SUMMARY

The general case against censorship as a principle, and the
particular case against the existing English censorship and
against its replacement by a more enlightened one, is now
complete. The following is a recapitulation of the propositions
and conclusions contended for.

1. The question of censorship or no censorship is a question of
high political principle and not of petty policy.

2. The toleration of heresy and shocks to morality on the stage,
and even their protection against the prejudices and
superstitions which necessarily enter largely into morality and
public opinion, are essential to the welfare of the nation.

3. The existing censorship of the Lord Chamberlain does not only
intentionally suppress heresy and challenges to morality in their
serious and avowed forms, but unintentionally gives the special
protection of its official licence to the most extreme
impropriety that the lowest section of London playgoers will
tolerate in theatres especially devoted to their entertainment,
licensing everything that is popular and forbidding any attempt
to change public opinion or morals.

4. The Lord Chamberlain's censorship is open to the special
objection that its application to political plays is taken to
indicate the attitude of the Crown on questions of domestic and
foreign policy, and that it imposes the limits of etiquet on the
historical drama.

5. A censorship of a more enlightened and independent kind,
exercised by the most eminent available authorities, would prove
in practice more disastrous than the censorship of the Lord
Chamberlain, because the more eminent its members were the less
possible it would be for them to accept the responsibility for
heresy or immorality by licensing them, and because the many
heretical and immoral plays which now pass the Lord Chamberlain
because he does not understand them, would be understood and
suppressed by a more highly enlightened censorship.

6. A reconstructed and enlightened censorship would be armed with
summary and effective powers which would stop the evasions by
which heretical and immoral plays are now performed in spite of
the Lord Chamberlain; and such powers would constitute a tyranny
which would ruin the theatre spiritually by driving all
independent thinkers from the drama into the uncensored
forms of art.

7. The work of critically examining all stage plays in their
written form, and of witnessing their performance in order to see
that the sense is not altered by the stage business, would, even
if it were divided among so many officials as to be physically
possible, be mentally impossible to persons of taste and
enlightenment.

8. Regulation of theatres is an entirely different matter from
censorship, inasmuch as a theatre, being not only a stage, but a
place licensed for the sale of spirits, and a public resort
capable of being put to disorderly use, and needing special
provision for the safety of audiences in cases of fire, etc.,
cannot be abandoned wholly to private control, and may therefore
reasonably be made subject to an annual licence like those now
required before allowing premises to be used publicly for music
and dancing.

9. In order to prevent the powers of the licensing authority
being abused so as to constitute a virtual censorship, any Act
transferring the theatres to the control of a licensing authority
should be made also a charter of the rights of dramatic authors
and managers by the following provisions:

A. The public prosecutor (the Attorney-General) alone should have
the right to set the law in operation against the manager of a
theatre or the author of a play in respect of the character of
the play or entertainment.

B. No disclosure of the particulars of a theatrical entertainment
shall be required before performance.

C. Licences shall not be withheld on the ground that the
existence of theatres is dangerous to religion and morals, or on
the ground that any entertainment given or contemplated is
heretical or immoral.

D. The licensing area shall be no less than that of a County
Council or City Corporation, which shall not delegate its
licensing powers to any minor local authority or to any official
or committee; it shall decide all questions affecting the
existence of a theatrical licence by vote of the entire body;
managers, lessees, and proprietors of theatres shall have the
right to plead, in person or by counsel, against a proposal to
withhold a licence; and the licence shall not be withheld except
for stated reasons, the validity of which shall be subject to the
judgment of the high courts.

E. The annual licence, once granted, shall not be cancelled or
suspended unless the manager has been convicted by public
prosecution of an offence against the ordinary laws against
disorderly housekeeping, indecency, blasphemy, etc., except in
cases where some structural or sanitary defect in the building
necessitates immediate action for the protection of the public
against physical injury.

F. No licence shall be refused on the ground that the proximity
of the theatre to a church, mission hall, school, or other place
of worship, edification, instruction, or entertainment (including
another theatre) would draw the public away from such places into
its own doors.


