THE LIMITS TO TOLERATION

But the large toleration these considerations dictate has limits.
For example, though we tolerate, and rightly tolerate, the
propaganda of Anarchism as a political theory which embraces all
that is valuable in the doctrine of Laisser-Faire and the method
of Free Trade as well as all that is shocking in the views of
Bakounine, we clearly cannot, or at all events will not, tolerate
assassination of rulers on the ground that it is "propaganda
by deed" or sociological experiment. A play inciting to such an
assassination cannot claim the privileges of heresy or
immorality, because no case can be made out in support of
assassination as an indispensable instrument of progress. Now it
happens that we have in the Julius Caesar of Shakespear a play
which the Tsar of Russia or the Governor-General of India would
hardly care to see performed in their capitals just now. It is an
artistic treasure; but it glorifies a murder which Goethe
described as the silliest crime ever committed. It may quite
possibly have helped the regicides of 1649 to see themselves, as
it certainly helped generations of Whig statesmen to see them, in
a heroic light; and it unquestionably  vindicates and ennobles a
conspirator who assassinated the head of the Roman State not
because he abused his position but solely because he occupied it,
thus affirming the extreme republican principle that all kings,
good or bad, should be killed because kingship and freedom cannot
live together. Under certain circumstances this vindication and
ennoblement might act as an incitement to an actual assassination
as well as to Plutarchian republicanism; for it is one thing to
advocate republicanism or royalism: it is quite another to make a
hero of Brutus or Ravaillac, or a heroine of Charlotte Corday.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems
hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
The very people who would have scouted the notion of prohibiting
the performances of Julius Caesar at His Majesty's Theatre in
London last year, might now entertain very seriously a proposal
to exclude Indians from them, and to suppress the play completely
in Calcutta and Dublin; for if the assassin of Caesar was a hero,
why not the assassins of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Presidents
Lincoln and McKinley, and Sir Curzon Wyllie? Here is a strong
case for some constitutional means of preventing the performance
of a play. True, it is an equally strong case for preventing the
circulation of the Bible, which was always in the hands of our
regicides; but as the Roman Catholic Church does not hesitate to
accept that consequence of the censorial principle, it does not
invalidate the argument.

Take another actual case. A modern comedy, Arms and The Man,
though not a comedy of politics, is nevertheless so far
historical that it reveals the unacknowledged fact that as the
Servo-Bulgarian War of 1885 was much more than a struggle between
the Servians and Bulgarians, the troops engaged were officered by
two European Powers of the first magnitude. In consequence,
the performance of the play was for some time forbidden in
Vienna, and more recently it gave offence in Rome at a moment
when popular feeling was excited as to the relations of Austria
with the Balkan States. Now if a comedy so remote from political
passion as Arms and The Man can, merely because it refers to
political facts, become so inconvenient and inopportune that
Foreign Offices take the trouble to have its production
postponed, what may not be the effect of what is called a
patriotic drama produced at a moment when the balance is
quivering between peace and war? Is there not something to be
said for a political censorship, if not for a moral one? May not
those continental governments who leave the stage practically
free in every other respect, but muzzle it politically, be
justified by the practical exigencies of the situation?


THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LAW AND CENSORSHIP

The answer is that a pamphlet, a newspaper article, or a
resolution moved at a political meeting can do all the mischief
that a play can, and often more; yet we do not set up a permanent
censorship of the press or of political meetings. Any journalist
may publish an article, any demagogue may deliver a speech
without giving notice to the government or obtaining its licence.
The risk of such freedom is great; but as it is the price of our
political liberty, we think it worth paying. We may abrogate
it in emergencies by a Coercion Act, a suspension of the Habeas
Corpus Act, or a proclamation of martial law, just as we stop the
traffic in a street during a fire, or shoot thieves at sight if
they loot after an earthquake. But when the emergency is past,
liberty is restored everywhere except in the theatre. The Act of
1843 is a permanent Coercion Act for the theatre, a permanent
suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act as far as plays are
concerned, a permanent proclamation of martial law with a single
official substituted for a court martial. It is, in fact, assumed
that actors, playwrights, and theatre managers are dangerous and
dissolute characters whose existence creates a chronic state of
emergency, and who must be treated as earthquake looters are
treated. It is not necessary now to discredit this assumption. It
was broken down by the late Sir Henry Irving when he finally
shamed the Government into extending to his profession the
official recognition enjoyed by the other branches of fine art.
To-day we have on the roll of knighthood actors, authors, and
managers. The rogue and vagabond theory of the depravity of the
theatre is as dead officially as it is in general society; and
with it has perished the sole excuse for the Act of 1843 and
for the denial to the theatre of the liberties secured, at
far greater social risk, to the press and the platform.

There is no question here of giving the theatre any larger
liberties than the press and the platform, or of claiming larger
powers for Shakespear to eulogize Brutus than Lord Rosebery has
to eulogize Cromwell. The abolition of the censorship does not
involve the abolition of the magistrate and of the whole civil
and criminal code. On the contrary it would make the theatre more
effectually subject to them than it is at present; for once
a play now runs the gauntlet of the censorship, it is
practically placed above the law. It is almost humiliating
to have to demonstrate the essential difference between a censor
and a magistrate or a sanitary inspector; but it is impossible to
ignore the carelessness with which even distinguished critics of
the theatre assume that all the arguments proper to the support
of a magistracy and body of jurisprudence apply equally to a
censorship.

