the author's apology from mrs. warren's profession. with an ......the"authorsapology"whichhe...

Shaw, George BernardThe author 1 s apology

I 363

cop .2

HE AUTHORSPOLOGY 2MIRS. WARREN SROFESSION* BERNARDHAWNTRODUCTION^JOHNCORBIN

The Author s Apology

The

Author s Apologyfrom

Mrs. Warren s Profession

BY

BERNARD SHAW

With an Introduction byJOHN CORBIN

The Tyranny of Policeand Press

NEW YORK

BRENTANO SMCMV

I

PR

Cop

Copyright 1905

By Brentano s

Arranged and Printed atThe CHELTENHAM Press

New York

The Tyranny of Policeand Press

1

AS an answer to thecritics of

the press, and to the NewYork Commissioner of Po

lice, who drove Arnold Daly s production of Mrs. Warren s Profession from the American stage, Mr.Bernard Shaw herewith republishesthe "Author s Apology" which heissued in London on a not dissimilaroccasion, in January, 1902. As Ihave questioned the value of the

play, both as regards the doctrine it

urges and as a work of art, I amnot without misgiving as to my fitness to stand sponsor before the

American public for the author sdefense of it. There are many and

prominent Americans who have the

advantage of me in thinking well ofit. One of our foremost dramatists,Augustus Thomas, thinks this themost vigorous and vital thing Shaw

1

Reprinted in part from the New York Sun, November 5, 1905, with permission. When this articlewas written 1 fiad not read Mr. Shaw s Apology.

The Tyranny of Police and Press

has ever done. Professor William

Lyon Phelps, who very ably occupiesa chair of drama and literature atYale, thinks that it is not only a goodplay, but teaches a much neededmoral lesson. Mr. Norman Hap-good, once preeminent as a dramaticcritic and now as editor of Collier sWeekly, is strong in his approval ofboth of these views. It is doubtful,however, whether any of these gentlemen could speak with more forceand conviction on this subject thanMr. Shaw has done in his Apology.Nor is the value of the play the onlypoint at issue before the American

public. This, it seems to me, is themeretricious hypocrisy of the pressand the tyrannous bigotry of the policewhich combined to deprive the stageof its freedom of speech. The veryfact that I do not share all the opinions of Mr. Shaw and his factionmay perhaps lend weight to theprotest which I made at the time,and which I gladly repeat.

Before the production of the playall of the sensational papers, andsome that pretend not to be sensational, used column upon column of


their most prominent space to createan unwarranted expectation of some

thing lewd, and after it used thosesame columns to falsify what actuallyhappened. The denunciations ofthe play were hysterical arid hypocritical in proportion as the paperswere yellow and foul. The blacklegeven more than the puritan has motives for holding up the public handof horror. I quote a statement fromthe front page of the Herald, whichdiffers from many such only in beingbriefer and more explicit:

"The play is an insult to decencybecause

"It defends immorality."It glorifies debauchery."It besmirches the sacredness of

a clergyman s calling."It pictures children and parents

living in calm observance of most

unholy relations."Is it necessary, even in this year of

disgrace, to point out that an author,and most of all a dramatic author, isnot to be held responsible for the

opinions of his characters ? Mrs.Warren defends the career of a prostitute and procuress as better than


being crushed and brutalized by themodern economic system. But no

glamour is thrown about this harlot slife. There is not a trace of the false

appeal to sentiment, of the emotional

florification

of the courtesan thatas so long been applauded in

Camille. The spirit of sheer, hardactuality is over it and in it all.At the outset of the play Mrs. Warren seems to have one chance of

regeneration in her love for her

daughter. But being what she isthis is no chance at all. She losesVivie forever, and sinks irreclaimablyinto the mire. As a defense of im

morality this takes the palm.As a glorification of debauchery it

is even more astonishing. But perhaps the allusion is to Mrs. Warren saristocratic partner in bawdry, Sir

George Crofts ? He realizes thirty-five per cent on his business invest

ment, andwiththe proceeds has sousedhis soul in all of the seven deadly sins

without loss of social standing amongcounty families. To the gentlemencapable of making newspaper capitalby creating the present sensation thismust indeed seem a glorification.


As for the sacredness of the clergyman s calling, is it to be besmirchedby the depiction of the black sheepin the fold? In point of fact, theRev. Samuel Gardner belongs to a

type that has been notorious in lifeand rampant in literature for centuries, and never a word of protest.The unholy relations in calm observance of which these parents and children live, I confess, thus far eludedme. Young Gardner openly insultsand reprobates his father, and Viviebids her mother a stern and calm

good-by.One and all the charges are false.

Assuming common intelligence onthe part of their author, they are

intentionally false.

In such a mess of calculated sensationalism and venal hypocrisy it isnot strange that the real purport of

the play should have escaped notice.Small chance here for that critical

honesty which makes an artist s intention the primary basis for judgment as to what he has done! Onemay search the press in vain for thefact, which should be obvious to themeanest intelligence, that what Shaw


has written is first and last a tract insocialism. Once grant that the primary right of every human being iswholesome work at a living wage,and the play is not only moral in purpose, but satirically and criticallyilluminating. As a girl Mrs. Warren

gave respectability a fair trial andwas denied every chance of material

happiness. But all that the virtueof society as organized withheld shesnatched from its vices. She didn twant to do this, but she was forcedto it, and with the courage of herconvictions took the consequences,bitter as they were. Personally I donot think that the dramatist s powersof simple human feeling and his insight into the spiritual depths of life

proved adequate to his theme; butif they had done sa there can be nodoubt that the result would havebeen a play of artistic value and intellectual power.That our press, at once the freest

in the world and the one that most

vilely abuses its freedom, should become an engine to crush the freedomof the stage is grotesquely comic.But what shall we say when our

10


police, which generally battens on

prostitution, and in spite of theclearest of laws always tolerates it,uses vague and irresponsible powersto prohibit its mere artistic representation? That open scurrility,The Turtle, gave rise to a statute

against disorderly conduct in the

theater, and lo ! this is first used to bana play the intention of which is un-,

mistakably artistic and intellectual.Prostitutes and their patrons, whoflourish on the other side of Broad

way flagrant and unpunished, go fora vacation from their hard labors to

the Garrick, and our Tammany Police Commissioner, McAdoo, transforms himself into dramatic censor

and closes the theater to good andbad alike. The disreputable elementin the audience goes back to its lifein the Tenderloin unmolested, but

the actors who dare to discuss thatlife intellectually and artisticallyamong them two women of spotlessreputation in their private life

andin their art are- summoned beforethe magistrate.

"

Could anything bemore affecting," a "Woman Ste

nographer"wrote to the Sun, "than

n


the solicitude of Mr. McAdoo ? Hefairly radiated all twelve of the beatitudes. He saw the white spotlightof virtue hovering near, and plumpedhimself into its very center.And note the serried logic with

which Mr. McAdoo justified whathe did!