PREFACE RESUMED

MR. GEORGE ALEXANDER'S PROTEST

On the facts mentioned in the foregoing statement, and in my
evidence before the Joint Select Committee, no controversy arose
except on one point. Mr. George Alexander protested vigorously
and indignantly against my admission that theatres, like public-
houses, need special control on the ground that they can profit
by disorder, and are sometimes conducted with that end in view.
Now, Mr. Alexander is a famous actor-manager; and it is very
difficult to persuade the public that the more famous an actor-
manager is the less he is likely to know about any theatre except
his own. When the Committee of 1892 reported, I was considered
guilty of a perverse paradox when I said that the witness who
knew least about the theatre was Henry Irving. Yet a moment's
consideration would have shown that the paradox was a platitude.
For about quarter of a century Irving was confined night after
night to his own theatre and his own dressing-room, never seeing
a play even there because he was himself part of the play;
producing the works of long-departed authors; and, to the extent
to which his talent was extraordinary, necessarily making his
theatre unlike any other theatre. When he went to the provinces
or to America, the theatres to which he went were swept and
garnished for him, and their staffs replaced--as far as he came
in contact with them--by his own lieutenants. In the end, there
was hardly a first-nighter in his gallery who did not know more
about the London theatres and the progress of dramatic art than
he; and as to the provinces, if any chief constable had told him
the real history and character of many provincial theatres, he
would have denounced that chief constable as an ignorant libeller
of a noble profession. But the constable would have been right
for all that. Now if this was true of Sir Henry Irving, who did
not become a London manager until he had roughed it for years in
the provinces, how much more true must it be of, say, Mr. George
Alexander, whose successful march through his profession has
passed as far from the purlieus of our theatrical world as the
king's naval career from the Isle of Dogs? The moment we come to
that necessary part of the censorship question which deals with
the control of theatres from the point of view of those who know
how much money can be made out of them by managers who seek to
make the auditorium attractive rather than the stage, you find
the managers divided into two sections. The first section
consists of honorable and successful managers like Mr. Alexander,
who know nothing of such abuses, and deny, with perfect sincerity
and indignant vehemence, that they exist except, perhaps, in
certain notorious variety theatres. The other is the silent
section which knows better, but is very well content to be
publicly defended and privately amused by Mr. Alexander's
innocence. To accept a West End manager as an expert in theatres
because he is an actor is much as if we were to accept the
organist of St. Paul's Cathedral as an expert on music halls
because he is a musician. The real experts are all in the
conspiracy to keep the police out of the theatre. And they are so
successful that even the police do not know as much as they
should.

The police should have been examined by the Committee, and the
whole question of the extent to which theatres are disorderly
houses in disguise sifted to the bottom. For it is on this point
that we discover behind the phantoms of the corrupt dramatists
who are restrained by the censorship from debauching the stage,
the reality of the corrupt managers and theatre proprietors
who actually do debauch it without let or hindrance from
the censorship. The whole case for giving control over
theatres to local authorities rests on this reality.


ELIZA AND HER BATH

The persistent notion that a theatre is an Alsatia where the
king's writ does not run, and where any wickedness is possible in
the absence of a special tribunal and a special police, was
brought out by an innocent remark made by Sir William Gilbert,
who, when giving evidence before the Committee, was asked by
Colonel Lockwood whether a law sufficient to restrain impropriety
in books would also restrain impropriety in plays. Sir William
replied: "I should say there is a very wide distinction between
what is read and what is seen. In a novel one may read that
'Eliza stripped off her dressing-gown and stepped into her bath'
without any harm; but I think if that were presented on the stage
it would be shocking." All the stupid and inconsiderate people
seized eagerly on this illustration as if it were a successful
attempt to prove that without a censorship we should be unable to
prevent actresses from appearing naked on the stage. As a matter
of fact, if an actress could be persuaded to do such a thing (and
it would be about as easy to persuade a bishop's wife to appear
in church in the same condition) the police would simply arrest
her on a charge of indecent exposure. The extent to which this
obvious safeguard was overlooked may be taken as a measure of the
thoughtlessness and frivolity of the excuses made for the
censorship. It should be added that the artistic representation
of a bath, with every suggestion of nakedness that the law as to
decency allows, is one of the most familiar subjects of scenic
art. From the Rhine maidens in Wagner's Trilogy, and the bathers
in the second act of Les Huguenots, to the ballets of water
nymphs in our Christmas pantomimes and at our variety theatres,
the sound hygienic propaganda of the bath, and the charm of the
undraped human figure, are exploited without offence on the stage
to an extent never dreamt of by any novelist.