A magistrate has laws to administer: a censor has nothing but his
own opinion. A judge leaves the question of guilt to the jury:
the Censor is jury and judge as well as lawgiver. A magistrate
may be strongly prejudiced against an atheist or an anti-
vaccinator, just as a sanitary inspector may have formed a
careful opinion that drains are less healthy than cesspools; but
the magistrate must allow the atheist to affirm instead of to
swear, and must grant the anti-vaccinator an exemption
certificate, when their demands are lawfully made; and in cities
the inspector must compel the builder to make drains and must
prosecute him if he makes cesspools. The law may be only the
intolerance of the community; but it is a defined and limited
intolerance. The limitation is sometimes carried so far that a
judge cannot inflict the penalty for housebreaking on a burglar
who can prove that he found the door open and therefore made only
an unlawful entry. On the other hand, it is sometimes so vague,
as for example in the case of the American law against obscenity,
that it makes the magistrate virtually a censor. But in the main
a citizen can ascertain what he may do and what he may not do;
and, though no one knows better than a magistrate that a single
ill-conducted family may demoralize a whole street, no magistrate
can imprison or otherwise restrain its members on the ground that
their immorality may corrupt their neighbors. He can prevent any
citizen from carrying certain specified weapons, but not from
handling pokers, table-knives, bricks or bottles of corrosive
fluid, on the ground that he might use them to commit murder or
inflict malicious injury. He has no general power to prevent
citizens from selling unhealthy or poisonous substances, or
judging for themselves what substances are unhealthy and what
wholesome, what poisonous and what innocuous: what he CAN do is
to prevent anybody who has not a specific qualification from
selling certain specified poisons of which a schedule is kept.
Nobody is forbidden to sell minerals without a licence; but
everybody is forbidden to sell silver without a licence. When the
law has forgotten some atrocious sin--for instance, contracting
marriage whilst suffering from contagious disease--the magistrate
cannot arrest or punish the wrongdoer, however he may abhor his
wickedness. In short, no man is lawfully at the mercy of the
magistrate's personal caprice, prejudice, ignorance,
superstition, temper, stupidity, resentment, timidity, ambition,
or private conviction. But a playwright's livelihood, his
reputation, and his inspiration and mission are at the personal
mercy of the Censor. The two do not stand, as the criminal and
the judge stand, in the presence of a law that binds them both
equally, and was made by neither of them, but by the
deliberative collective wisdom of the community. The only law
that affects them is the Act of 1843, which empowers one of them
to do absolutely and finally what he likes with the other's work.
And when it is remembered that the slave in this case is the man
whose profession is that of Eschylus and Euripides, of Shakespear
and Goethe, of Tolstoy and Ibsen, and the master the holder of a
party appointment which by the nature of its duties practically
excludes the possibility of its acceptance by a serious statesman
or great lawyer, it will be seen that the playwrights are
justified in reproaching the framers of that Act for having
failed not only to appreciate the immense importance of the
theatre as a most powerful instrument for teaching the nation how
and what to think and feel, but even to conceive that those who
make their living by the theatre are normal human beings with
the common rights of English citizens. In this extremity of
inconsiderateness it is not surprising that they also did not
trouble themselves to study the difference between a censor and a
magistrate. And it will be found that almost all the people who
disinterestedly defend the censorship today are defending him on
the assumption that there is no constitutional difference between
him and any other functionary whose duty it is to restrain
crime and disorder.

One further difference remains to be noted. As a magistrate grows
old his mind may change or decay; but the law remains the same.
The censorship of the theatre fluctuates with every change in the
views and character of the man who exercises it. And what this
implies can only be appreciated by those who can imagine what the
effect on the mind must be of the duty of reading through every
play that is produced in the kingdom year in, year out.


WHY THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN?

What may be called the high political case against censorship as
a principle is now complete. The pleadings are those which have
already freed books and pulpits and political platforms in
England from censorship, if not from occasional legal
persecution. The stage alone remains under a censorship of a
grotesquely unsuitable kind. No play can be performed if the Lord
Chamberlain happens to disapprove of it. And the Lord
Chamberlain's functions have no sort of relationship to
dramatic literature. A great judge of literature, a farseeing
statesman, a born champion of liberty of conscience and
intellectual integrity--say a Milton, a Chesterfield, a Bentham--
would be a very bad Lord Chamberlain: so bad, in fact, that his
exclusion from such a post may be regarded as decreed by natural
law. On the other hand, a good Lord Chamberlain would be a
stickler for morals in the narrowest sense, a busy-body, a man to
whom a matter of two inches in the length of a gentleman's sword
or the absence of a feather from a lady's head-dress would be a
graver matter than the Habeas Corpus Act. The Lord Chamberlain,
as Censor of the theatre, is a direct descendant of the King's
Master of the Revels, appointed in 1544 by Henry VIII. To keep
order among the players and musicians of that day when they
performed at Court. This first appearance of the theatrical
censor in politics as the whipper-in of the player, with its
conception of the player as a rich man's servant hired to amuse
him, and, outside his professional duties, as a gay, disorderly,
anarchic spoilt child, half privileged, half outlawed, probably
as much vagabond as actor, is the real foundation of the
subjection of the whole profession, actors, managers, authors
and all, to the despotic authority of an officer whose business
it is to preserve decorum among menials. It must be remembered
that it was not until a hundred years later, in the reaction
against the Puritans, that a woman could appear on the English
stage without being pelted off as the Italian actresses were. The
theatrical profession was regarded as a shameless one; and it is
only of late years that actresses have at last succeeded in
living down the assumption that actress and prostitute are
synonymous terms, and made good their position in respectable
society. This makes the survival of the old ostracism in the Act
of 1843 intolerably galling; and though it explains the
apparently unaccountable absurdity of choosing as Censor of
dramatic literature an official whose functions and
qualifications have nothing whatever to do with literature, it
also explains why the present arrangement is not only criticized
as an institution, but resented as an insult.


