Mrs. Warrens Profession | Page 5

the stage without actual felony, the officer
then relents and leaves her. When she recovers, she believes that he has
carried out his threat; and during the rest of the play she is represented
as vainly vowing vengeance upon him, whilst she is really falling in
love with him under the influence of his imaginary crime against her.
Finally she consents to marry him; and the curtain falls on their
happiness.
This story was certified by the present King's Reader, acting for the
Lord Chamberlain, as void in its general tendency of "anything
immoral or otherwise improper for the stage." But let nobody conclude
therefore that Mr Redford is a monster, whose policy it is to deprave
the theatre. As a matter of fact, both the above stories are strictly in
order from the official point of view. The incidents of sex which they
contain, though carried in both to the extreme point at which another
step would be dealt with, not by the King's Reader, but by the police,
do not involve adultery, nor any allusion to Mrs Warren's profession,
nor to the fact that the children of any polyandrous group will, when

they grow up, inevitably be confronted, as those of Mrs Warren's group
are in my play, with the insoluble problem of their own possible
consanguinity. In short, by depending wholly on the coarse humors and
the physical fascination of sex, they comply with all the formulable
requirements of the Censorship, whereas plays in which these humors
and fascinations are discarded, and the social problems created by sex
seriously faced and dealt with, inevitably ignore the official formula
and are suppressed. If the old rule against the exhibition of illicit sex
relations on stage were revived, and the subject absolutely barred, the
only result would be that Antony and Cleopatra, Othello (because of
the Bianca episode), Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV, Measure for
Measure, Timon of Athens, La Dame aux Camellias, The Profligate,
The Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Gay
Lord Quex, Mrs Dane's Defence, and Iris would be swept from the
stage, and placed under the same ban as Tolstoy's Dominion of
Darkness and Mrs Warren's Profession, whilst such plays as the two
described above would have a monopoly of the theatre as far as sexual
interest is concerned.
What is more, the repulsiveness of the worst of the certified plays
would protect the Censorship against effective exposure and criticism.
Not long ago an American Review of high standing asked me for an
article on the Censorship of the English stage. I replied that such an
article would involve passages too disagreeable for publication in a
magazine for general family reading. The editor persisted nevertheless;
but not until he had declared his readiness to face this, and had pledged
himself to insert the article unaltered (the particularity of the pledge
extending even to a specification of the exact number of words in the
article) did I consent to the proposal. What was the result?
The editor, confronted with the two stories given above, threw his
pledge to the winds, and, instead of returning the article, printed it with
the illustrative examples omitted, and nothing left but the argument
from political principles against the Censorship. In doing this he fired
my broadside after withdrawing the cannon balls; for neither the
Censor nor any other Englishman, except perhaps Mr Leslie Stephen
and a few other veterans of the dwindling old guard of Benthamism,

cares a dump about political principle. The ordinary Briton thinks that
if every other Briton is not kept under some form of tutelage, the more
childish the better, he will abuse his freedom viciously. As far as its
principle is concerned, the Censorship is the most popular institution in
England; and the playwright who criticizes it is slighted as a
blackguard agitating for impunity. Consequently nothing can really
shake the confidence of the public in the Lord Chamberlain's
department except a remorseless and unbowdlerized narration of the
licentious fictions which slip through its net, and are hallmarked by it
with the approval of the Throne. But since these narrations cannot be
made public without great difficulty, owing to the obligation an editor
is under not to deal unexpectedly with matters that are not virginibus
puerisque, the chances are heavily in favor of the Censor escaping all
remonstrance. With the exception of such comments as I was able to
make in my own critical articles in The World and The Saturday
Review when the pieces I have described were first produced, and a
few ignorant protests by churchmen against much better plays which
they confessed they had not seen nor read, nothing has been said in the
press that could seriously disturb the easygoing notion that the stage
would be much worse than it admittedly