Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.” Shaw’s appeal has been more acutely intellectual than Pinero’s, but his plays are less popular and less satisfying; while the critics, he complains, refuse to take him seriously. They treat him as an irresponsible Irishman with a genius for paradox, a puzzling way of going back on himself, and a freakish delight in mystifying the public. The heart interest in his plays is small. He has the Celtic subtlety, but not the Celtic sentiment; in this, too, resembling Sheridan, that wit rather than humor is the staple of his comedy—a wit which in both is employed in the service of satire upon sentiment. But the modern dramatist’s satire cuts deeper and is more caustic. Lydia Languish and Joseph Surface, Sheridan’s embodiments of romance and sentiment, are conceived superficially and belong to the comedy of manners, not of character. Sheridan would not have understood Lamb’s saying that Charles Surface was the true canting hypocrite of “The School for Scandal.” For nowadays sentiment and romance take less obvious shapes; and Shaw, who detests them both and holds a retainer for realism, tests for them with finer reagents. And here comes in the influence of Ibsen, perhaps the most noticeable foreign influence in the recent English drama, from which it has partly driven out the French, hitherto all-predominant. Ibsen’s introduction to the English stage dates from 1889 and the years following, although Mr. Gosse’s studies and the translations of Mr. Havelock Ellis and others had made a few of his plays known to the reader. As long since as 1880, a very free version of “A Doll’s House,” under the title “Breaking a Butterfly,” had been made for the theatre by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and a collaborator. The French critic, M. Augustin Filon, in his book, “The English Stage” (1897), ventures a guess that the Ibsen brand of realism will be found to agree better with the English character than the article furnished by Dumas _fils_ and other French dramatists; and he even suggests the somewhat fantastic theory that an audience of the fellow countrymen of Darwin and Huxley will listen with a peculiar sympathy to such a play as “Ghosts,” in which the doctrine of heredity is so forcibly preached. Ibsen’s masterly construction, quite as much as his ideas, has been studied with advantage by our dramatists. Thus it is thought that Pinero, who has shown, in general, very little of Ibsen’s influence, may have taken a hint from him in the inconclusive ending of “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.” The inconclusive ending is a practice—perhaps a principle—of the latest realistic schools of drama and fiction. Life, they contend, has no artificial closes, but flows continually on, and a play is only a “bleeding slice of life.” In old tragedy, death is the end. “Troilus and Cressida” is Shakespeare’s only episodical tragedy, the only one in which the protagonist is not