THE DIPLOMATIC OBJECTION TO THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN

There is another reason, quite unconnected with the
Susceptibilities of authors, which makes it undesirable that a
member of the King's Household should be responsible for the
character and tendency of plays. The drama, dealing with all
departments of human life, is necessarily political. Recent
events have shown--what indeed needed no demonstration--that it
is impossible to prevent inferences being made, both at home and
abroad, from the action of the Lord Chamberlain. The most talked-
about play of the present year (1909), An Englishman's Home, has
for its main interest an invasion of England by a fictitious
power which is understood, as it is meant to be understood, to
represent Germany. The lesson taught by the play is the danger of
invasion and the need for every English citizen to be a soldier.
The Lord Chamberlain licensed this play, but refused to license a
parody of it. Shortly afterwards he refused to license another
play in which the fear of a German invasion was ridiculed. The
German press drew the inevitable inference that the Lord
Chamberlain was an anti-German alarmist, and that his opinions
were a reflection of those prevailing in St. James's Palace.
Immediately after this, the Lord Chamberlain licensed the play.
Whether the inference, as far as the Lord Chamberlain was
concerned, was justified, is of no consequence. What is important
is that it was sure to be made, justly or unjustly, and extended
from the Lord Chamberlain to the Throne.


THE OBJECTION OF COURT ETIQUET

There is another objection to the Lord Chamberlain's censorship
which affects the author's choice of subject. Formerly very
little heed was given in England to the susceptibilities of
foreign courts. For instance, the notion that the Mikado of Japan
should be as sacred to the English playwright as he is to the
Japanese Lord Chamberlain would have seemed grotesque a
generation ago. Now that the maintenance of entente cordiale
between nations is one of the most prominent and most useful
functions of the crown, the freedom of authors to deal with
political subjects, even historically, is seriously
threatened by the way in which the censorship makes the King
responsible for the contents of every play. One author--the
writer of these lines, in fact--has long desired to dramatize the
life of Mahomet. But the possibility of a protest from the
Turkish Ambassador--or the fear of it--causing the Lord
Chamberlain to refuse to license such a play has prevented the
play from being written. Now, if the censorship were abolished,
nobody but the author could be held responsible for the play.
The Turkish Ambassador does not now protest against the
publication of Carlyle's essay on the prophet, or of the English
translations of the Koran in the prefaces to which Mahomet is
criticized as an impostor, or of the older books in which he is
reviled as Mahound and classed with the devil himself. But if
these publications had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain it
would be impossible for the King to allow the licence to be
issued, as he would thereby be made responsible for the opinions
expressed. This restriction of the historical drama is an
unmixed evil. Great religious leaders are more interesting
and more important subjects for the dramatist than great
conquerors. It is a misfortune that public opinion would not
tolerate a dramatization of Mahomet in Constantinople. But to
prohibit it here, where public opinion would tolerate it, is an
absurdity which, if applied in all directions, would make it
impossible for the Queen to receive a Turkish ambassador without
veiling herself, or the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's to display
a cross on the summit of their Cathedral in a city occupied
largely and influentially by Jews. Court etiquet is no doubt an
excellent thing for court ceremonies; but to attempt to impose it
on the drama is about as sensible as an attempt to make everybody
in London wear court dress.


WHY NOT AN ENLIGHTENED CENSORSHIP?

In the above cases the general question of censorship is
separable from the question of the present form of it. Every one
who condemns the principle of censorship must also condemn the
Lord Chamberlain's control of the drama; but those who approve of
the principle do not necessarily approve of the Lord Chamberlain
being the Censor ex officio. They may, however, be entirely
opposed to popular liberties, and may conclude from what has been
said, not that the stage should be made as free as the church,
press, or platform, but that these institutions should be
censored as strictly as the stage. It will seem obvious to them
that nothing is needed to remove all objections to a censorship
except the placing of its powers in better hands.

Now though the transfer of the censorship to, say, the Lord
Chancellor, or the Primate, or a Cabinet Minister, would be much
less humiliating to the persons immediately concerned, the
inherent vices of the institution would not be appreciably less
disastrous. They would even be aggravated, for reasons which do
not appear on the surface, and therefore need to be followed with
some attention.