"Played at the Academy ofMusic, on the East Side, or at theGrand Opera House, on the WestSide, at popular prices, the effect on

public morality would be most pernicious." Admirable this as an excuse for stopping it at one of the mostartistic and sophisticated theaters inthe city! Mr. McAdoo does noteven pretend that the play might be

given in the popular houses. "I

doubt, however, if the hard-workingand plain-minded heads of familiesin those neighborhoods would permit it to be

played." "Doubt" is amild word. Nothing is more certainthan that they would not. In theirwildest nightmares, Managers Gil-more, Tompkins, and Springer couldnot imagine themselves offering their

public such a piece. "That theaudience last night did not hiss the

play off the stage, or engage in mob


demonstrations against it, was due,I think, to the fact that the audiencewas not a representative one." Cer

tainly it was not. The play had two

appeals a factitious appeal to prurience, and a real appeal to people of

intelligent curiosity. If there hadbeen any demonstration it wouldhave been an outcry of disappointment from those who had been ledto think they were to be delightedwith lubricity. The one redeemingfeature of the occasion was the fateof aspirants who paid the speculatorsthirty dollars apiece for seats, andwhen the play was stopped wereforced to exchange them at the boxoffice for two dollars.Mr. McAdoo did not expect any

continued popular interest in theGarrick performance. "There was

nothing during the evening thatcould be really called applause."And he has no illusions as to thereason for this. "The whole play,to my personal view, is revolting,indecent, nauseating, where it is not

boring." There is a delicate intimation here that the Commissioner ofPolice was enlivened by its revolting

18


indecency, but we will let that pass.He makes it abundantly clear thatthe audience did not share his mood.In plain terms, the people who paidthirty dollars and saw the play weremost beautifully sold. By the Commissioner s own statement the playmust have failed, when the false andfactitious interest in it was spent.Except for the small public of peoplegenuinely interested in the play, itsfate would have been precisely thatof innumerable giddy farces endingwith Pinero s Wife Without a Smile

or of this very same piece when itwas played in Germany. To thesense of the general public the playwas rankly obnoxious that was its

safeguard. The polecat is his ownexcuse for being he makes it soevident that safety lies in flight.

Truly it is to laugh when the veryreasons which the authorities allegefor interfering show so plainly thatinterference was gratuitous.

"Well, then," Mr. McAdoo andhis henchmen of puritans and black

legs may ask, "what is the harm inadding a perfume to this polecat, es

pecially if the result is to bury him for-14


everoutofreach ofthepublic nostrils ?"The answer is that we live, presumably, in a free and truth-loving land,in which even polecat specialistsmust have a look in. This happensto be an intelligent polecat, an artistic polecat, a highly interesting polecat, a polecat the like of which never

ranged the wilds of Broadway."Why shouldn t I butt my headagainst the wall?" cries the rebel

lious heroine of Wheels WithinWheels. "The wall is open to

everybody, and my head is my own!"So she butted her head and becamea wiser and better, if sadder, woman.Mr. McAdoo avers that some of thescant applause at that premier camefrom women actuated by foolishbravado." He misconceived themand maligned them as grossly as hedid the play and its actors. Thethesis at the bottom of the whole

thing is that women have an inalienable right to vocations that do notinvolve the degradation either of

poverty or of prostitution. Many ofour women, innocent alike of follyor bravado, sincerely and profoundlybelieve this. One such woman, as

15


it seems, wrote to the Commissioner

protesting that it was not for himto tell her what she should think anddo. His reply was to tell her moreof what he thought, and scold herfor thinking otherwise. He addedthat she might if she wished go tosuch plays a smug sentiment of liberality, after he had closed the doors !

It fares hard with the intelligence,in a mob-ridden democracy, whichhates anything above its own conventional judgments. No artist istruly an artist who does not departfrom the rigidity of accepted types,who does not stir us from the inertacquiescence in habit and custom,who does not incite us to revolt fromthe tyranny of the standards of the

past. But all the forces of stupidityand hypocrisy are exerted in preventing a dramatist from doing anything different from what has alwaysbeen done.The intelligent world is well agreed

that Mr. Anthony Comstock is an

enemy to true decency and the properfreedom of art. But he has limitedhis activities for the most part towhat strikes the eye or the ear.

16


There is no question of vulgar orexternal indecency here. Mr. Mc-Adoo has put his ban on the motionsof the mind and the soul. He hasattacked the dearest liberty of ourrace the liberty to think for itself,and give public expression to its

thought. He has dealt a vital blowat the sacred, the invaluable instinct

which prompts able playwrights,actors, and managers to extend the

province of their art.He has made

himself the arch representative of

those standards of stupidity and

bigotry which have kept our dramaon the lowest plane of intelligence.It is the sort of thing that alwayshappens when questions of aestheticsor of belief are meddled with by the

policeman.f in the present case, as it happens,something more is at stake than thefreedom of the theater. The socialistic ideas that inspired Mrs. Warren s Profession are identical with

those that are creating revolutionaryferment in all modern countries. In

Europe monarchy and aristocracy arestill, for the most part, in power, andhave means to check the rising tides

17


of revolution. Here, thanks to ourmore liberal institutions, the ballot

gives immediate expression to thewill of the people. How strong andpervasive are the forces of the new

thought was lately shown in the

municipal election in New York.An able socialistic agitator, backedby a large private fortune, has, as itseems, actually elected himself mayor.What he may still do no man canforetell. Only a few years agoanother agitator, without any suchfinancial power, made two all butsuccessful campaigns for the presidency of our country. The principles for which he stood were knownby well-grounded economists to be asfallacious as they were dangerous tothe established order. But such wasthe appeal to social and economicdiscontent that it took a decade, andthe best energies of the country, to

educate the public out of their delusions. The socialism of to-dayis backed by many of the keenestintellects; and many of the mostconservative thinkers do not denythat certain of its principles are valid.

But taken as a whole, or as put in18


practice by a rash popular movement,it would subvert not only the economic but the moral basis of society.Its danger is ten times the danger offree silver, and ten times as difficultto combat. And now, as before, wehave only one engine of warfarean enlightened public opinion.

Mrs. Warren s Profession wasan opportunity to show it up in itshabit as it lives, with its attractivelyrational materialism, its alluring of

fer of moral freedom to the indi

vidual, and its repugnance to our

deepest racial instincts. The rightof the actors to give the play, and ofthe public to see it, was a minor matter compared with the duty of ourintellectual leaders to make us understand it. Placed as we are, to libelsocialism and put it under the banof the police, is only to redouble its

power. In England, when the royalostrich buries its head in the sand itstail feathers still make an imposingimpression many bow down beforethem and worship them. But the

republican ostrich has no tail feathers.When it buries its head the resultis an exposure of naked fatuity.

19

TheAuthor s Apology

MRS.WARREN S PROFESSION

has been performed at last, aftera delay of only eight years ; and

I have once more shared with Ibsen the

triumphant amusement of startling all butthe strongest-headed of the London theatercritics clean out of the practice of their

profession. No author who has ever knownthe exultation of sending the press into an

hysterical tumult of protest, of moral

panic, of involuntary and frantic confession of sin, of a horror of conscience inwhich the power of distinguishing betweenthe work of art on the stage and the reallife of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotypedcompliments which every successful farceor melodrama elicits from the newspapers.Give me that critic who has just rushedfrom my play to declare furiously that SirGeorge Crofts ought to be kicked. What atriumph for the actor, thus to reduce a

jaded London journalist to the conditionof the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts execrations at lago andwarnings to Othello not to believe him!But dearer still than such simplicity is thatsense of the sudden earthquake shock to the

21


foundations of morality which sends a

pallid crowd of critics into the street shriek

ing that the pillars of society are crackingand the ruin of the state at hand. Eventhe Ibsen champions of ten years ago remonstrate with me even as the veterans ofthose brave days remonstrated with them.

Mr. Grein, the hardy iconoclast who firstlaunched my plays on the stage alongsideGhosts and The Wild Duck, exclaims thatI have shattered his ideals. Actually his

ideals! What would Dr. Relling say?And Mr. William Archer himself disownsme because I "cannot touch pitch without

wallowing in it." Truly my play must bemore needed than I knew; and yet I

thought I knew how little the others know.Do not suppose, however, that the con

sternation of the press reflects any consternation among the general public. Anybody can upset the theater critics, in a turnof the wrist, by substituting for the romantic commonplaces of the stage the

moral commonplaces of the pulpit, the

platform, or the library. Play Mrs. Warren s Profession to an audience of clericalmembers of the Christian Social Union andof women well experienced in Rescue, Temperance, and Girls Club work,

1 and no

1 Many a specialist of the stalls will shudder at his owndreary conception of such an audience; but I can assure himthat he would hardly know where he was on such an occasion, so much more vital would the atmosphere be, andso much jollier and better looking the people.

