Mrs. Warrens Profession | Page 9

in this
way, finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle's suggested painting of
parliament sitting without its clothes.
I now come to those critics who, intellectually baffled by the problem
in Mrs Warren's Profession, have made a virtue of running away from
it. I will illustrate their method by quotation from Dickens, taken from
the fifth chapter of Our Mutual Friend:
"Hem!" began Wegg. "This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of
the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off----" here he looked hard at
the book, and stopped.
"What's the matter, Wegg?"
"Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir," said Wegg with an air
of insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book),
"that you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set
you right in; only something put it out of my head. I think you said
Rooshan Empire, sir?"
"It is Rooshan; ain't it, Wegg?"
"No, sir. Roman. Roman."
"What's the difference, Wegg?"
"The difference, sir?" Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking
down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. "The difference, sir?

There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe, that
the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs
Boffin does not honor us with her company. In Mrs Boffin's presence,
sir, we had better drop it."
Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air,
and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy, "In
Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it!" turned the
disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a
very painful manner.
I am willing to let Mr Wegg drop it on these terms, provided I am
allowed to mention here that Mrs Warren's Profession is a play for
women; that it was written for women; that it has been performed and
produced mainly through the determination of women that it should be
performed and produced; that the enthusiasm of women made its first
performance excitingly successful; and that not one of these women
had any inducement to support it except their belief in the timeliness
and the power of the lesson the play teaches. Those who were
"surprised to see ladies present" were men; and when they proceeded to
explain that the journals they represented could not possibly demoralize
the public by describing such a play, their editors cruelly devoted the
space saved by their delicacy to an elaborate and respectful account of
the progress of a young lord's attempt to break the bank at Monte Carlo.
A few days sooner Mrs Warren would have been crowded out of their
papers by an exceptionally abominable police case. I do not suggest
that the police case should have been suppressed; but neither do I
believe that regard for public morality had anything to do with their
failure to grapple with the performance by the Stage Society. And, after
all, there was no need to fall back on Silas Wegg's subterfuge. Several
critics saved the faces of their papers easily enough by the simple
expedient of saying all they had to say in the tone of a shocked
governess lecturing a naughty child. To them I might plead, in Mrs
Warren's words, "Well, it's only good manners to be ashamed, dearie;"
but it surprises me, recollecting as I do the effect produced by Miss
Fanny Brough's delivery of that line, that gentlemen who shivered like
violets in a zephyr as it swept through them, should so completely miss

the full width of its application as to go home and straightway make a
public exhibition of mock modesty.
My old Independent Theatre manager, Mr Grein, besides that reproach
to me for shattering his ideals, complains that Mrs Warren is not
wicked enough, and names several romancers who would have clothed
her black soul with all the terrors of tragedy. I have no doubt they
would; but if you please, my dear Grein, that is just what I did not want
to do. Nothing would please our sanctimonious British public more
than to throw the whole guilt of Mrs Warren's profession on Mrs
Warren herself. Now the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on
the British public itself. You may remember that when you produced
my first play, Widowers' Houses, exactly the same misunderstanding
arose. When the virtuous young gentleman rose up in wrath against the
slum landlord, the slum landlord very effectively shewed him that
slums are the product, not of individual Harpagons, but of the
indifference of virtuous young gentlemen to the condition of the city
they live in, provided they live at the west end of it on money earned by
someone else's