Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand--the unity of a number
of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain
consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour--that
is precisely the unity of _Getting Married_. A jumble of ideas,
prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of
marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous
fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at
once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from
without. In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to
the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due
proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw
flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head. At the same time it
is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room,
talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of
a given theme. If this be unity, then he has achieved it.
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