22

From Mrs. Warren s Profession

moral panic will arise : every man andwoman present will know that as long aspoverty makes virtue hideous and the sparepocket money of rich bachelordom makesvice dazzling, their daily hand-to-hand

fight against prostitution with prayer and

persuasion, shelters and scanty alms, willbe a losing one. There was a time when

they were able to urge that though "thewhite-lead factory where Anne Jane waspoisoned" may be a far more terrible placethan Mrs. Warren s house, yet hell is stillmore dreadful. Nowadays they no longerbelieve in hell; and the girls among whomthey are working know that they do notbelieve in it, and would laugh at them if

they did. So well have the rescuers learntthat Mrs. Warren s defense of herself andindictment of society is the thing that mostneeds saying, that those who know me personally reproach me, not for writing this

play, but for wasting my energies on"pleasant plays" for the amusement offrivolous people, when I can build up suchexcellent stage sermons on their own work.Mrs. Warren s Profession is the one playof mine which I could submit to a censor

ship without doubt of the result; only, itmust not be the censorship of the minortheater critic, or of an innocent courtofficial like the King s Reader of Plays,much less of people who consciously profit


by Mrs. Warren s profession, or who personally make use of it, or who hold the

widely whispered view that it is an indis

pensable safety valve for the protection of

domestic virtue, or, above all, who aresmitten with a sentimental, pitiful affection

for our fallen sister, and would "take her

up tenderly, lift her with care, fashioned so

slenderly, young, and so fair." Nor am I

prepared to accept the verdict of the

medical gentlemen who would compulsorilysanitate and register Mrs. Warren, whilst

leaving Mrs. Warren s patrqns, especiallyher military patrons, free to destroy her

health and anybody else s without fear of

reprisals. "But I should be quite content to

have my play judged by, say, a joint committee of the Central Vigilance Society andthe Salvation Army. And the sternermoralists the members of the committee

were, the better.

Some of the journalists I have shockedreason so unripely that they will gather

nothing from this but a confused notionthat I am accusing the National VigilanceAssociation and the Salvation Army ofcomplicity in my own scandalous immorality. It will seem to them that peoplewho would stand this play would stand

anything. They are quite mistaken. Suchan audience as I have described would berevolted by many of our fashionable plays.

From Mrs. Warren 9s Profession

They would leave the theater convincedthat the Plymouth Brother who still re

gards the playhouse as one of the gates of

hell is perhaps the safest adviser on the

subject of which he knows so little. If Ido not draw the same conclusion, it is notbecause "I am one of those who claim thatart is exempt from moral obligations, andthat the writing or performance of a playis not a moral act, to be treated on exactlythe same footing as theft or murder if it

produces equally mischievous consequences.I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest,the most seductive, the most effective meansof moral propagandism in the world, ex

cepting only the example of personal con

duct; and I waive even this exception infavor of the art of the stage, because it

works by exhibiting examples of personalconduct made intelligible and moving tocrowds of unobservant, unreflecting peopleto whom real life means nothing. I have

pointed out again and again that the influence of the theater in England is growing so great that whilst private conduct,

religion, law, science, politics, and moralsare becoming more and more theatrical, thetheater itself remains impervious to common sense, religion, science, politics, andmorals. That is why I fight the theater,not with pamphlets and sermons and trea

tises, but with plays ; and so effective do I

25


find the dramatic method that I have no

doubt I shall at last persuade even Londonto take its conscience and its brains with itwhen it goes to the theater, instead of

leaving them at home with its prayer bookas it does at present. Consequently, I amthe last man in the world to deny that if thenet effect of a performance of Mrs. Warren s Profession were an increase in the

number of persons entering that profession, its performance should be dealt with

accordingly.Now let us consider how such recruiting

can be encouraged by the theater. Noth

ing is easier. Let the King s Reader of

Plays, backed by the press, make an unwritten but perfectly well understood regulation that members of Mrs. Warren s profession shall be tolerated on the stage onlywhen they are beautiful, exquisitelydressed, and sumptuously lodged and fed;also that they shall, at the end of the play,die of consumption to the sympathetic tears

of the whole audience, or step into the next

room to commit suicide, or at least be

turned out by their protectors and passedon to be "redeemed" by old and faithfullovers who have adored them in spite of alltheir levities. Naturally the poorer girlsin the gallery will believe in the beauty, in

the exquisite dresses, and the luxurious

living, and will see that there is no real


necessity for the consumption, the suicide,or the ejectment: mere pious forms, all of

them, to save the Censor s face. Even ifthese purely official catastrophes carried

any conviction, the majority of Englishgirls remain so poor, so dependent, so well

aware that the drudgeries of such honestwork as is within their reach are likelyenough to lead them eventually to lungdisease, premature death, and domestic desertion or brutality, that they would stillsee reason to prefer the primrose path tothe strait path of virtue, since both, viceat worst and virtue at best, lead to thesame end in poverty and overwork. It istrue that the Board School mistress will tell

you that only girls of a certain kind willreason in this way. But alas ! that certainkind turns out on inquiry to be simply the

pretty, dainty kind: that is, the only kindthat gets the chance of acting on such rea

soning. Read the first report of the Commission on the Housing of the WorkingClasses (Bluebook C 4402, 8d., 1889) ;read the Report on Home Industries ( sacredword, Home!), issued by the Women sIndustrial Council (Home Industries ofWomen in London, 1897, Is., 12 Buckingham Street, W. C. ) ; and ask yourselfwhether, if the lot in life therein describedwere your lot in life, you would not prefer the lot of Cleopatra, of Theodora, of

27


the Lady of the Camellias, of Mrs. Tan-

queray, of Zaza, of Iris. If you can godeep enough into things to be able to sayno, how many ignorant, half-starved girlswill believe you are speaking sincerely?To them the lot of Iris is heavenly in comparison with our own. Yet our King, likehis predecessors, says to the dramatist,

"Thus, and thus only, shall you presentMrs. Warren s profession on the stage, or

you shall starve. Witness Shaw, who toldthe untempting truth about it, and whomWe, by the Grace of God, accordingly disallow and suppress, and do what in Us liesto silence." Fortunately, Shaw cannot besilenced. "The harlot s cry from street tostreet" is louder than the voices of all the

kings. I am not dependent on the theater,and cannot be starved into making my playa standing advertisement of the attractive

side of Mrs. Warren s business.Here I must guard myself against a

misunderstanding. It is not the fault of

their authors that the long string of

wanton s tragedies, from Antony and

Cleopatra to Iris, are snares to poor girls,and are objected to on that account bymany earnest men and women who considerMrs. Warren s Profession an excellent sermon. Mr. Pinero is in no way bound to

suppress the fact that Iris is a person to

be envied by millions of better women. If


he made his play false to life by inventingfictitious disadvantages for her, he wouldbe acting as unscrupulously as any tractwriter. If society chooses to provide forits Irises better than for its workingwomen, it must not expect honest playwrights to manufacture spurious evidenceto save its credit. The mischief lies in thedeliberate suppression of the other side ofthe case ; the refusal to allow Mrs. Warrento expose the drudgery and repulsivenessof plying for hire among coarse, tediousdrunkards ; the determination not to let theParisian girl in Brieux s Les Avaries comeon the stage and drive into people s mindswhat her diseases mean for her and forthemselves. All that, says the King sReader in effect, is horrifying, loathsome.

Precisely: what does he expect it to be?would he have us represent it as beautifuland gratifying? The answer to this question, I fear, must be a blunt Yes; for itseems impossible to root out of an Englishman s mind the notion that vice is delightful, and that abstention from it is privation.At all events, as long as the tempting sideof it is kept towards the public, andsoftened by plenty of sentiment and sympathy, it is welcomed by our Censor,whereas the slightest attempt to place it in

the light of the policeman s lantern or the

Salvation Army shelter is checkmated at29


once as not merely disgusting, but, if youplease, unnecessary.