A KING'S PROCTOR

Another hare was started by Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr.
Laurence Housman, who, in pure kindness to the managers, asked
whether it would not be possible to establish for their
assistance a sort of King's Proctor to whom plays might be
referred for an official legal opinion as to their compliance
with the law before production. There are several objections to
this proposal; and they may as well be stated in case the
proposal should be revived. In the first place, no lawyer with
the most elementary knowledge of the law of libel in its various
applications to sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy, could answer
for the consequences of producing any play whatsoever as to which
the smallest question could arise in the mind of any sane person.
I have been a critic and an author in active service for thirty
years; and though nothing I have written has ever been prosecuted
in England or made the subject of legal proceedings, yet I have
never published in my life an article, a play, or a book, as to
which, if I had taken legal advice, an expert could have assured
me that I was proof against prosecution or against an action for
damages by the persons criticized. No doubt a sensible solicitor
might have advised me that the risk was no greater than all men
have to take in dangerous trades; but such an opinion, though it
may encourage a client, does not protect him. For example, if a
publisher asks his solicitor whether he may venture on an edition
of Sterne's Sentimental Journey, or a manager whether he may
produce King Lear without risk of prosecution, the solicitor will
advise him to go ahead. But if the solicitor or counsel consulted
by him were asked for a guarantee that neither of these works was
a libel, he would have to reply that he could give no such
guarantee; that, on the contrary, it was his duty to warn his
client that both of them are obscene libels; that King Lear,
containing as it does perhaps the most appalling blasphemy that
despair ever uttered, is a blasphemous libel, and that it is
doubtful whether it could not be construed as a seditious libel
as well. As to Ibsen's Brand (the play which made him popular
with the most earnestly religious people) no sane solicitor would
advise his client even to chance it except in a broadly
cultivated and tolerant (or indifferent) modern city. The lighter
plays would be no better off. What lawyer could accept any
responsibility for the production of Sardou's Divorcons or Clyde
Fitch's The Woman in the Case? Put the proposed King's Proctor in
operation to-morrow; and what will be the result? The managers
will find that instead of insuring them as the Lord Chamberlain
does, he will warn them that every play they submit to him is
vulnerable to the law, and that they must produce it not only on
the ordinary risk of acting on their own responsibility, but at
the very grave additional risk of doing so in the teeth of an
official warning. Under such circumstances, what manager would
resort a second time to the Proctor; and how would the Proctor
live without fees, unless indeed the Government gave him a salary
for doing nothing? The institution would not last a year, except
as a job for somebody.


COUNSEL'S OPINION

The proposal is still less plausible when it is considered that
at present, without any new legislation at all, any manager who
is doubtful about a play can obtain the advice of his solicitor,
or Counsel's opinion, if he thinks it will be of any service to
him. The verdict of the proposed King's Proctor would be nothing
but Counsel's opinion without the liberty of choice of counsel,
possibly cheapened, but sure to be adverse; for an official
cannot give practical advice as a friend and a man of the world:
he must stick to the letter of the law and take no chances. And
as far as the law is concerned, journalism, literature, and the
drama exist only by custom or sufferance.