It is often said that the public is the real censor. That this is
to some extent true is proved by the fact that plays which are
licensed and produced in London have to be expurgated for the
provinces. This does not mean that the provinces are more strait-
laced, but simply that in many provincial towns there is only one
theatre for all classes and all tastes, whereas in London there
are separate theatres for separate sections of playgoers; so
that, for example, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree can conduct His
Majesty's Theatre without the slightest regard to the tastes of
the frequenters of the Gaiety Theatre; and Mr. George Edwardes
can conduct the Gaiety Theatre without catering in any way for
lovers of Shakespear. Thus the farcical comedy which has
scandalized the critics in London by the libertinage of its jests
is played to the respectable dress circle of Northampton
with these same jests slurred over so as to be imperceptible by
even the most prurient spectator. The public, in short, takes
care that nobody shall outrage it.

But the public also takes care that nobody shall starve it, or
regulate its dramatic diet as a schoolmistress regulates the
reading of her pupils. Even when it wishes to be debauched, no
censor can--or at least no censor does--stand out against it. If
a play is irresistibly amusing, it gets licensed no matter what
its moral aspect may be. A brilliant instance is the Divorcons of
the late Victorien Sardou, which may not have been the naughtiest
play of the 19th century, but was certainly the very naughtiest
that any English manager in his senses would have ventured  to
produce. Nevertheless, being a very amusing play, it passed the
licenser with the exception of a reference to impotence as a
ground for divorce which no English actress would have ventured
on in any case. Within the last few months a very amusing comedy
with a strongly polygamous moral was found irresistible by the
Lord Chamberlain. Plenty of fun and a happy ending will get
anything licensed, because the public will have it so, and the
Examiner of Plays, as the holder of the office testified before
the Commission of 1892 (Report, page 330), feels with the public,
and knows that his office could not survive a widespread
unpopularity. In short, the support of the mob--that is, of the
unreasoning, unorganized, uninstructed mass of popular
sentiment--is indispensable to the censorship as it exists to-
day in England. This is the explanation of the toleration by the
Lord Chamberlain of coarse and vicious plays. It is not long
since a judge before whom a licensed play came in the course of a
lawsuit expressed his scandalized astonishment at the licensing
of such a work. Eminent churchmen have made similar protests.
In some plays the simulation of criminal assaults on the stage
has been carried to a point at which a step further would have
involved the interference of the police. Provided the treatment
of the theme is gaily or hypocritically popular, and the ending
happy, the indulgence of the Lord Chamberlain can be counted on.
On the other hand, anything unpleasing and unpopular is
rigorously censored. Adultery and prostitution are tolerated and
even encouraged to such an extent that plays which do not deal
with them are commonly said not to be plays at all. But if any of
the unpleasing consequences of adultery and prostitution--for
instance, an UNSUCCESSFUL illegal operation (successful ones are
tolerated) or venereal disease--are mentioned, the play is
prohibited. This principle of shielding the playgoer from
unpleasant reflections is carried so far that when a play was
submitted for license in which the relations of a prostitute
with all the male characters in the piece was described as
"immoral," the Examiner of Plays objected to that passage, though
he made no objection to the relations themselves. The Lord
Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage
the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity,
adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight.
But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an
unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no
laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar
applause, the net result being that vice is made delightful
and virtue banned by the very institution which is
supported on the understanding that it produces exactly
the opposite result.


THE WEAKNESS OF THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN'S DEPARTMENT

Now comes the question, Why is our censorship, armed as it is
with apparently autocratic powers, so scandalously timid in the
face of the mob? Why is it not as autocratic in dealing with
playwrights below the average as with those above it? The answer
is that its position is really a very weak one. It has no direct
co-ercive forces, no funds to institute prosecutions and recover
the legal penalties of defying it, no powers of arrest or
imprisonment, in short, none of the guarantees of autocracy. What
it can do is to refuse to renew the licence of a theatre at which
its orders are disobeyed. When it happens that a theatre is about
to be demolished, as was the case recently with the Imperial
Theatre after it had passed into the hands of the Wesleyan
Methodists, unlicensed plays can be performed, technically in
private, but really in full publicity, without risk. The
prohibited plays of Brieux and Ibsen have been performed in
London in this way with complete impunity. But the impunity is
not confined to condemned theatres. Not long ago a West End
manager allowed a prohibited play to be performed at his theatre,
taking his chance of losing his licence in consequence. The
event proved that the manager was justified in regarding the risk
as negligible; for the Lord Chamberlain's remedy--the closing of
a popular and well-conducted theatre--was far too extreme to be
practicable. Unless the play had so outraged public opinion as to
make the manager odious and provoke a clamor for his exemplary
punishment, the Lord Chamberlain could only have had his revenge
at the risk of having his powers abolished as unsupportably
tyrannical.

The Lord Chamberlain then has his powers so adjusted that he is
tyrannical just where it is important that he should be tolerant,
and tolerant just where he could screw up the standard a little
by being tyrannical. His plea that there are unmentionable depths
to which managers and authors would descend if he did not prevent
them is disproved by the plain fact that his indulgence goes as
far as the police, and sometimes further than the public, will
let it. If our judges had so little power there would be no law
in England. If our churches had so much, there would be no
theatre, no literature, no science, no art, possibly no England.
The institution is at once absurdly despotic and abjectly weak.


