Another newspaper, the _Russ_, wrote as follows: “Bernard Shaw is thought to be an _enfant terrible_ in England. In Russia we take him as a writer, and as a writer only, who is not absolutely devoid of advanced ideas. In our opinion, his play belongs neither to the extreme right nor to the extreme left of dramatic literature; it is an expression of the ideas of moderation which belong to the centre, and the proof of this is the production of it at our State-paid Theatre, which in our eyes is the home and shelter of what is retrograde and respectable.”[26] Such was the opinion of the newspaper critic on Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play. It represented more or less the opinion of the man in the street. For nearly all European dramatic art, with the exception of certain German and Norwegian work, strikes the Russian public as stagey and artificial. If a Russian had written _Mrs. Warren’s Profession_, he would never have introduced the scene between Crofts and Vivy which occurs at the end of Act III., because such a scene, to a Russian, savours of melodrama. On the other hand, he would have had no hesitation in putting on the stage (at the Imperial State-paid Theatre) the interior, with all its details, of one of the continental hotels from which Mrs. Warren derived her income. But, as I have already said, what interests the Russian dramatist most keenly is not the huge catastrophes that stand out in lurid pre-eminence, but the incidents, sometimes important, sometimes trivial, and sometimes ludicrous, which happen to every human being every day of his life. And nowhere is this so clearly visible as in the work of Tchekov; for although the plays of Tchekov--which have not yet been discovered in England, and which will soon be old-fashioned in Russia--are not a reflection of the actual state of mind of the Russian people, yet as far as their artistic aim is concerned, they are more intensely typical, and more successful in the achievement of their aim than the work of any other Russian dramatist.[27]