WANTED: A NEW MAGNA CHARTA

This leads us to a very vital question. Is it not possible to
amend the law so as to make it possible for a lawyer to advise
his client that he may publish the works of Blake, Zola, and
Swinburne, or produce the plays of Ibsen and Mr. Granville
Barker, or print an ordinary criticism in his newspaper, without
the possibility of finding himself in prison, or mulcted in
damages and costs in consequence? No doubt it is; but only by a
declaration of constitutional right to blaspheme, rebel, and deal
with tabooed subjects. Such a declaration is not just now within
the scope of practical politics, although we are compelled to act
to a great extent as if it was actually part of the constitution.
All that can be done is to take my advice and limit the necessary
public control of the theatres in such a manner as to prevent its
being abused as a censorship. We have ready to our hand the
machinery of licensing as applied to public-houses. A licensed
victualler can now be assured confidently by his lawyer that a
magistrate cannot refuse to renew his licence on the ground that
he (the magistrate) is a teetotaller and has seen too much of the
evil of drink to sanction its sale. The magistrate must give
a judicial reason for his refusal, meaning really a
constitutional reason; and his teetotalism is not such a reason.
In the same way you can protect a theatrical manager by ruling
out certain reasons as unconstitutional, as suggested in my
statement. Combine this with the abolition of the common
informer's power to initiate proceedings, and you will have gone
as far as seems possible at present. You will have local control
of the theatres for police purposes and sanitary purposes without
censorship; and I do not see what more is possible until we get a
formal Magna Charta declaring all the Categories of libel and the
blasphemy laws contrary to public liberty, and repealing and
defining accordingly.


PROPOSED: A NEW STAR CHAMBER

Yet we cannot mention Magna Charta without recalling how useless
such documents are to a nation which has no more political
comprehension nor political virtue than King John. When Henry
VII. calmly proceeded to tear up Magna Charta by establishing the
Star Chamber (a criminal court consisting of a committee of the
Privy Council without a jury) nobody objected until, about a
century and a half later, the Star Chamber began cutting off the
ears of eminent XVII. century Nonconformists and standing them in
the pillory; and then the Nonconformists, and nobody else,
abolished the Star Chamber. And if anyone doubts that we are
quite ready to establish the Star Chamber again, let him read the
Report of the Joint Select Committee, on which I now venture to
offer a few criticisms.

The report of the Committee, which will be found in the bluebook,
should be read with attention and respect as far as page x., up
to which point it is an able and well-written statement of the
case. From page x. onward, when it goes on from diagnosing the
disease to prescribing the treatment, it should be read with even
greater attention but with no respect whatever, as the main
object of the treatment is to conciliate the How Not To Do It
majority. It contains, however, one very notable proposal, the
same being nothing more or less than to revive the Star Chamber
for the purpose of dealing with heretical or seditious plays and
their authors, and indeed with all charges against theatrical
entertainments except common police cases of indecency. The
reason given is that for which the Star Chamber was created by
Henry VII: that is, the inadequacy of the ordinary law. "We
consider," says the report, "that the law which prevents or
punishes indecency, blasphemy and libel in printed publications
[it does not, by the way, except in the crudest police cases]
would not be adequate for the control of the drama." Therefore
a committee of the Privy Council is to be empowered to suppress
plays and punish managers and authors at its pleasure, on the
motion of the Attorney-General, without a jury. The members of
the Committee will, of course, be men of high standing and
character: otherwise they would not be on the Privy Council. That
is to say, they will have all the qualifications of Archbishop
Laud.

Now I have no guarantee that any member of the majority of the
Joint Select Committee ever heard of the Star Chamber or of
Archbishop Laud. One of them did not know that politics meant
anything more than party electioneering. Nothing is more alarming
than the ignorance of our public men of the commonplaces of our
history, and their consequent readiness to repeat experiments
which have in the past produced national catastrophes. At all
events, whether they knew what they were doing or not, there can
be no question as to what they did. They proposed virtually that
the Act of the Long Parliament in 1641 shall be repealed, and the
Star Chamber re-established, in order that playwrights and
managers may be punished for unspecified offences unknown to the
law. When I say unspecified, I should say specified as follows
(see page xi. of the report) in the case of a play.

(a) To be indecent.

(b) To contain offensive personalities.

(c) To represent on the stage in an invidious manner a living
person, or any person recently dead.

(d) To do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence.

(e) To be calculated to conduce to vice or crime.

(f) To be calculated to impair friendly relations with any
foreign power.

