Mrs. Warrens Profession | Page 7

Censorship reminds me that I have to apologize to
those who went to the recent performance of Mrs Warren's Profession
expecting to find it what I have just called an aphrodisiac. That was not
my fault; it was Mr Redford's. After the specimens I have given of 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 indeed. Accordingly, I find one critic so explicit as
to the nature of his disappointment as to say candidly that "such airy
talk 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 I crushed between the upper millstone of the
Mr Redford, who thinks me a libertine, and the nether 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
indignant with me. They revile me as lacking in passion, in feeling, in
manhood. Some of them even sum the matter up by denying me any
dramatic power: a melancholy betrayal of what dramatic power has
come to mean on our stage under the Censorship! Can I be expected to

refrain from laughing at the spectacle of a number of respectable
gentlemen lamenting because a playwright lures them to the theatre by
a promise to excite their senses in a very special and sensational
manner, and then, having successfully trapped them in exceptional
numbers, proceeds to ignore their senses and ruthlessly improve their
minds? But I protest again that the lure was not mine. The play had
been in print for four years; and I have spared no pains to make known
that my plays are built to induce, not voluptuous reverie but intellectual
interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane concern. Accordingly, I do
not find those critics who are gifted with intellectual appetite and
political conscience complaining of want of dramatic power. Rather do
they protest, not altogether unjustly, against a few relapses into
staginess and caricature which betray the young playwright 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 always disappoint them. The drama can
do little to delight the senses: all the apparent instances to the contrary
are instances of the personal fascination of the performers. The drama
of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been
conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts
seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet 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 public of this.
The voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod's Faust and Bizet's Carmen
has captured the common playgoer; and there is, flatly, no future now
for any drama without music except the drama of thought. The attempt
to produce a genus of opera without music (and this absurdity is what
our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time without
knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept
problem as the normal materiel of the drama.
That this determination will throw me into a long conflict with our
theatre critics, and with the few playgoers who go to the theatre as
often as the critics, I well know; but I am too well equipped for the
strife to be deterred by it, or to bear malice towards the losing side. In

trying to produce the sensuous effects of opera, the fashionable drama
has become so flaccid in its sentimentality, and the intellect of its
frequenters so atrophied by disuse, that the reintroduction of problem,
with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact, inevitably
produces at first an overwhelming impression of coldness and inhuman
rationalism. But this will soon pass away. When the intellectual muscle
and moral nerve 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 the camera to
nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's
will and 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, sentimentally diluted, is shewn in conflict, not