Dramatists of other countries, be they English, or French, or German, or Norwegian, whether they belong to the school of Ibsen, or to that which found its temple in the Théâtre Antoine at Paris, had one thing in common; they were either reacting or fighting against something--as in the case of the Norwegian dramatists--or bent on proving a thesis--as in the case of Alexandre Dumas _fils_, the Théâtre Antoine school, or Mr. Shaw--; that is to say, they were all actuated by some definite purpose; the stage was to them a kind of pulpit. On the English stage this was especially noticeable, and what the English public has specially delighted in during the last fifteen years has been a sermon on the stage, with a dash of impropriety in it. Now the Russian stage has never gone in for sermons or theses: like the Russian novel, it has been a looking-glass for the use of the public, and not a pulpit for the use of the playwright. This fact is never more strikingly illustrated than when the translation of a foreign play is performed in Russia. For instance, when Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, _Mrs. Warren’s Profession_, was performed in December, 1907, at the Imperial State-paid Theatre at St. Petersburg, the attitude of the public and of the critics was interesting in the extreme. In the first place, that the play should be produced at the Imperial State-paid Theatre is an interesting illustration of the difference of the attitude of the two countries towards the stage. In England, public performance of this play is forbidden; in America it was hounded off the stage by an outraged and indignant populace; in St. Petersburg it is produced at what, in Russia, is considered the temple of respectability, the home of tradition, the citadel of conservatism. In the audience were a quantity of young, unmarried girls. The play was beautifully acted, and well received,[25] but it never occurred to any one that it was either daring or dangerous or startling; it was merely judged as a story of English life, a picture of English manners. Some people thought it was interesting, others that it was uninteresting, but almost all were agreed in considering it to be too stagey for the Russian taste; and as for considering it an epoch-making work, that is to say, in the region of thought and ideas, the very idea was scoffed at. These opinions were reflected in the press. In one of the newspapers, the leading Liberal organ, edited by Professor Milioukov, the theatrical critic said that Mr. Bernard Shaw was the typical middle-class Englishman, and satirised the faults and follies of his class, but that he himself belonged to the class that he satirised, and shared its limitations. “The play,” they said, “is a typical middle-class English play, and it suffers from the faults inherent to this class of English work: false sentiment and melodrama.”