Mrs. Warrens Profession | Page 3

issued by
the Women's Industrial Council [Home Industries of Women in
London, 1897, 1s., 12 Buckingham Street, W. C.]; and ask yourself
whether, if the lot in life therein described were your lot in life, you
would not prefer the lot of Cleopatra, of Theodora, of the Lady of the
Camellias, of Mrs Tanqueray, of Zaza, of Iris. If you can go deep
enough into things to be able to say no, how many ignorant half-starved
girls will believe you are speaking sincerely? To them the lot of Iris is
heavenly in comparison with their own. Yet our King, like his
predecessors, says to the dramatist, "Thus, and thus only, shall you
present Mrs Warren's profession on the stage, or you shall starve.
Witness Shaw, who told the untempting truth about it, and whom We,
by the Grace of God, accordingly disallow and suppress, and do what
in Us lies to silence." Fortunately, Shaw cannot be silenced. "The
harlot's cry from street to street" is louder than the voices of all the

kings. I am not dependent on the theatre, and cannot be starved into
making my play a 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 by many earnest men and women who consider Mrs
Warren's Profession an excellent sermon. Mr Pinero is in no way bound
to suppress the fact that his Iris is a person to be envied by millions of
better women. If he made his play false to life by inventing fictitious
disadvantages for her, he would be acting as unscrupulously as any
tract writer. If society chooses to provide for its Irises better than for its
working women, it must not expect honest playwrights to manufacture
spurious evidence to save its credit. The mischief lies in the deliberate
suppression of the other side of the case: the refusal to allow Mrs
Warren to expose the drudgery and repulsiveness of plying for hire
among coarse, tedious drunkards; the determination not to let the
Parisian girl in Brieux's Les Avaries come on the stage and drive into
people's minds what her diseases mean for her and for themselves. All
that, says the King's Reader in effect, is horrifying, loathsome.
Precisely: what does he expect it to be? would he have us represent it as
beautiful and gratifying? The answer to this question, I fear, must be a
blunt Yes; for it seems 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 side of it is kept towards the
public, and softened 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 at once as not merely disgusting, but, if you please,
unnecessary.
Everybody will, I hope, admit that this state of things is intolerable; that
the subject of Mrs Warren's profession must be either tapu altogether,
or else exhibited with the warning side as freely displayed as the
tempting side. But many persons will vote for a complete tapu, and an

impartial sweep from the boards of Mrs Warren and Gretchen and the
rest; in short, for banishing the sexual instincts from the stage
altogether. Those who think this impossible can hardly have considered
the number and importance of the subjects which are actually banished
from the stage. Many plays, among them Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth,
Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, have no sex complications: the thread of
their action can be followed by children who could not understand a
single scene of Mrs Warren's Profession or Iris. None of our plays
rouse the sympathy of the audience by an exhibition of the pains of
maternity, as Chinese plays constantly do. Each nation has its own
particular set of tapus in addition to the common human stock; and
though each of these tapus limits the scope of the dramatist, it does not
make drama impossible. If the Examiner 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 entertaining play with only one woman in it,
and she is quite heartwhole; and I could just as easily write a play
without a woman in it at all. I will even go so far as to promise the Mr
Redford my support if he will introduce this limitation for