Everybody will, I hope, admit that thisstate of things is intolerable ; that the sub

ject of Mrs. Warren s profession must beeither tapu altogether, or else exhibitedwith the warning side as freely displayedas the tempting side. But many personswill vote for a complete tapu, and an im

partial clean sweep from the boards ofMrs. Warren and Gretchen and the rest:in short, for banishing the sexual instincts

from the stage altogether. Those whothink this impossible can hardly have con

sidered the number and importance of the

subjects which are actually banished fromthe stage. Many plays, among them Lear,Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Julius

Caesar, have no sex complications: the

thread of their action can be followed .bychildren who could not understand a singlescene of Mrs. Warren s Profession or Iris.None of our plays rouse the sympathy ofthe audience by an exhibition of the painsof maternity, as Chinese plays constantlydo. Each nation has its particular set of

tapus in addition to the common human

stock; and though each of these tapuslimits the scope of the dramatist, it does

not make drama impossible. If Mr. Red-ford were to refuse to license plays with

female characters in them, he would only


be doing to the stage what our tribal customs already do to the pulpit and the bar.I have myself written a rather entertainingplay with only one woman in it, and shequite heartwhole; and I could just as easilywrite a play without a woman in it at all.I will even go as far as to promise Mr.Redford my support if he will introducethis limitation for part of the year, say

during Lent, so as to make a close seasonfor that dullest of stock dramatic subjects,

adultery, and force our managers andauthors to find out what all great dramatists find out spontaneously : to wit, that

people who sacrifice every other consideration to love are as hopelessly unheroic onthe stage as lunatics or dipsomaniacs.Hector is the world s hero; not Paris nor

Antony.But though I do not question the possi

bility of a drama in which love should beas effectively ignored as cholera is at present, there is not the slightest chance of that

way out of the difficulty being taken byMr. Redford. If he attempted it therewould be a revolt in which he would be

swept away, in spite of my single-handedefforts to defend him. A complete tapuis politically impossible. A complete toleration is equally impossible to Mr. Redford,because his occupation would be gone ifthere were no tapu to enforce. He is

31


therefore compelled to maintain the present compromise of a partial tapu, applied,to the best of his judgment, with a careful

respect to persons and to public opinion.And a very sensible English solution of the

difficulty, too, most readers will say. I

should not dispute it if dramatic poets

really were what English public opinion

generally assumes them to be during their

lifetime: that is, a licentiously irregular

group to be kept in order in a rough and

ready way by a magistrate who will standno nonsense from them. But I cannotadmit that the class represented by Eschy-lus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides,

Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen, and Tolstoy,not to mention our own contemporary playwrights, is as much in place in Mr. Red-ford s office as a pickpocket is in BowStreet. Further, it is not true that the

Censorship, though it certainly suppressesIbsen and Tolstoy, and would suppress

Shakespear but for the absurd rule that a

play once licensed is always licensed (sothat Wycherly is permitted and Shelley

prohibited), also suppresses unscrupulous

playwrights. I challenge Mr. Redford to

mention any extremity of sexual miscon

duct which any manager in his senses would

risk presenting on the London stage that

has not been presented under his license

and that of his predecessor. The compro-


mise, in fact, works out in practice in favorof loose plays as against earnest ones.

To carry conviction on this point, I willtake the extreme course of narrating the

plots of two plays witnessed within the lastten years by myself at London West Endtheaters, one licensed by the late Queen Victoria s Reader of Plays, the other by the

present Reader to the King. Both plotsconform to the strictest rules of the periodwhen La Dame aux Camellias was still aforbidden play, and when The Second Mrs.

Tanqueray would have been tolerated onlyon condition that she carefully explainedto the audience that when she met CaptainArdale she sinned "but in intention."

Play number one. A prince is compelledby his parents to marry the daughter of a

neighboring king, but loves another maiden. The scene represents a hall in the

king s palace at night. The wedding hastaken place that day ; and the closed doorof the nuptial chamber is in view of the

audience. Inside, the princess awaits her

bridegroom. A duenna is in attendance.The bridegroom enters. His sole desire isto escape from a marriage which is hatefulto him. An idea strikes him. He will assault the duenna, and get ignominiouslyexpelled from the palace by his indignantfather-in-law. To his horror, when he proceeds to carry out this stratagem, the


duenna, far from raising an alarm, is flat

tered, delighted, and compliant. The assaulter becomes the assaulted. He flingsher angrily to the ground, where she re

mains placidly. He flies. The father enters; dismisses the duenna; and listens at

the keyhole of his daughter s nuptialchamber, uttering various pleasantries, and

declaring, with a shiver, that a sound of

kissing, which he supposes to proceed from

within, makes him feel young again.In deprecation of the scandalized aston

ishment with which such a story as this will

be read, I can only say that it was not presented on the stage until its propriety had

been certified by the chief officer of the

Queen of England s household.

Story number two. A German officerfinds himself in an inn with a French ladywho has wounded his national vanity. Heresolves to humble her by committing a

rape upon her. He announces his purpose.She remonstrates, implores, flies to the

doors and finds them locked, calls for helpand finds none at hand, runs screaming*from side to side, and, after a harrowing

scene, is overpowered and faints. Nothingfurther being possible on the stage with

out actual felony, the officer then relents

and leaves her. When she recovers, shebelieves that he has carried out his threat ;

and during the rest of the play she is repre-

34


sented as vainly vowing vengeance uponhim, whilst she is really falling in lovewith him under the influence of his imaginary crime against her. Finally she consents to marry him; and the curtain fallson their happiness.

This story was certified by the presentKing s Reader, acting for the Lord Chamberlain, as void in its general tendency of

"anything immoral or otherwise improperfor the

stage."But let nobody conclude

therefore that Mr. Redford is a monster,whose policy it is to deprave the theater.As a matter of fact, both the above storiesare strictly in order from the official pointof view. The incidents of sex which theycontain, though carried in both to the extreme point at which another step wouldbe dealt with, not by the King s Reader, butby the police, do not involve adultery, nor

any allusion to Mrs. Warren s profession,nor to the fact that the children of anypolyandrous group will, when they growup, inevitably be confronted, as those ofMrs. Warren s group are in my play, withthe insoluble problem of their own possibleconsanguinity. In short, by dependingwholly on the coarse humors and the physical fascination of sex, they comply withall the formulable requirements of the Cen

sorship, whereas plays in which thesehumors and fascinations are discarded, and


the social problems created by sex seriouslyfaced and dealt with, inevitably ignore theofficial formula and are suppressed. If theold rule against the exhibition of illicit sexrelations on the stage were revived, and thesubject absolutely barred, the only resultwould be that Antony and Cleopatra,Othello (because of the Bianca episode),Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV, Measurefor Measure, Timon of Athens, La Dameaux Camellias, The Profligate, The SecondMrs. Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs.Ebbsmith, The Gay Lord Quex, Mrs.Dane s Defence, and Iris would be sweptfrom the stage, and placed under the sameban as Tolstoy s Dominion of Darkness andMrs. Warren s Profession, whilst suckplays as the two described above wouldhave a monopoly of the theater as far assexual interest is concerned.What is more, the repulsiveness . of the

worst of these certified plays would protect the Censorship against effective ex

posure and criticism. Not long ago anAmerican Review of high standing askedme for an article on the Censorship of theEnglish Stage. I replied that such an article would involve passages too disagreeable for publication in a magazine for general family reading. The editor persistednevertheless ; but not until he had declaredhis readiness to face this, and had pledged


himself to insert the article unaltered (the

particularity of the pledge extending evento a specification of the exact number ofwords in the article) did I consent to the

proposal. What was the result? Theeditor, confronted with the .two stories

given above, threw his pledge to the winds,and, instead of returning the article,

printed it with the illustrative examplesomitted, and nothing left but the argumentfrom political principles against the Cen

sorship. In doing this he fired my broadside after withdrawing the cannon balls ;for neither the Censor nor any other Englishman, except perhaps Mr. Leslie Stephonand a few other veterans of the dwindlingold guard of Benthamism, cares a dumpabout political principle. The ordinaryBriton thinks that if every other Briton is

not under some form of tutelage, the morechildish the better, he will abuse his freedom

viciously. As far as its principle is con

cerned, the Censorship is the most popularinstitution in England; and the playwright who criticises it is slighted as a

blackguard agitating for impunity. Con

sequently nothing can really shake the con

fidence of the public in the lord chamberlain s department except a remorseless andunbowdlerized narration of the licentiousfictions which slip through its net, and arehallmarked by it with the approval of the

