As we have no scientific record of a statue coming to life, the probable moral and intellectual condition of a being so created is left to the widest conjecture.  The playwright may assume for it any stage of development he pleases, and his audience will readily grant his assumption.  But if his work is to have any claim to artistic value, he must not assume all sorts of different stages of development at every second word his creation utters.  He must not make her a child in one speech, a woman of the world in the next, and an idiot in the next again.  Of course, it would be an extremely difficult task clearly to define in all its bearings and details the particular intellectual condition assumed at the outset, and then gradually to indicate the natural growth of a fuller consciousness.  Difficult it would be, but by no means impossible; nay, it would be this very problem which would tempt the true dramatist to adopt such a theme.  Mr. Gilbert has not essayed the task.  He regulates Galatea’s state of consciousness by the fluctuating exigencies of dialogue whose humour is levelled straight at the heads of the old Haymarket pit.

To indicate the nature of the inconsistencies which abound in every scene, I may say that, in the first act, Galatea does not know that she is a woman, but understands the word “beauty,” knows (though Pygmalion is the only living creature she has ever seen) the meaning of agreement and difference of taste, and is alive to the distinction between an original and a copy.  In the second act she has got the length of knowing the enormity of taking life, and appreciating the fine distinction between taking it of one’s own motive, and taking it for money.  Yet the next moment, when Leucippe enters with a fawn he has killed, it appears that she does not realize the difference between man and the brute creation.  Thus we are for ever shifting from one plane of convention to another.  There is no fixed starting-point for our imagination, no logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition.  The play, it is true, enjoyed some five-and-twenty years of life; but it certainly cannot claim an enduring place either in literature or on the stage.  It is still open to the philosophic dramatist to write a logical Pygmalion and Galatea.

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[Footnote 1:  I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain a copy of The City; but my memory is pretty clear.]

CHAPTER XVII

KEEPING A SECRET

It has been often and authoritatively laid down that a dramatist must on no account keep a secret from his audience.  Like most authoritative maxims, this one seems to require a good deal of qualification.  Let us look into the matter a little more closely.