Overruled | Page 3

to live in sin. Sentimental
controversies on the subject are endless; but they are useless, because
nobody tells the truth. Rousseau did it by an extraordinary effort, aided
by a superhuman faculty for human natural history, but the result was
curiously disconcerting because, though the facts were so
conventionally shocking that people felt that they ought to matter a
great deal, they actually mattered very little. And even at that
everybody pretends not to believe him.
ARTIFICIAL RETRIBUTION.
The worst of that is that busybodies with perhaps rather more than a
normal taste for mischief are continually trying to make negligible
things matter as much in fact as they do in convention by deliberately
inflicting injuries--sometimes atrocious injuries--on the parties
concerned. Few people have any knowledge of the savage punishments
that are legally inflicted for aberrations and absurdities to which no
sanely instructed community would call any attention. We create an
artificial morality, and consequently an artificial conscience, by
manufacturing disastrous consequences for events which, left to
themselves, would do very little harm (sometimes not any) and be
forgotten in a few days.

But the artificial morality is not therefore to be condemned offhand. In
many cases it may save mischief instead of making it: for example,
though the hanging of a murderer is the duplication of a murder, yet it
may be less murderous than leaving the matter to be settled by blood
feud or vendetta. As long as human nature insists on revenge, the
official organization and satisfaction of revenge by the State may be
also its minimization. The mischief begins when the official revenge
persists after the passion it satisfies has died out of the race. Stoning a
woman to death in the east because she has ventured to marry again
after being deserted by her husband may be more merciful than
allowing her to be mobbed to death; but the official stoning or burning
of an adulteress in the west would be an atrocity because few of us hate
an adulteress to the extent of desiring such a penalty, or of being
prepared to take the law into our own hands if it were withheld. Now
what applies to this extreme case applies also in due degree to the other
cases. Offences in which sex is concerned are often needlessly
magnified by penalties, ranging from various forms of social ostracism
to long sentences of penal servitude, which would be seen to be
monstrously disproportionate to the real feeling against them if the
removal of both the penalties and the taboo on their discussion made it
possible for us to ascertain their real prevalence and estimation.
Fortunately there is one outlet for the truth. We are permitted to discuss
in jest what we may not discuss in earnest. A serious comedy about sex
is taboo: a farcical comedy is privileged.
THE FAVORITE SUBJECT OF FARCICAL COMEDY.
The little piece which follows this preface accordingly takes the form
of a farcical comedy, because it is a contribution to the very extensive
dramatic literature which takes as its special department the gallantries
of married people. The stage has been preoccupied by such affairs for
centuries, not only in the jesting vein of Restoration Comedy and Palais
Royal farce, but in the more tragically turned adulteries of the Parisian
school which dominated the stage until Ibsen put them out of
countenance and relegated them to their proper place as articles of
commerce. Their continued vogue in that department maintains the
tradition that adultery is the dramatic subject par excellence, and indeed

that a play that is not about adultery is not a play at all. I was
considered a heresiarch of the most extravagant kind when I expressed
my opinion at the outset of my career as a playwright, that adultery is
the dullest of themes on the stage, and that from Francesca and Paolo
down to the latest guilty couple of the school of Dumas fils, the
romantic adulterers have all been intolerable bores.
THE PSEUDO SEX PLAY.
Later on, I had occasion to point out to the defenders of sex as the
proper theme of drama, that though they were right in ranking sex as an
intensely interesting subject, they were wrong in assuming that sex is
an indispensable motive in popular plays. The plays of Moliere are, like
the novels of the Victorian epoch or Don Quixote, as nearly sexless as
anything not absolutely inhuman can be; and some of Shakespear's
plays are sexually on a par with the census: they contain women as well
as men, and that is all. This had to be admitted; but it was still assumed
that the plays of the XIX century Parisian school are, in contrast with
the sexless masterpieces, saturated with sex; and this I strenuously
denied. A play about the