How He Lied to Her Husband | Page 4

have taken both, and got an original play out of
them, as anybody else can if only he will look about him for his
material instead of plagiarizing Othello and the thousand plays that
have proceeded on Othello's romantic assumptions and false point of
honor.
A further experiment made by Mr Arnold Daly with this play is worth
recording. In 1905 Mr Daly produced Mrs Warren's Profession in New
York. The press of that city instantly raised a cry that such persons as
Mrs Warren are "ordure," and should not be mentioned in the presence
of decent people. This hideous repudiation of humanity and social
conscience so took possession of the New York journalists that the few
among them who kept their feet morally and intellectually could do
nothing to check the epidemic of foul language, gross suggestion, and
raving obscenity of word and thought that broke out. The writers
abandoned all self-restraint under the impression that they were
upholding virtue instead of outraging it. They infected each other with
their hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently mad.
They finally forced the police to arrest Mr Daly and his company, and
led the magistrate to express his loathing of the duty thus forced upon
him of reading an unmentionable and abominable play. Of course the
convulsion soon exhausted itself. The magistrate, naturally somewhat
impatient when he found that what he had to read was a strenuously
ethical play forming part of a book which had been in circulation
unchallenged for eight years, and had been received without protest by
the whole London and New York press, gave the journalists a piece of
his mind as to their moral taste in plays. By consent, he passed the case
on to a higher court, which declared that the play was not immoral;
acquitted Mr Daly; and made an end of the attempt to use the law to
declare living women to be "ordure," and thus enforce silence as to the
far-reaching fact that you cannot cheapen women in the market for
industrial purposes without cheapening them for other purposes as well.
I hope Mrs Warren's Profession will be played everywhere, in season

and out of season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the public
conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a tariff to keep
up the price of every American commodity except American manhood
and womanhood.
Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of those
who direct public attention to the profits of the sweater or the pleasures
of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side by side with me.
Months elapsed before the decision of the courts vindicated him; and
even then, since his vindication implied the condemnation of the press,
which was by that time sober again, and ashamed of its orgy, his
triumph received a rather sulky and grudging publicity. In the
meantime he had hardly been able to approach an American city,
including even those cities which had heaped applause on him as the
defender of hearth and home when he produced Candida, without
having to face articles discussing whether mothers could allow their
daughters to attend such plays as You Never Can Tell, written by the
infamous author of Mrs Warren's Profession, and acted by the monster
who produced it. What made this harder to bear was that though no fact
is better established in theatrical business than the financial
disastrousness of moral discredit, the journalists who had done all the
mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it is enormously
popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly, being exploiters of vice,
must therefore be making colossal fortunes out of the abuse heaped on
us, and had in fact provoked it and welcomed it with that express object.
Ignorance of real life could hardly go further.
One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his financial
engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he not accepted
engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville theatres [the
American equivalent of our music halls], where he played How He
Lied to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the press
censorship of the theatre, or by that sophistication of the audience
through press suggestion from which I suffer more, perhaps, than any
other author. Vaudeville authors are fortunately unknown: the
audiences see what the play contains and what the actor can do, not
what the papers have told them to expect. Success under such
circumstances had a value both for Mr Daly and myself which did
something to console us for the very unsavory mobbing which the New

York press organized for us, and which was not the less disgusting
because we suffered in a good cause and in the very best company.
Mr Daly, having