(g) To be calculated to cause a breach of the peace.

Now it is clear that there is no play yet written, or possible to
be written, in this world, that might not be condemned under one
or other of these heads. How any sane man, not being a professed
enemy of public liberty, could put his hand to so monstrous a
catalogue passes my understanding. Had a comparatively definite
and innocent clause been added forbidding the affirmation or
denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the country would
have been up in arms at once. Lord Ribblesdale made an effort to
reduce the seven categories to the old formula "not to be fitting
for the preservation of good manners, decorum, or the public
peace"; but this proposal was not carried; whilst on Lord
Gorell's motion a final widening of the net was achieved by
adding the phrase "to be calculated to"; so that even if a play
does not produce any of the results feared, the author
can still be punished on the ground that his play is "calculated"
to produce them. I have no hesitation in saying that a committee
capable of such an outrageous display of thoughtlessness and
historical ignorance as this paragraph of its report implies
deserves to be haled before the tribunal it has itself proposed,
and dealt with under a general clause levelled at conduct
"calculated to" overthrow the liberties of England.


POSSIBILITIES OF THE PROPOSAL

Still, though I am certainly not willing to give Lord Gorell the
chance of seeing me in the pillory with my ears cut off if I can
help it, I daresay many authors would rather take their chance
with a Star Chamber than with a jury, just as some soldiers would
rather take their chance with a court-martial than at Quarter
Sessions. For that matter, some of them would rather take their
chance with the Lord Chamberlain than with either. And though
this is no reason for depriving the whole body of authors of the
benefit of Magna Charta, still, if the right of the proprietor of
a play to refuse the good offices of the Privy Council and to
perform the play until his accusers had indicted him at law, and
obtained the verdict of a jury against him, were sufficiently
guarded, the proposed committee might be set up and used for
certain purposes. For instance, it might be made a condition of
the intervention of the Attorney-General or the Director of
Public Prosecutions that he should refer an accused play to the
committee, and obtain their sanction before taking action,
offering the proprietor of the play, if the Committee thought
fit, an opportunity of voluntarily accepting trial by the
Committee as an alternative to prosecution in the ordinary course
of law. But the Committee should have no powers of punishment
beyond the power (formidable enough) of suspending performances
of the play. If it thought that additional punishment was called
for, it could order a prosecution without allowing the proprietor
or author of the play the alternative of a trial by itself. The
author of the play should be made a party to all proceedings
of the Committee, and have the right to defend himself in person
or by counsel. This would provide a check on the Attorney-General
(who might be as bigoted as any of the municipal aldermen who are
so much dreaded by the actor-managers) without enabling the
Committee to abuse its powers for party, class, or sectarian
ends beyond that irreducible minimum of abuse which a popular
jury would endorse, for which minimum there is no remedy.

But when everything is said for the Star Chamber that can be
said, and every precaution taken to secure to those whom it
pursues the alternative of trial by jury, the expedient still
remains a very questionable one, to be endured for the sake of
its protective rather than its repressive powers. It should
abolish the present quaint toleration of rioting in theatres. For
example, if it is to be an offence to perform a play which the
proposed new Committee shall condemn, it should also be made an
offence to disturb a performance which the Committee has not
condemned. "Brawling" at a theatre should be dealt with as
severely as brawling in church if the censorship is to be taken
out of the hands of the public. At present Jenny Geddes may throw
her stool at the head of a playwright who preaches unpalatable
doctrine to her, or rather, since her stool is a fixture, she may
hiss and hoot and make it impossible to proceed with the
performance, even although nobody has compelled her to come to
the theatre or suspended her liberty to stay away, and although
she has no claim on an unendowed theatre for her spiritual
necessities, as she has on her parish church. If mob censorship
cannot be trusted to keep naughty playwrights in order, still
less can it be trusted to keep the pioneers of thought in
countenance; and I submit that anyone hissing a play permitted by
the new censorship should be guilty of contempt of court.