37


Throne. But since these narrations cannotbe 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 escapingall remonstrance. With the exception ofsuch comments as I was able to make in myown 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 muchbetter plays which they confessed they had

not seen nor read, nothing has been said in

the press that could seriously disturb tEe

easy-going notion that the stage would be

much worse than it admittedly is but forthe vigilance of the King s Reader. Thetruth is, that no manager would dare produce on his own responsibility the pieces hecan now get royal certificates for at two

guineas per piece.I hasten to add that I believe these evils

to be inherent in the nature of all censor

ship, and not merely a consequence of the

form the institution takes in London. Nodoubt there is a. staggering absurdity in

appointing an ordinary clerk to see that

the leaders of European literature do not

corrupt the morals of the nation, and to

restrain Sir Henry Irving, as a rogue and

a vagabond, from presuming to imperson-

From Mrs. Warren}

s Profession

ate Samson or David on the stage, thoughany other sort of artist may daub these

scriptural figures on a signboard or carvethem on a tombstone without hindrance. Ifthe General Medical Council, the RoyalCollege of Physicians, the Royal Academyof Arts, the Incorporated Law Society,and Convocation were abolished, and theirfunctions handed over to Mr. Redford, theConcert of Europe would presumably declare England mad and treat her accord

ingly. Yet, though neither medicine nor

painting nor law nor the church molds the

character of the nation as potently as the

theater does, nothing can come on the

stage unless its dimensions admit of its first

passing through Mr. Redford s mind!

Pray do not think that I question Mr. Red-ford s honesty. I am quite sure that he

sincerely thinks me a blackguard, and myplay a grossly improper one, because, like

Tolstoy s Dominion of Darkness, it produces, as they are both meant to produce,a very strong and very painful impressionof evil. I do not doubt for a moment thatthe rapine play which I have described,and which he licensed, was quite incapablein manuscript of producing any particulareffect on his mind at all, and that when hewas once satisfied that the ill-conducted

hero was a German and not an Englishofficer, he passed the play without study-


ing its moral tendencies. Even if he hadundertaken that study, there is no morereason to suppose that he is a competentmoralist than there is to suppose that I ama competent mathematician. But truly itdoes not matter whether he is a moralist or

not. Let nobody dream for a moment thatwhat is \vrong with the Censorship is the

shortcoming of the gentleman who happensat any moment to be acting as Censor. Re

place him to-morrow by an* Academy ofLetters and an Academy of Dramatic

Poetry, acting in concert with the proposednew Academy, and the new and enlargedfilter will still exclude original and epoch-

making work, whilst passing conventional,old-fashioned, and vulgar work without

question. The conclave which compiles theindex of the Roman Catholic Church is themost august, ancient, learned, famous, and

authoritative censorship in Europe. Is it

more enlightened, more liberal, more tol

erant than the comparatively infinitesimal

office of the Lord Chamberlain ? On the con

trary, it has reduced itself to a degree of

absurdity which makes a Catholic univer

sity a contradiction in terms. All censor

ships exist to prevent anyone from chal

lenging current conceptions and existinginstitutions. All progress is initiated by

challenging current conceptions, and exe

cuted by supplanting existing institutions.

40


Consequently the first condition of progressis the removal of censorships. There is the

whole case against censorships in a nutshell.

It will be asked whether theatrical man

agers are to be allowed to produce what

they like, without regard to the publicinterest. But that is not the alternative.The managers of our London music hallsare not subject to any censorship. Theyproduce their entertainments on their own

responsibility, and have no two-guinea certificates to plead if their houses are con

ducted viciously. They know that if theylose their character, the County Council will

simply refuse to renew their license at the

end of the year ; and nothing in the historyof popular art is more amazing than the

improvement in music halls that this simple

arrangement has produced within a few

years. Place the theaters on the same foot

ing, and we shall promptly have a similarrevolution : a whole class of frankly black

guardly plays, in which unscrupulous low

comedians attract crowds to gaze at bevies

of girls who have nothing to exhibit buttheir prettiness, will vanish like the obscene

songs which were supposed to enliven the

squalid dullness, incredible to the youngergeneration, of the music h^lls fifteen years

ago. On the other hand, plays which treatsex questions as problems for thought in

stead of as aphrodisiacs will be freely per-

41


formed. .Gentlemen of Mr. Redford s wayof thinking will have plenty of opportu

nity of protesting against them in Council ;but the result will be that Mr. Redford willfind his natural level; Ibsen and Tolstoytheirs ; so no harm will be done.

This question of the Censorship reminds

me that I have to apologize to those whowent to the recent performance of Mrs.

Warren s Profession expecting to find itwhat I have just called an aphrodisiac.That was not my fault: it was Mr. Red-ford s. After the specimens I have givenof the tolerance of his department, it was

natural enough for thoughtless people to

infer that a play which overstepped his

indulgence must be a very exciting play in

deed. Accordingly, I find one critic so

explicit as to the nature of his disappointment as to say candidly that "such airytalk as there is upon the matter is utterly

unworthy of acceptance as being a representation of what people with blood in them

think or do on such occasions." Thus am Icrushed between the upper millstone of Mr.

Redford, who thinks me a libertine, and thenether popular critic, who thinks me a

prude. Critics of all grades and ages,

middle-aged fathers of families no less than

ardent young enthusiasts, are equally in

dignant with me. They revile me as lack

ing in passion, in feeling, in manhood.

42


Some of them even sum the matter up bydenying me any dramatic power: a melan

choly betrayal of what dramatic power hascome to mean on our stage under the Cen

sorship ! Can I be expected to refrainfrom laughing at the spectacle of a number of respectable gentlemen lamenting be

cause a playwright lures them to the theater by a promise to excite their senses ina very special and sensational manner, and

then, having successfully trapped them in

exceptional numbers, proceeds to ignoretheir senses and ruthlessly improve theirminds? But I protest again that the lurewas not mine. The play had been in printfor four years ; and I have spared no painsto make known that my plays are built toinduce, not voluptuous reverie but intellec

tual interest, not romantic rhapsody buthumane concern. Accordingly, I do notfind those critics who are gifted with intellectual appetite and political conscience

complaining of want of dramatic power.Rather do they protest, not altogether un

justly, against a few relapses into staginessand caricature which betray the youngplaywright and the old playgoer in this

early work of mine. As to the voluptuaries,I can assure them that the playwright,whether he be myself or another, will al

ways disappoint them. The drama can dolittle to delight the senses : all the apparent

43


instances to the contrary are instances of

the personal fascination of the performers.The drama of pure feeling is no lor 2r inthe hands of the playwright: it h been

conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem cold and

tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliestJuliet is dry, tedious, and rhetorical in

comparison with Wagner s Tristan, even

though Isolde be both fourteen stone and

forty, as she often is in Germany. Indeed,it needed no Wagner to convince the publicof this. The voluptuous sentimentality ofGounod s Faust and Bizet s Carmen has

captured the common playgoer; and there

is, flatly, no future now for any dramawithout music except the drama of thought.The attempt to produce a genus of operawithout music and this absurdity is what

our fashionable theaters have been drivingat for a long time past without knowing it

is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem as the normal

material of the drama.