AN ENLIGHTENED CENSORSHIP STILL WORSE THAN THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN'S

Clearly a censorship of judges, bishops, or statesmen would not
be in this abject condition. It would no doubt make short work of
the coarse and vicious pieces which now enjoy the protection of
the Lord Chamberlain, or at least of those of them in which the
vulgarity and vice are discoverable by merely reading the prompt
copy. But it would certainly disappoint the main hope of its
advocates: the hope that it would protect and foster the higher
drama. It would do nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it would
inevitably suppress it more completely than the Lord Chamberlain
does, because it would understand it better. The one play of
Ibsen's which is prohibited on the English stage, Ghosts, is far
less subversive than A Doll's House. But the Lord Chamberlain
does not meddle with such far-reaching matters as the tendency of
a play. He refuses to license Ghosts exactly as he would refuse
to license Hamlet if it were submitted to him as a new play. He
would license even Hamlet if certain alterations were made in it.
He would disallow the incestuous relationship between the King
and Queen. He would probably insist on the substitution of some
fictitious country for Denmark in deference to the near relations
of our reigning house with that realm. He would certainly make it
an absolute condition that the closet scene, in which a son, in
an agony of shame and revulsion, reproaches his mother for her
relations with his uncle, should be struck out as unbearably
horrifying and improper. But compliance with these conditions
would satisfy him. He would raise no speculative objections to
the tendency of the play.

This indifference to the larger issues of a theatrical
performance could not be safely predicated of an enlightened
censorship. Such a censorship might be more liberal in its
toleration of matters which are only objected to on the ground
that they are not usually discussed in general social
conversation or in the presence of children; but it would
presumably have a far deeper insight to and concern for the real
ethical tendency of the play. For instance, had it been in
existence during the last quarter of a century, it would have
perceived that those plays of Ibsen's which have been licensed
without question are fundamentally immoral to an altogether
extraordinary degree. Every one of them is a deliberate act of
war on society as at present constituted. Religion, marriage,
ordinary respectability, are subjected to a destructive exposure
and criticism which seems to mere moralists--that is, to persons
of no more than average depth of mind--to be diabolical. It is no
exaggeration to say that Ibsen gained his overwhelming reputation
by undertaking a task of no less magnitude than changing the mind
of Europe with the view of changing its morals. Now you cannot
license work of that sort without making yourself responsible for
it. The Lord Chamberlain accepted the responsibility because
he did not understand it or concern himself about it. But what
really enlightened and conscientious official dare take such a
responsibility? The strength of character and range of vision
which made Ibsen capable of it are not to be expected from any
official, however eminent. It is true that an enlightened censor
might, whilst shrinking even with horror from Ibsen's views,
perceive that any nation which suppressed Ibsen would presently
find itself falling behind the nations which tolerated him
just as Spain fell behind England; but the proper action to take
on such a conviction is the abdication of censorship, not the
practise of it. As long as a censor is a censor, he cannot
endorse by his licence opinions which seem to him dangerously
heretical.

We may, therefore, conclude that the more enlightened a
censorship is, the worse it would serve us. The Lord Chamberlain,
an obviously unenlightened Censor, prohibits Ghosts and licenses
all the rest of Ibsen's plays. An enlightened censorship would
possibly license Ghosts; but it would certainly suppress many of
the other plays. It would suppress subversiveness as well as what
is called bad taste. The Lord Chamberlain prohibits one play by
Sophocles because, like Hamlet, it mentions the subject of
incest; but an enlightened censorship might suppress all the
plays of Euripides because Euripides, like Ibsen, was a
revolutionary Freethinker. Under the Lord Chamberlain, we can
smuggle a good deal of immoral drama and almost as much coarsely
vulgar and furtively lascivious drama as we like. Under a college
of cardinals, or bishops, or judges, or any other conceivable
form of experts in morals, philosophy, religion, or politics, we
should get little except stagnant mediocrity.


THE PRACTICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES OF CENSORSHIP

There is, besides, a crushing material difficulty in the way of
an enlightened censorship. It is not too much to say that the
work involved would drive a man of any intellectual rank mad.
Consider, for example, the Christmas pantomimes. Imagine a judge
of the High Court, or an archbishop, or a Cabinet Minister, or an
eminent man of letters, earning his living by reading through the
mass of trivial doggerel represented by all the pantomimes which
are put into rehearsal simultaneously at the end of every year.
The proposal to put such mind-destroying drudgery upon an
official of the class implied by the demand for an enlightened
censorship falls through the moment we realize what it implies
in practice.

Another material difficulty is that no play can be judged by
merely reading the dialogue. To be fully effective a censor
should witness the performance. The mise-en-scene of a play is as
much a part of it as the words spoken on the stage. No censor
could possibly object to such a speech as "Might I speak to you
for a moment, miss"; yet that apparently innocent phrase has
often been made offensively improper on the stage by popular low
comedians, with the effect of changing the whole character and
meaning of the play as understood by the official Examiner. In
one of the plays of the present season, the dialogue was that of
a crude melodrama dealing in the most conventionally correct
manner with the fortunes of a good-hearted and virtuous girl. Its
morality was that of the Sunday school. But the principal
actress, between two speeches which contained no reference to her
action, changed her underclothing on the stage? It is true that
in this case the actress was so much better than her part that
she succeeded in turning what was meant as an impropriety into
an inoffensive stroke of realism; yet it is none the less clear
that stage business of this character, on which there can be no
check except the actual presence of a censor in the theatre,
might convert any dialogue, however innocent, into just the sort
of entertainment against which the Censor is supposed to protect
the public.

