I go further than this.  I declare that the real secret of the cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage.  The axioms and postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so well known that it is almost impossible for its slaves to write tolerable last acts to their plays, so conventionally do their conclusions follow from their premises.  Because I have thrown this logic ruthlessly overboard, I am accused of ignoring, not stage logic, but, of all things, human feeling.  People with completely theatrified imaginations tell me that no girl would treat her mother as Vivie Warren does, meaning that no stage heroine would in a popular sentimental play.  They say this just as they might say that no two straight lines would enclose a space.  They do not see how completely inverted their vision has become even when I throw its preposterousness in their faces, as I repeatedly do in this very play.  Praed, the sentimental artist (fool that I was not to make him a theatre critic instead of an architect!) burlesques them by expecting all through the piece that the feelings of others will be logically deducible from their family relationships and from his “conventionally unconventional” social code.  The sarcasm is lost on the critics:  they, saturated with the same logic, only think him the sole sensible person on the stage.  Thus it comes about that the more completely the dramatist is emancipated from the illusion that men and women are primarily reasonable beings, and the more powerfully he insists on the ruthless indifference of their great dramatic antagonist, the external world, to their whims and emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to the very distinction on which his whole work is built.  Far from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself in this way, finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle’s suggested painting of parliament sitting without its clothes.

I now come to those critics who, intellectually baffled by the problem in Mrs Warren’s Profession, have made a virtue of running away from it.  I will illustrate their method by quotation from Dickens, taken from the fifth chapter of Our Mutual Friend: 

“Hem!” began Wegg.  “This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off——­” here he looked hard at the book, and stopped.

“What’s the matter, Wegg?”

“Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir,” said Wegg with an air of insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book), “that you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set you right in; only something put it out of my head.  I think you said Rooshan Empire, sir?”