An influence
from abroad set it in motion. The plays of Ibsen--produced, the best of
them, in the eighties of last century--came to England in the nineties.
In a way, perhaps, they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly
less than by their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart
they taught men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new
and freer dramatic technique. Where plays had been constructed on a
journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou--mid-nineteenth century
writers in France--a plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness,
false correspondences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a quite
unreal complexity and elaboration, they become bolder and less
artificial, more close to the likelihoods of real life. The gravity of
the problems with which they set themselves to deal heightened their
influence. In England men began to ask themselves whether the theatre
here too could not be made an avenue towards the discussion of living
difficulties, and then arose the new school of dramatists--of whom the
first and most remarkable is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. In his earlier
plays he set himself boldly to attack established conventions, and to
ask his audiences to think for themselves.
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