It was this practical impossibility that prevented the London
County Council from attempting to apply a censorship of the Lord
Chamberlain's pattern to the London music halls. A proposal to
examine all entertainments before permitting their performance
was actually made; and it was abandoned, not in the least as
contrary to the liberty of the stage, but because the executive
problem of how to do it at once reduced the proposal to
absurdity. Even if the Council devoted all its time to witnessing
rehearsals of variety performances, and putting each item to the
vote, possibly after a prolonged discussion followed by a
division, the work would still fall into arrear. No committee
could be induced to undertake such a task. The attachment of an
inspector of morals to each music hall would have meant an
appreciable addition to the ratepayers' burden. In the face
of such difficulties the proposal melted away. Had it been pushed
through, and the inspectors appointed, each of them would have
become a censor, and the whole body of inspectors would have
become a police des moeurs. Those who know the history of such
police forces on the continent will understand how impossible it
would be to procure inspectors whose characters would stand the
strain of their opportunities of corruption, both pecuniary
and personal, at such salaries as a local authority could be
persuaded to offer.

It has been suggested that the present censorship should be
supplemented by a board of experts, who should deal, not with the
whole mass of plays sent up for license, but only those which the
Examiner of Plays refuses to pass. As the number of plays which
the Examiner refuses to pass is never great enough to occupy
a Board in permanent session with regular salaries, and as casual
employment is not compatible with public responsibility, this
proposal would work out in practice as an addition to the duties
of some existing functionary. A Secretary of State would be
objectionable as likely to be biased politically. An
ecclesiastical referee might be biassed against the theatre
altogether. A judge in chambers would be the proper authority.
This plan would combine the inevitable intolerance of an
enlightened censorship with the popular laxity of the Lord
Chamberlain.

The judge would suppress the pioneers, whilst the Examiner of
Plays issued two guinea certificates for the vulgar and vicious
plays. For this reason the plan would no doubt be popular; but it
would be very much as a relaxation of the administration of the
Public Health Acts accompanied by the cheapening of gin would be
popular.


THE ARBITRATION PROPOSAL

On the occasion of a recent deputation of playwrights to the
Prime Minister it was suggested that if a censorship be
inevitable, provision should be made for an appeal from the Lord
Chamberlain in cases of refusal of licence. The authors of this
suggestion propose that the Lord Chamberlain shall choose one
umpire and the author another. The two umpires shall then elect a
referee, whose decision shall be final.

This proposal is not likely to be entertained by constitutional
lawyers. It is a naive offer to accept the method of arbitration
in what is essentially a matter, not between one private
individual or body and another, but between a public offender and
the State. It will presumably be ruled out as a proposal to refer
a case of manslaughter to arbitration would be ruled out. But
even if it were constitutionally sound, it bears all the marks
of that practical inexperience which leads men to believe that
arbitration either costs nothing or is at least cheaper than law.
Who is to pay for the time of the three arbitrators, presumably
men of high professional standing? The author may not be able:
the manager may not be willing: neither of them should be called
upon to pay for a public service otherwise than by their
contributions to the revenue. Clearly the State should pay. But
even so, the difficulties are only beginning. A licence is seldom
refused except on grounds which are controversial.

The two arbitrators selected by the opposed parties to the
controversy are to agree to leave the decision to a third party
unanimously chosen by themselves. That is very far from being a
simple solution. An attempt to shorten and simplify the passing
of the Finance Bill by referring it to an arbitrator chosen
unanimously by Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour might not improbably
cost more and last longer than a civil war. And why should the
chosen referee--if he ever succeeded in getting chosen--be
assumed to be a safer authority than the Examiner of Plays? He
would certainly be a less responsible one: in fact, being
(however eminent) a casual person called in to settle a single
case, he would be virtually irresponsible. Worse still, he would
take all responsibility away from the Lord Chamberlain, who is at
least an official of the King's Household and a nominee of the
Government. The Lord Chamberlain, with all his shortcomings,
thinks twice before he refuses a licence, knowing that his
refusal is final and may promptly be  made public. But if he
could transfer his responsibility to an arbitrator, he would
naturally do so whenever he felt the slightest misgiving, or
whenever, for diplomatic reasons, the licence would come more
gracefully from an authority unconnected with the court. These
considerations, added to the general objection to the principle
of censorship, seem sufficient to put the arbitration expedient
quite out of the question.

END OF THE FIRST PART OF THE REJECTED STATEMENT.


