"Hedda Gabler can appeal to no sound taste. One never sees why she is so fearfully unhappy. If she is not in love with her husband, let her work in the house, in the kitchen, in the garden; let her try to be a mother; let her adopt a child if the gods deny her one of her own. Let her do something. Of course, idling all day long as she does, will in the end demoralise a poker; and far from wondering that she ends badly at the end of the last act, one only wonders that she did not do away with herself before the first scene of the first act. By doing so she would have done a great service to herself, her people, and to dramatic literature. "Of the same kind is Raina, in _Arms and the Man_. She is a doll, but not a young girl. She has neither senses, nor sense. She is made of cardboard, and fit only to appear in a Punch and Judy show. She is, in common with most of the figures in the comedies of the modern Cynics, a mere outline drawing of a human being from whose mouth hang various slips of paper on which the author conveniently writes his _variorum_ jokes and bright sayings. All these so-called dramatic pieces will be brushed away by the broom of Time, as happened to the dramas and travesties of our Greek Cynics. Life eternal is given to things only through Art, and in these writings of the Cynics, old or modern ones, there is not the faintest trace either of one of the Graces, or of one of the Muses. * * * * * "Having said this much about Shaw's and the other modern Cynics' alleged dramatic writings, I hasten to add, that when we come to consider the _effect_ these so-called dramas have, and possibly will continue to have on the mind of the public, we are bound to speak in quite a different manner. "I have had plenty of time, since the days of my Academy at Athens, to think out the vast difference between such works of the intellect as aim at nothing but truth and beauty, or what we might call _alethology_, on the one hand; and such works as aim at effect, or what may be generally termed as _effectology_. "It is from this all-important point of view that I say that Tolstoy, Ibsen, Shaw and the others are, _effectologically_, just as remarkable as they are _alethologically_ without much significance. "As to the latter; as to their hitting off great or new truths; as to their being philosophers; or to put it in my terms, as to their having any _alethological_ value, Diogenes has already spoken with sufficient clearness. Just consider this one point. "Tolstoy, as well as Shaw, wants to reform the abuses of civilisation. In order to do so they combat with all their might the most powerful purifier and reformer of men,--War. Can anything be more ludicrous, and unscientific? "Who gave the modern Germans that incomparable dash and _élan_, thanks to which they have in one generation quadrupled their commerce, doubled their population, quintupled their wealth, and ensured their supremacy on the Continent?