Mrs. Warrens Profession | Page 4

part of the
year, say during Lent, so as to make a close season for that dullest of
stock dramatic subjects, adultery, and force our managers and authors
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 on the stage as lunatics or dipsomaniacs. Hector is the world's
hero; not Paris nor Antony.
But though I do not question the possibility of a drama in which love
should be as effectively ignored as cholera is at present, there is not the
slightest chance of that way out of the difficulty being taken by the Mr
Redford. If he attempted it there would be a revolt in which he would
be swept away in spite of my singlehanded efforts to defend him. A
complete tapu is politically impossible. A complete toleration is equally
impossible to Mr Redford, because his occupation would be gone if
there were no tapu to enforce. He is therefore compelled to maintain the
present compromise of a partial tapu, applied, to the best of his
judgement, 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 stand no nonsense from them. But I
cannot admit that the class represented by Eschylus, Sophocles,
Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen, and Tolstoy, not to
mention our own contemporary playwrights, is as much in place in Mr
Redford's office as a pickpocket is in Bow Street. Further, it is not true
that the Censorship, though it certainly suppresses Ibsen and Tolstoy,
and would suppress Shakespear but for the absurd rule that a play once
licensed is always licensed (so that Wycherly is permitted and Shelley
prohibited), also suppresses unscrupulous playwrights. I challenge Mr
Redford to mention any extremity of sexual misconduct 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 compromise, in fact, works out in practice in favor of loose plays
as against earnest ones.
To carry conviction on this point, I will take the extreme course of
narrating the plots of two plays witnessed within the last ten years by
myself at London West End theatres, one licensed by the late Queen
Victoria's Reader of Plays, the other by the present Reader to the King.
Both plots conform to the strictest rules of the period when La Dame
aux Camellias was still a forbidden play, and when The Second Mrs
Tanqueray would have been tolerated only on condition that she
carefully explained to the audience that when she met Captain Ardale
she sinned "but in intention."
Play number one. A prince is compelled by 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 has taken
place that day; and the closed door of 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 is to escape from a
marriage which is hateful to him. An idea strikes him. He will assault
the duenna, and get ignominiously expelled from the palace by his
indignant father-in-law. To his horror, when he proceeds to carry out

this stratagem, the duenna, far from raising an alarm, is flattered,
delighted, and compliant. The assaulter becomes the assaulted. He
flings her angrily to the ground, where she remains placidly. He flies.
The father enters; dismisses the duenna; and listens at the keyhole of
his daughter's nuptial chamber, 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 astonishment 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 officer finds himself in an inn with a
French lady who has wounded his national vanity. He resolves 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 help and finds none at hand, runs screaming from side to side,
and, after a harrowing scene, is overpowered and faints. Nothing
further being possible on