"Shaw's persons are no humans whatever. They are homunculi concocted in a chemical laboratory of pseudo-science and false psychology. They crack, from time to time, brave jokes; so do clowns in a circus. That alone does not make a wax figure into a human.
"There may be very interesting comic scenes amongst bees, wasps, or beavers; but we cannot appreciate them. We can only appreciate human comicality, even when it is presented to us in the shape of dialogues between animals, as Aristophanes, the fabulists, and so many other writers have done.
"Who would care to sit through a comedy showing the comic aspects of life in a Bedlam? If madmen have humour, as undoubtedly they have, we do not want to see it on a public stage. The fact that it is a madman's humour deprives it of all humour.
"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.