THE REJECTED STATEMENT: PART TWO

THE LICENSING OF THEATRES

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN LICENSING AND CENSORSHIP

It must not be concluded that the uncompromising abolition of all
censorship involves the abandonment of all control and regulation
of theatres. Factories are regulated in the public interest; but
there is no censorship of factories. For example, many persons
are sincerely convinced that cotton clothing is unhealthy; that
alcoholic drinks are demoralizing; and that playing-cards are the
devil's picture-books. But though the factories in which cotton,
whiskey, and cards are manufactured are stringently regulated
under the factory code and the Public Health and Building Acts,
the inspectors appointed to carry out these Acts never go to a
manufacturer and inform him that unless he manufactures woollens
instead of cottons, ginger-beer instead of whiskey, Bibles
instead of playing-cards, he will be forbidden to place his
products on the market. In the case of premises licensed for the
sale of spirits the authorities go a step further. A public-house
differs from a factory in the essential particular that whereas
disorder in a factory is promptly and voluntarily suppressed,
because every moment of its duration involves a measurable
pecuniary loss to the proprietor, disorder in a public-house may
be a source of profit to the proprietor by its attraction for
disorderly customers. Consequently a publican is compelled to
obtain a licence to pursue his trade; and this licence lasts
only a year, and need not be renewed if his house has been
conducted in a disorderly manner in the meantime.


PROSTITUTION AND DRINK IN THEATRES

The theatre presents the same problem as the public-house in
respect to disorder. To begin with, a theatre is actually a place
licensed for the sale of spirits. The bars at a London theatre
can be let without difficulty for 30 pounds a week and upwards.
And though it is clear that nobody will pay from a shilling to
half a guinea for access to a theatre bar when he can obtain
access to an ordinary public-house for nothing, there is no law
to prevent the theatre proprietor from issuing free passes
broadcast and recouping himself by the profit on the sale of
drink. Besides, there may be some other attraction than the sale
of drink. When this attraction is that of the play no objection
need be made. But it happens that the auditorium of a theatre,
with its brilliant lighting and luxurious decorations, makes a
very effective shelter and background for the display of fine
dresses and pretty faces. Consequently theatres have been used
for centuries in England as markets by prostitutes. From the
Restoration to the days of Macready all theatres were made use of
in this way as a matter of course; and to this, far more than to
any prejudice against dramatic art, we owe the Puritan formula
that the theatre door is the gate of hell. Macready had a hard
struggle to drive the prostitutes from his theatre; and since his
time the London theatres controlled by the Lord Chamberlain have
become respectable and even socially pretentious. But some of the
variety theatres still derive a revenue by selling admissions to
women who do not look at the performance, and men who go to
purchase or admire the women. And in the provinces this state of
things is by no means confined to the variety theatres. The real
attraction is sometimes not the performance at all. The theatre
is not really a theatre: it is a drink shop and a prostitution
market; and the last shred of its disguise is stripped by the
virtually indiscriminate issue of free tickets to the men. Access
to the stage is so easily obtained; and the plays preferred by
the management are those in which the stage is filled with young
women who are not in any serious technical sense of the word
actresses at all. Considering that all this is now possible at
any theatre, and actually occurs at some theatres, the fact that
our best theatres are as respectable as they are is much to their
credit; but it is still an intolerable evil that respectable
managers should have to fight against the free tickets and
disorderly housekeeping of unscrupulous competitors. The dramatic
author is equally injured. He finds that unless he writes plays
which make suitable sideshows for drinking-bars and brothels, he
may be excluded from towns where there is not room for two
theatres, and where the one existing theatre is exploiting
drunkenness and prostitution instead of carrying on a legitimate
dramatic business. Indeed everybody connected with the theatrical
profession suffers in reputation from the detestable tradition of
such places, against which the censorship has proved quite
useless.

Here we have a strong case for applying either the licensing
system or whatever better means may be devized for securing the
orderly conduct of houses of public entertainment, dramatic or
other. Liberty must, no doubt, be respected in so far that no
manager should have the right to refuse admission to decently
dressed, sober, and well-conducted persons, whether they are
prostitutes, soldiers in uniform, gentlemen not in evening
dress, Indians, or what not; but when disorder is stopped,
disorderly persons will either cease to come or else reform their
manners. It is, however, quite arguable that the indiscriminate
issue of free admissions, though an apparently innocent and good-
natured, and certainly a highly popular proceeding, should expose
the proprietor of the theatre to the risk of a refusal to renew
his licence.


WHY THE MANAGERS DREAD LOCAL CONTROL

All this points to the transfer of the control of theatres from
the Lord Chamberlain to the municipality. And this step is
opposed by the long-run managers, partly because they take it for
granted that municipal control must involve municipal censorship
of plays, so that plays might be licensed in one town and
prohibited in the next, and partly because, as they have no
desire to produce plays which are in advance of public opinion,
and as the Lord Chamberlain in every other respect gives more
scandal by his laxity than trouble by his severity, they find in
the present system a cheap and easy means of procuring a
certificate which relieves them of all social responsibility, and
provides them with so strong a weapon of defence in case of a
prosecution that it acts in practice as a bar to any such
proceedings. Above all, they know that the Examiner of Plays is
free from the pressure of that large body of English public
opinion already alluded to, which regards the theatre as the
Prohibitionist Teetotaller regards the public-house: that is, as
an abomination to be stamped out unconditionally. The managers
rightly dread this pressure more than anything else; and they
believe that it is so strong in local governments as to be a
characteristic bias of municipal authority. In this they are no
doubt mistaken. There is not a municipal authority of any
importance in the country in which a proposal to stamp out the
theatre, or even to treat it illiberally, would have a chance of
adoption. Municipal control of the variety theatres (formerly
called music halls) has been very far from liberal, except in the
one particular in which the Lord Chamberlain is equally
illiberal. That particular is the assumption that a draped figure
is decent and an undraped one indecent. It is useless to point to
actual experience, which proves abundantly that naked or
apparently naked figures, whether exhibited as living pictures,
animated statuary, or in a dance, are at their best not only
innocent, but refining in their effect, whereas those actresses
and skirt dancers who have brought the peculiar aphrodisiac
effect which is objected to to the highest pitch of efficiency
wear twice as many petticoats as an ordinary lady does, and seldom
exhibit more than their ankles. Unfortunately, municipal
councillors persist in confusing decency with drapery; and both in
London and the provinces certain positively edifying performances
have been forbidden or withdrawn under pressure, and replaced by
coarse and vicious ones. There is not the slightest reason to
suppose that the Lord Chamberlain would have been any more
tolerant; but this does not alter the fact that the municipal
licensing authorities have actually used their powers to set up a
censorship which is open to all the objections to censorship in
general, and which, in addition, sets up the objection from which
central control is free: namely, the impossibility of planning
theatrical tours without the serious commercial risk of having the
performance forbidden in some of the towns booked. How can this be
prevented?