That this determination will throw meinto a long conflict with our theater critics,

and with the few playgoers who go to the

theater as often as the critics, I well know ;but I am too well equipped for the strifeto be deterred by it, or to bear malice

towards the losing side. In trying to produce the sensuous effects of opera, the

44


fashionable drama has become so flaccid inits sentimentality, and the intellect of its

frequenters so atrophied by disuse, that thereintroduction of problem, with its re

morseless logic and iron framework of fact,inevitably produces at first an overwhelm

ing impression of coldness and inhumanrationalism. But this will soon pass away.When the intellectual muscle and moralnerve of the critics has been developed in

the struggle with modern problem plays,the pettish luxuriousness of the clever ones,and the sulky sense of disadvantaged weakness in the sentimental ones, will clear

away; and it will be seen that only in the

problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of thecamera to nature: it is the presentation in

parable of the conflict between Man s willand his environment : in a word, of problem. The vapidness of such drama as the

pseudo-operatic plays contain lies in the

fact that in them animal passion, sentimen

tally diluted, is shown in conflict, not withreal circumstances, but with a set of conventions and assumptions half of which donot exist off the stage, whilst the other half

can either be evaded by a pretense of com

pliance or defied with complete impunityby any reasonably strong-minded person.Nobody can feel that such conventions are

really compulsory; and consequently no-

45


body can believe in the stage pathos that

accepts them as an inexorable fate, or in

the genuineness of the people who indulgein such pathos. Sitting at such plays wedo not believe: we make believe. And thehabit of make believe becomes at last sorooted that criticism of the theater insen

sibly ceases to be criticism at all, and be

comes more and more a chronicle of the

fashionable enterprises of the only realities

left on the stage : that is, the performers in

their own persons. In this phase the playwright who attempts to revive genuinedrama produces the disagreeable impression of the pedant who attempts to start aserious discussion at a fashionable at-home.

Later on, when he has driven the teaservices out and made the people who hadcome to use the theater as a drawing-roomunderstand that it is they and not the

dramatists who are the intruders, he has toface the accusation that his plays ignorehuman feeling, an illusion produced by that

very resistance of fact and law to human

feeling which creates drama. It is the

deus ex machina who, by suspending that

resistance, makes the fall of the curtain an

immediate necessity, since drama ends ex

actly where resistance ends. Yet the in

troduction of this resistance produces so

strong an impression of heartlessness now

adays that a distinguished critic has

From Mrs. Warren9s Profession

summed up the impression made on him byMrs. Warren s Profession, by declaringthat "the difference between the spirit of

Tolstoy and the spirit of Mr. Shaw is thedifference between the spirit of Christ andthe spirit of Euclid." But the epigramwould be as good if Tolstoy s name were

put in place of mine and D Annunzio s inplace of Tolstoy s. At the same time I ac

cept the enormous compliment to my reasoning powers with sincere complacency;and I promise my flatterer that when he issufficiently accustomed to and therefore un-dazzled by problem on the stage to be ableto attend to the familiar factor of hu

manity in it as well as to the unfamiliarone of a real environment, he will both see

and feel that Mrs. Warren s Profession isno mere theorem, but a play of instinctsand temperaments in conflict with eachother and with a flinty social problem thatnever yields an inch to mere sentiment.

I go further than this. I declare thatthe real secret of the cynicism and inhu

manity of which shallower critics accuse meis the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of

conforming to the romantic logic of the

stage. The axioms and postulates of thatdreary mimanthropometry are so wellknown that it is almost impossible for itsslaves to write tolerable last acts to their

47


plays, so conventionally do their conclu

sions follow from their premises. BecauseI have thrown this logic ruthlessly over

board, I am accused of ignoring, not stagelogic, but, of all things, human feeling.People with completely theatrified imaginations tell me that no girl would treat hermother as Vivie Warren does, meaning thatno stage heroine would in a popular senti

mental play. They say this just as theymight say that no two straight lines would

inclose a space. They do not see how com

pletely inverted their vision has become

even when I throw its preposterousness intheir faces, as I repeatedly do in this very

play. Praed, the sentimental artist (foolthat I was not to make him a playwrightinstead of an architect!), burlesques them

by anticipating all through the piece that

the feelings of the others will be logicallydeducible from their family relationshipsand from his "conventionally unconven

tional" social code. The sarcasm is lost onthe critics: they, saturated with the same

logic, only think him the sole sensible person on the stage. Thus it comes about thatthe more completely the dramatist is eman

cipated from the illusion that men andwomen are primarily reasonable beings, andthe more powerfully he insists on the ruth

less indifference of their great dramatic

antagonist, the external world, to their

48


whims and emotions, the surer he is to be

denounced as blind to the very distinction

on which his whole work is built. Far from

ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, im

pulse, whim, as factors in human action, Ihave placed them so nakedly on the stagethat the elderly citizen, accustomed to see

them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about duty, and to disguiseeven his own impulses from himself in this

way, finds the picture as unnatural as Car-

lyle s suggested painting of Parliament

sitting without its clothes.

I now come to those critics who, intellec

tually baffled by the problem in Mrs. Warren s Profession, have made a virtue of run

ning away from it. I will illustrate theirmethod by a quotation from Dickens,taken from the fifth chapter of Our MutualFriend :

"Hem!" began Wegg. "This, Mr.Boffin and Lady, is the first chapterof the first wollume of the Decline

and Fall off " here he lookedhard at the book, and stopped.

"What s the matter, Wegg?"

"Why, it comes into my mind, do youknow, sir," said Wegg with an airof insinuating frankness (havingfirst again looked hard at the book),"that you made a little mistake this

49


morning, which I had meant to set

you right in; only something put itout of my head. I think you saidRooshan Empire, sir?"

"It is Rooshan; ain t it, Wegg?""No, sir. Roman. Roman.""What s the difference, Wegg?""The difference, sir?" Mr. Wegg was

faltering and in danger of breaking. down, when a bright thought flashed

upon him. "The difference, sir?There you place me in a difficulty,Mr. Boffin. Suffice it to observe, thatthe difference is best postponed to

some other occasion when Mrs.Boffin does not honor us with her

company. In Mrs. Boffin s presence,sir, we had better drop it."

Mr. Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air,and not only that, but by dint of re

peating with a manly delicacy, "InMrs. Boffin s presence, sir, we hadbetter drop it!" turned the disad

vantage on Boffin, who felt that hehad committed himself in a verypainful manner.

I am willing to let Mr. Wegg drop it onthese terms, provided I am allowed to mention here that Mrs. Warren s Profession isa play for women; that it was written for

50

From Mrs. Warren}

s Profession

women; that it has been performed and

produced mainly through the determinationof women that it should be performed and

produced; that the enthusiasm of womenmade its first performance excitingly suc

cessful; and that not one of these womenhad any inducement to support it excepttheir belief in the timeliness and the powerof the lesson the play teaches. Those whowere "surprised to see ladies present" were

men; and when they proceeded to explainthat the journals they represented could

not possibly demoralize the public by de

scribing such a play, their editors cruellydevoted the space saved by their delicacyto an elaborate and respectful account ofthe progress of a young lord s attempt tobreak the bank at Monte Carlo. A fewdays sooner Mrs. Warren would have beencrowded out of their papers by an exceptionally abominable police case. I do not

suggest that the police case should havebeen suppressed; but neither do I believethat regard for public morality had anything to do with their failure to grapplewith the performance by the Stage Society.And, after all, there was no need to fallback on Silas Wegg s subterfuge. Severalcritics saved the faces of their papers easilyenough by the simple expedient of sayingall they had to say in the tone of a shocked

governess lecturing a naughty child. To51


them I might plead, in Mrs. Warren s

words, "Well, it s only good manners to be

ashamed, dearie ;" but it surprises me, recol

lecting as I do the effect produced by Miss

Fanny Brough s delivery of that line, that

gentlemen who shivered like violets in a

zephyr as it swept through them, should so

completely miss the full width of its application as to go home and straightway makea public exhibition of mock modesty.My old Independent Theater manager,

Mr. Grein, besides that reproach to me for

shattering his ideals, complains that Mrs.

