Construction of the Suez canal started

1861–5 American Civil War

1866 The Fenians, Irish Republicans, opposed the English occupation of Ireland

1867 Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ published

1870 Education Act made primary schooling compulsory in England and Wales

1871 Year of political change in Europe: Italy and Germany both unified

1883 Death of Marx. The left-wing Fabian Society founded

1886 Home Rule for Ireland first proposed by Gladstone’s Liberal government; the Conservative Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister

1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee

1892 Keir Hardie elected as first Independent Socialist Member of Parliament

1895 Oscar Wilde imprisoned for homosexual offences. Lumière brothers patented cinematograph

1897 Irish Literary Theatre founded by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn

1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War in South Africa

1901 Death of Queen Victoria, accession of Edward VII

1907 Rudyard Kipling the first British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

1911 Members of Parliament paid a salary for the first time.
Women’s Freedom League founded

1914–18 First World War

1916 Easter Rising by Irish Nationalists in Dublin

1920 League of Nations created. Government of Ireland Act, partitioning Ireland

1922 Continuing civil war in Ireland

1924 First Labour government in Britain, under Ramsay Macdonald; replaced by the Conservative Unionists, under Stanley Baldwin. Death of Lenin

1920 Women over twenty-one in the United Kingdom given the vote.

1929 New York Stock Exchange crash led to world economic depression. Election of second Labour minority government in Britain (which became a multi-party national government in 1931)

1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany

1939–45 Second World War

1945 Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, won the election, replacing the wartime leader Winston Churchill

1946 First meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations

1948 British National Health Service founded

PREFACE

(1898)

READERS of the discourse with which the ‘Unpleasant’ volume commences will remember that I turned my hand to play-writing when a great deal of talk about ‘the New Drama’, followed by the actual establishment of a ‘New Theatre’ (the Independent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that the New Drama, in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination. This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence.

Man is a creature of habit. You cannot write three plays and then stop. Besides, the New movement did not stop. In 1894, Florence Farr, who had already produced Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, was placed in command of the Avenue Theatre in London for a season on the new lines by Miss A. E. F. Horniman, who had family reasons for not yet appearing openly as a pioneer-manageress. There were, as available New Dramatists, myself, discovered by the Independent Theatre (at my own suggestion); Dr John Todhunter, who had been discovered before (his play The Black Cat had been one of the Independent’s successes); and Mr W. B. Yeats, a genuine discovery. Dr Todhunter supplied A Comedy of Sighs: Mr Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire. I, having nothing but unpleasant plays in my desk, hastily completed a first attempt at a pleasant one, and called it Arms and The Man, taking the title from the first line of Dryden’s Virgil. It passed for a success, the applause on the first night being as promising as could be wished; and it ran from the 21st of April to the 7th of July. To witness it the public paid £1777:5:6, an average of £23:2:5 per representation (including nine matinées). A publisher receiving £ 1700 for a book would have made a satisfactory profit: experts in West End theatrical management will contemplate that figure with a grim smile.

In the autumn of 1894 I spent a few weeks in Florence, where I occupied myself with the religious art of the Middle Ages and its destruction by the Renascence. From a former visit to Italy on the same business I had hurried back to Birmingham to discharge my duties as musical critic at the Festival there. On that occasion a very remarkable collection of the works of our British ‘pre-Raphaelite’ painters was on view. I looked at these, and then went into the Birmingham churches to see the windows of William Morris and Burne-Jones. On the whole, Birmingham was more hopeful than the Italian cities; for the art it had to shew me was the work of living men, whereas modern Italy had, as far as I could see, no more connection with Giotto than Port Said has with Ptolemy. Now I am no believer in the worth of any mere taste for art that cannot produce what it professes to appreciate.