DESIRABLE LIMITATIONS OF LOCAL CONTROL

The problem is not a difficult one. The municipality can be
limited just as the monarchy is limited. The Act transferring
theatres to local control can be a charter of the liberties of
the stage as well as an Act to reform administration. The power
to refuse to grant or renew a licence to a theatre need not be an
arbitrary one. The municipality may be required to state the
ground of refusal; and certain grounds can be expressly declared
as unlawful; so that it shall be possible for the manager to
resort to the courts for a mandamus to compel the authority to
grant a licence. It can be declared unlawful for a licensing
authority to demand from the manager any disclosure of the nature
of any entertainment he proposes to give, or to prevent its
performance, or to refuse to renew his licence on the ground that
the tendency of his entertainments is contrary to religion and
morals, or that the theatre is an undesirable institution, or
that there are already as many theatres as are needed, or that
the theatre draws people away from the churches, chapels, mission
halls, and the like in its neighborhood. The assumption should be
that every citizen has a right to open and conduct a theatre, and
therefore has a right to a licence unless he has forfeited that
right by allowing his theatre to become a disorderly house, or
failing to provide a building which complies with the regulations
concerning sanitation and egress in case of fire, or being
convicted of an offence against public decency. Also, the
licensing powers of the authority should not be delegated to any
official or committee; and the manager or lessee of the theatre
should have a right to appear in person or by counsel to plead
against any motion to refuse to grant or renew his licence. With
these safeguards the licensing power could not be stretched to
censorship. The manager would enjoy liberty of conscience as far
as the local authority is concerned; but on the least attempt on
his part to keep a disorderly house under cover of opening a
theatre he would risk his licence.

But the managers will not and should not be satisfied with these
limits to the municipal power. If they are deprived of the
protection of the Lord Chamberlain's licence, and at the same
time efficiently protected against every attempt at censorship by
the licensing authority, the enemies of the theatre will resort
to the ordinary law, and try to get from the prejudices of a jury
what they are debarred from getting from the prejudices of a
County Council or City Corporation. Moral Reform Societies,
"Purity" Societies, Vigilance Societies, exist in England and
America for the purpose of enforcing the existing laws against
obscenity, blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking, the debauchery of
children, prostitution and so forth. The paid officials of these
societies, in their anxiety to produce plenty of evidence of
their activity in the annual reports which go out to the
subscribers, do not always discriminate between an obscene
postcard and an artistic one, or to put it more exactly, between
a naked figure and an indecent one. They often combine a narrow
but terribly sincere sectarian bigotry with a complete ignorance
of art and history. Even when they have some culture, their
livelihood is at the mercy of subscribers and committee men who
have none. If these officials had any power of distinguishing
between art and blackguardism, between morality and virtue,
between immorality and vice, between conscientious heresy and
mere baseness of mind and foulness of mouth, they might be
trusted by theatrical managers not to abuse the powers of the
common informer. As it is, it has been found necessary, in order
to enable good music to be performed on Sunday, to take away
these powers in that particular, and vest them solely in the
Attorney-General. This disqualification of the common informer
should be extended to the initiation of all proceedings of a
censorial character against theatres. Few people are aware of the
monstrous laws against blasphemy which still disgrace our statute
book. If any serious attempt were made to carry them out, prison
accommodation would have to be provided for almost every educated
person in the country, beginning with the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Until some government with courage and character
enough to repeal them comes into power, it is not too much to
ask that such infamous powers of oppression should be kept in
responsible hands and not left at the disposal of every bigot
ignorant enough to be unaware of the social dangers of
persecution. Besides, the common informer  is not always a
sincere bigot, who believes he is performing an action of signal
merit in silencing and ruining a heretic. He is unfortunately
just as often a blackmailer, who has studied his powers as a
common informer in order that he may extort money for refraining
from exercising them. If the manager is to be responsible he
should be made responsible to a responsible functionary. To be
responsible to every fanatical ignoramus who chooses to prosecute
him for exhibiting a cast of the Hermes of Praxiteles in his
vestibule, or giving a performance of Measure for Measure, is
mere slavery. It is made bearable at present by the protection
of the Lord Chamberlain's certificate. But when that is no longer
available, the common informer must be disarmed  if the manager
is to enjoy security.