Warren is not wicked enough, and namesseveral romancers who would have clothedher black soul with all the terrors of

tragedy. I have no doubt they would;but if you please, my dear Grein, that isjust what I did not want to do. Nothingwould please our sanctimonious British

public more than to throw the whole guiltof Mrs. Warren s profession on Mrs. Warren herself. Now, the whole aim of myplay is to throw that guilt on the British

public itself. You may remember thatwhen you produced my first play, Widowers Houses, exactly the same misunder

standing arose. When the virtuous younggentleman rose up in wrath against theslum landlord, the slum landlord very ef

fectually showed him that slums are the

product, not of individual Harpagons,52


but of the indifference of virtuous younggentlemen to the condition of the city theylive in, provided they live at the west end

of it on money earned by somebody else slabor. The notion that prostitution is created by the wickedness of Mrs. Warren isas silly as the notion prevalent, neverthe

less, to some extent in Temperance circles ^that drunkenness is created by the wickedness of the publican. Mrs. Warren is nota whit a worse woman than the reputabledaughter who cannot endure her. Herindifference to the ultimate social conse

quences of her means of making money,and her discovery of that means by the or

dinary method of taking the line of leastresistance to getting it, are too common in

English society to call for any special remark. Her vitality, her thrift, her energy,her outspokenness, her wise care of her

daughter, and the managing capacity whichhas enabled her and her sister to climb fromthe fried fish shop down by the mint to theestablishments of which she boasts, are all

high English social virtues. Her defenseof herself is so overwhelming that it provokes the St. James s Gazette to declarethat "the tendency of the play is whollyevil," because "it contains one of the bold

est and most specious defenses of an immoral life for poor women that has everbeen penned." Happily the St. James s

53


Gazette here speaks in its haste. Mrs.

Warren s defense of herself is not onlybold and specious, but valid and unanswerable. But it is no defense at all of thevice which she organizes. It is no defenseof an immoral life to say that the alterna

tive offered by society collectively to poorwomen is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly. Though it is

quite natural and right for Mrs. Warrento choose what is, according to her lights,the least immoral alternative, it is none theless infamous of society to offer such alter

natives. For the alternatives offered arenot morality and immorality, but two sortsof immorality. The man who cannot seethat starvation, overwork, dirt, and disease are as immoral as prostitution that

they are the vices and crimes of a nation,and not merely its misfortunes is (to putit as politely as possible) a hopelesslyPrivate Person.

The notion that Mrs. Warren must be afiend is only an example of the violence and

passion which the slightest reference to sex

rouses in undisciplined minds, and whichmakes it seem natural to our lawgiversto punish silly and negligible indecencieswith a ferocity unknown in dealing with,for example, ruinous financial swindling.Had my play been entitled Mr. Warren sProfession, and Mr. Warren been a book-

54


maker, nobody would have expected me tomake him a villain as well. Yet gamblingis a vice, and bookmaking an institution,for which there is absolutely nothing to be

said. The moral and economic evil done

by trying to get other people s moneywithout working for it (and this is the essence of gambling) is not only enormousbut uncompensated. There are no twosides to the question of gambling, no circumstances which force us to tolerate it lestits suppression lead to worse things, no consensus of opinion among responsible classes,such as magistrates and military commanders, that it is a necessity, no Athenianrecords of gambling made splendid by thetalents of its professors, no contention thatinstead of violating morals it only violates

a legal institution which is in many respects oppressive and unnatural, no possible plea that the instinct on which it isfounded is a vital one. Prostitution canconfuse the issue with all these excuses ;

gambling has none of them. Consequently,if Mrs. Warren must needs be a demon, thebookmaker must be a cacodemon. Well,does anybody who knows the sportingworld really believe that bookmakers areworse than their neighbors? On the contrary, they have to be a good deal better;for in that world nearly everybody whosesocial rank does not exclude such an occu-

56


pation would be a bookmaker if he could;but the strength of character required for

handling large sums of money and forstrict settlements and unflinching paymentof losses is so rare that successful bookmakers are rare too. It may seem that atleast public spirit cannot be one of a bookmaker s virtues ; but I can testify from personal experience that excellent public workis done with money subscribed by bookmakers. It is true that there are abyssesin bookmaking: for example, welshing.Mr. Grein hints that there are abysses inMrs. Warren s profession also. So thereare in every profession: the error lies in

supposing that every member of themsounds these depths. I sit on a public bodywhich prosecutes Mrs. Warren zealously ;and I can assure Mr. Grein that she is often

leniently dealt with because she has con

ducted her business "respectably," and heldherself above its vilest branches. The de-sgrees in infamy are as numerous and as

scrupulously observed as the degrees in the

peerage: the moralist s notion that there

are depths at which the moral atmosphereceases is as delusive as the rich man s notionthat there are no social jealousies or snob

beries among the very poor. No: had Idrawn Mrs. Warren as a fiend in human

form, the very people who now rebuke mefor flattering her would probably be the

56

From Mrs. Warren }s Profession

first to deride me for deducing character

logically from occupation instead of ob

serving it accurately in society.One critic is so enslaved by this sort of

logic that he calls my portraiture of theRev. Samuel Gardner an attack on re

ligion. According to this view Subaltern

lago is an attack on the army, Sir JohnFalstaff an attack on knighthood, and

King Claudius an attack on royalty. Here

again the clamor for naturalness and human feeling, raised by so many critics when

they are confronted by the real thing onthe stage, is really a clamor for the most

mechanical and superficial sort of logic.The dramatic reason for making the

clergyman what Mrs. Warren calls "anold stick-in-the-mud," whose son, in spiteof much capacity and charm, is a cynicallyworthless member of society, is to set up amordant contrast between him and the

.woman of infamous profession, with her

well-brought-up, straightforward, hard

working daughter. The critics who havemissed the contrast have doubtless observed

often enough that many clergymen are inthe church through no genuine calling, but

simply because, in circles which can command preferment, it is the refuge of "thefool of the family"; and that clergymen ssons are often conspicuous reactionists

against the restraints imposed on them in

57


childhood by their father s profession.These critics must know, too, from historyif not from experience, that women as un

scrupulous as Mrs. Warren have dis

tinguished themselves as administrators and

rulers, both commercially and politically.But both observation and knowledge areleft behind when journalists go to thetheater. Once in their stalls, they assumethat it is "natural" for clergymen to be

saintly, for soldiers to be heroic, for law

yers to be hard-hearted, for sailors to be

simple and generous, for doctors to perform miracles with little bottles, and forMrs. Warren to be a beast and a demon.All this is not only not natural, but not

dramatic. A man s profession only entersinto the drama of his life when it comesinto conflict with his nature. The resultof this conflict is tragic in Mrs. Warren s

case, and comic in the clergyman s case (atleast we are savage enough to laugh at it) ;but in both cases it is illogical, and in bothcases natural. I repeat, the critics who accuse me of sacrificing nature to logic are so

sophisticated by their profession that tothem logic is nature, and nature absurdity.Many friendly critics are too little

skilled in social questions and moral discussions to be able to conceive that respectable

gentlemen like themselves, who would

instantly call the police to remove Mrs.


Warren if she ventured to canvass them

personally, could possibly be in any wayresponsible for her proceedings. Theyremonstrate sincerely, asking me what goodsuch painful exposures can possibly do.

