Mrs. Warrens Profession | Page 2

fair." Nor am I prepared to accept the verdict
of the medical gentlemen who would compulsorily sanitate and register
Mrs Warren, whilst leaving Mrs Warren's patrons, especially her
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 and the
Salvation Army. And the sterner moralists the members of the
committee were, the better.
Some of the journalists I have shocked reason so unripely that they will

gather nothing from this but a confused notion that I am accusing the
National Vigilance Association and the Salvation Army of complicity
in my own scandalous immorality. It will seem to them that people who
would stand this play would stand anything. They are quite mistaken.
Such an audience as I have described would be revolted by many of our
fashionable plays. They would leave the theatre convinced that the
Plymouth Brother who still regards the playhouse as one of the gates of
hell is perhaps the safest adviser on the subject of which he knows so
little. If I do not draw the same conclusion, it is not because I am one of
those who claim that art is exempt from moral obligations, and deny
that the writing or performance of a play is a moral act, to be treated on
exactly the 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 instrument of moral propaganda
in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I
waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it
works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible
and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom
real life means nothing. I have pointed out again and again that the
influence of the theatre in England is growing so great that whilst
private conduct, religion, law, science, politics, and morals are
becoming more and more theatrical, the theatre itself remains
impervious to common sense, religion, science, politics, and morals.
That is why I fight the theatre, not with pamphlets and sermons and
treatises, but with plays; and so effective do I find the dramatic method
that I have no doubt I shall at last persuade even London to take its
conscience and its brains with it when it goes to the theatre, instead of
leaving them at home with its prayer-book as it does at present.
Consequently, I am the last man in the world to deny that if the net
effect of performing 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
theatre. Nothing 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

only when they are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, 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 passed on to be "redeemed" by old and faithful lovers
who have adored them in spite of their levities. Naturally, the poorer
girls in 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 if these purely official
catastrophes carried any conviction, the majority of English girls
remain so poor, so dependent, so well aware that the drudgeries of such
honest work as is within their reach are likely enough to lead them
eventually to lung disease, premature death, and domestic desertion or
brutality, that they would still see reason to prefer the primrose path to
the strait path of virtue, since both, vice at worst and virtue at best, lead
to the same end in poverty and overwork. It is true that the Board
School mistress will tell you that only girls of a certain kind will reason
in this way. But alas! that certain kind turns out on inquiry to be simply
the pretty, dainty kind: that is, the only kind that gets the chance of
acting on such reasoning. Read the first report of the Commission on
the Housing of the Working Classes [Bluebook C 4402, 8d., 1889];
read the Report on Home Industries (sacred word, Home!)