fantasies, indeed,
which sinned against this principle, have had no small success. In
_Pygmalion and Galatea_, for example, there is a conspicuous lack of
logic. The following passage from a criticism of thirty years ago puts
my point so clearly that I am tempted to copy it:

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