Thej* might as well ask what good Lord

Shaftesbury did by devoting his life to the

exposure of evils (by no means yet rem

edied) compared to which the worst thingsbrought into view or even into surmisein this play are trifles. The good of mentioning them is that you make people soextremely uncomfortable about them that

they finally stop blaming- human nature"

for them, and begin to support measuresfor their reform. Can anything be moreabsurd than the copy of the Echo whichcontains a notice of the performance of

my play ? It is edited by a gentleman who,having devoted his life to work of the

Shaftesbury type, exposes social evils andclamors for their reform in every column

except one ; and that one is occupied by thedeclaration of the paper s kindly theater

critic, that the performance left him

"wondering what useful purpose the playwas intended to serve." The balance has tobe redressed by the more fashionable papers, which usually combine capable artcriticism with West End solecism on politics and sociology. It is very noteworthy,however, on comparing the press explosion


produced by Mrs. Warren s Profession in1902 with that produced by WidowersHouses about ten years earlier, that

whereas in 1892 the facts were franticallydenied and the persons of the drama floutedas monsters of wickedness, in 1902 the factsare admitted, and the characters recognized, though it is suggested that this is

exactly why no gentleman should mentionthem in public. Only one writer has ven

tured to imply this time that the povertymentioned by Mrs. Warren has since been

quietly relieved, and need not have been

dragged back to the footlights. I compliment him on his splendid mendacity, in

which he is unsupported, save by a little

plea in a theatrical paper which is innocent

enough to think that ten guineas a yearwith board and lodging is an impossiblylow wage for a barmaid. It goes on to cite

Mr. Charles Booth as having testified that

there are many laborers wives who are

happy and contented on eighteen shillingsa week. But I can go further than that

myself. I have seen an Oxford agricultural laborer s wife looking cheerful on

eight shillings a week; but that does not

console me for the fact that agriculture in

England is a ruined industry. If povertydoes not matter as long as it is contented,

then crime does not matter as long as it is

unscrupulous. The truth is that it is only


then that it docs matter most desperately.

Many persons are more comfortable whenthey are dirty than when they are clean ;but that does not recommend dirt as anational policy.

Here I must for the present break off

my arduous work of educating the press.We shall resume our studies later on; butjust now I am tired of playing the preceptor; and the eager thirst of my pupils forimprovement does not console me for theslowness of their progress. Besides, I mustreserve space to gratify my own vanity anddo justice to the six artists who acted myplay, by placing on record the hitherto un-chronicled success of the first representation. It is not often that an author, after

a couple of hours of those rare alterna

tions of excitement and intensely attentivesilence which only occur in the theater whenactors and audience are reacting on oneanother to the utmost, is able to step on the

stage and apply the strong word genius tothe representation with the certainty of

eliciting an instant and overwhelming assent from the audience. That was mygood fortune on the afternoon of Sunday,the fifth of January last. I was certainlyextremely fortunate in my interpreters inthe enterprise, and that not alone in re

spect of their artistic talent ; for had it notbeen for their superhuman patience, their

61


imperturbable good humor and good fel

lowship, there could have been no performance. The terror of the Censor s

power gave us trouble enough to break upany ordinary commercial enterprise. Managers promised and even engaged theirtheaters to us after the most explicit warn

ings that the play was unlicensed, and atthe last moment suddenly realized that Mr.Redford had their livelihoods in the hollowof his hand, and backed out. Over andover again the date and place were fixedand the tickets printed, only to be can

celed, until at last the desperate and overworked manager of the Stage Society could

only laugh, as criminals broken on the

wheel used to laugh at the second stroke.

We rehearsed under great difficulties.Christmas pieces and plays for the new

year were being prepared in all directions ;and my six actor colleagues were busypeople, with engagements in these pieces in

addition to their current professional work

every night. On several raw winter daysstages for rehearsal were unattainable even

by the most distinguished applicants; andwe shared corridors and saloons with themwhilst the stage was given over to children

in training for Boxing night. At last wehad to rehearse at an hour at which noactor or actress has been out of bed within

the memory of man ; and we sardonically


congratulated one another every morningon our rosy matutinal looks and the im

provement wrought by early rising in ourhealths and characters. And all this, pleaseobserve, for a society without treasury or

commercial prestige, for a play which was

being denounced in advance as unmentionable, for an author without influence atthe fashionable theaters ! I victoriously

challenge the West End managers to get asmuch done for interested motives, if theycan.

Three causes made the production themost notable that has fallen to my lot.First, the veto of the Censor, which put the

supporters of the play on their mettle.

Second, the chivalry of the Stage Society,which, in spite of my urgent advice to thecontrary, and my demonstration of thedifficulties, dangers, and expenses the en

terprise would cost, put my discouragements to shame and resolved to give battleat all costs to the attempt of the Censorshipto suppress the play. Third, the artistic

spirit of the actors, who made the playtheir own and carried it through triumphantly in spite of a series of disappointments and annoyances much more tryingto the dramatic temperament than meredifficulties.

The acting, too, required courage andcharacter as well as skill and intelligence.


The veto of the Censor introduced a quitenovel element of moral responsibility into

the undertaking. And the characters werevery unusual on the English stage. The

younger heroine is, like her mother, an

Englishwoman to the backbone, and not,like the heroines of our fashionable drama,a prima donna of Italian origin. Conse

quently she was sure to be denounced as unnatural and undramatic by the critics.The most vicious man in the play is not inthe least a stage villain : indeed, he regardshis own moral character with the sincere

complacency of a hero of melodrama. Theamiable devotee of romance and beauty isshown at an age which brings out thefutilization which these worships are apt to

produce if they are made the staple of lifeinstead of the sauce. The attitude of theclever young people to their elders is faith

fully presented as one of pitiless ridicule

and unsympathetic criticism, and forms a

spectacle incredible to those who, when

young, were not cleverer than their nearest

elders, and painful to those sentimental

parents who shrink from the cruelty of

youth, which pardons nothing because it

knows nothing. In short, the charactersand their relations are of a kind that theroutineer critic has not yet learned to

place ; so that their misunderstanding was a

foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, there

64


was no hesitation behind the curtain. Whenit went up at last, a stage much too smallfor the company was revealed to an auditorium much too small for the audience.But the players, though it was impossiblefor them to forget their own discomfort,at once made the spectators forget theirs.

It certainly was a model audience, responsive from the first line to the last; and it

got no less than it deserved in return.

I grieve to have to add that the second

performance, given for the edification of

the London press and of those members ofthe Stage Society who cannot attend the

Sunday performances, was a less inspiritingone than the first. A solid phalanx oftheater-weary journalists in an afternoon

humor, most of them committed to irrecon

cilable disparagement of problem plays,and all of them bound by etiquette to be as

undemonstrative as possible, is not exactlythe sort of audience that rises at the performers and cures them of the inevitable

reaction after an excitingly successful first

night. The artist nature is a sensitive andtherefore a vindictive one; and masterful

players have a way with recalcitrantaudiences of rubbing a play into them in

stead of delighting them with it. I should

describe the second performance of Mrs.

Warren s Profession, especially as to itsearlier stages, as decidedly a rubbed-in one.

65


The rubbing was no doubt salutary ; but itmust have hurt some of the thinner skins.The charm of the lighter passages fled;and the strong scenes, though they againcarried everything before them, yet dis

charged that duty in a grim fashion, doingexecution on the enemy rather than movingthem to repentance and confession. Still,to those who had not seen the first performance, the effect was sufficiently impressive;and they had the advantage of witnessinga fresh development in Mrs. Warren, who,

artistically jealous, as I took it, of the over

whelming effect of the end of the secondact on the previous day, threw herself into

the fourth act in quite a new way, andachieved the apparently impossible feat of

surpassing herself. The compliments paidto Miss Fanny Brough by the critics,eulogistic as they are, are the complimentsof men three-fourths duped as Partridgewas duped by Garrick. By much of heracting they were so completely taken in

that they did not recognize it as acting at

all. Indeed, none of the six players quite

escaped this consequence of their own

thoroughness. There was a distinct tend

ency among the less experienced critics to

complain of their sentiments and behavior.

Naturally, the author does not share that

grievance.

Pigcard s Cottage, January, 1902.

66

PR

5363M73C6

cop. 2

Shaw, George BernardThe author s apology

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE

CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

the author's apology from mrs. warren's profession. with an ......the"authorsapology"whichhe...

Documents