedians, all Irishmen, all talkers.  It is by his astonishing skill of saying everything that comes into his head, with a spirit really intoxicating, that Mr. Shaw has succeeded in holding the stage with undramatic plays, in which there is neither life nor beauty.  Life gives up its wisdom only to reverence, and beauty is jealous of neglected altars.  But those who amuse the world, no matter by what means, have their place in the world at any given moment.  Mr. Shaw is a clock striking the hour.

With Mr. Shaw we come to the play which is prose, and nothing but prose.  The form is familiar among us, though it is cultivated with a more instinctive skill, as is natural, in France.  There was a time, not so long ago, when Dumas fils was to France what Ibsen afterwards became to Europe.  What remains of him now is hardly more than his first “fond adventure” the supremely playable “Dame aux Camelias.”  The other plays are already out of date, since Ibsen; the philosophy of “Tue-la!” was the special pleading of the moment, and a drama in which special pleading, and not the fundamental “criticism of life,” is the dramatic motive can never outlast its technique, which has also died with the coming of Ibsen.  Better technique, perhaps, than that of “La Femme de Claude,” but with less rather than more weight of thought behind it, is to be found in many accomplished playwrights, who are doing all sorts of interesting temporary things, excellently made to entertain the attentive French public with a solid kind of entertainment.  Here, in England, we have no such folk to command; our cleverest playwrights, apart from Mr. Shaw, are what we might call practitioners.  There is Mr. Pinero, Mr. Jones, Mr. Grundy:  what names are better known, or less to be associated with literature?  There is Anthony Hope, who can write, and Mr. Barrie who has something both human and humourous.  There are many more names, if I could remember them; but where is the serious playwright?  Who is there that can be compared with our poets or our novelists, not only with a Swinburne or a Meredith, but, in a younger generation, with a Bridges or a Conrad?  The Court Theatre has given us one or two good realistic plays, the best being Mr. Granville Barker’s, besides giving Mr. Shaw his chance in England, after he had had and taken it in America.  But is there, anywhere but in Ireland, an attempt to write imaginative literature in the form of drama?  The Irish Literary Theatre has already, in Mr. Yeats and Mr. Synge, two notable writers, each wholly individual, one a poet in verse, the other a poet in prose.  Neither has yet reached the public, in any effectual way, or perhaps the limits of his own powers as a dramatist.  Yet who else is there for us to hope in, if we are to have once more an art of the stage, based on the great principles, and a theatre in which that art can be acted?