STAR CHAMBER SENTIMENTALITY

But what is most to be dreaded in a Star Chamber is not its
sternness but its sentimentality. There is no worse censorship
than one which considers only the feelings  of the spectators,
except perhaps one which considers the feelings of people who do
not even witness the performance. Take the case of the Passion
Play at Oberammergau. The offence given by a representation of
the Crucifixion on the stage is not bounded by frontiers:
further, it is an offence of which the voluntary spectators
are guilty no less than the actors. If it is to be tolerated at
all: if we are not to make war on the German Empire for
permitting it, nor punish the English people who go to Bavaria to
see it and thereby endow it with English money, we may as well
tolerate it in London, where nobody need go to see it except
those who are not offended by it. When Wagner's Parsifal becomes
available for representation in London, many people will be
sincerely horrified when the miracle of the Mass is simulated on
the stage of Covent Garden, and the Holy Ghost descends in the
form of a dove. But if the Committee of the Privy Council, or the
Lord Chamberlain, or anyone else, were to attempt to keep
Parsifal from us to spare the feelings of these people, it would
not be long before even the most thoughtless champions of the
censorship would see that the principle of doing nothing that
could shock anybody had reduced itself to absurdity. No quarter
whatever should be given to the bigotry of people so unfit for
social life as to insist not only that their own prejudices and
superstitions should have the fullest toleration but that
everybody else should be compelled to think and act as they do.
Every service in St. Paul's Cathedral is an outrage to the
opinions of the congregation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of
Westminster. Every Liberal meeting is a defiance and a challenge
to the most cherished opinions of the Unionists. A law to compel
the Roman Catholics to attend service at St. Paul's, or the
Liberals to attend the meetings of the Primrose League would be
resented as an insufferable tyranny. But a law to shut up both
St. Paul's and the Westminster Cathedral; and to put down
political meetings and associations because of the offence given
by them to many worthy and excellent people, would be a far worse
tyranny, because it would kill the religious and political life
of the country outright, whereas to compel people to attend the
services and meetings of their opponents would greatly enlarge
their minds, and would actually be a good thing if it were
enforced all round. I should not object to a law to compel
everybody to read two newspapers, each violently opposed to the
other in politics; but to forbid us to read newspapers at all
would be to maim us mentally and cashier our country in the ranks
of civilization. I deny that anybody has the right to demand more
from me, over and above lawful conduct in a general sense, than
liberty to stay away from the theatre in which my plays are
represented. If he is unfortunate enough to have a religion so
petty that it can be insulted (any man is as welcome to insult my
religion, if he can, as he is to insult the universe) I claim the
right to insult it to my heart's content, if I choose, provided I
do not compel him to come and hear me. If I think this country
ought to make war on any other country, then, so long as war
remains lawful, I claim full liberty to write and perform a play
inciting the country to that war without interference from the
ambassadors of the menaced country. I may "give pain to many
worthy people, and pleasure to none," as the Censor's pet phrase
puts it: I may even make Europe a cockpit and Asia a shambles: no
matter: if preachers and politicians, statesmen and soldiers, may
do these things--if it is right that such things should be done,
then I claim my share in the right to do them. If the proposed
Committee is meant to prevent me from doing these things whilst
men of other professions are permitted to do them, then I protest
with all my might against the formation of such a Committee. If
it is to protect me, on the contrary, against the attacks that
bigots and corrupt pornographers may make on me by appealing to
the ignorance and prejudices of common jurors, then I welcome it;
but is that really the object of its proposers? And if it is,
what guarantee have I that the new tribunal will not presently
resolve into a mere committee to avoid unpleasantness and keep
the stage "in good taste"? It is no more possible for me to do my
work honestly as a playwright without giving pain than it is for
a dentist. The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more
decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them. Prevent
dentists and dramatists from giving pain, and not only will our
morals become as carious as our teeth, but toothache and the
plagues that follow neglected morality will presently cause more
agony than all the dentists and dramatists at their worst
have caused since the world began.


ANYTHING FOR A QUIET LIFE

Another doubt: would a Committee of the Privy Council really face
the risks that must be taken by all communities as the price of
our freedom to evolve? Would it not rather take the popular
English view that freedom and virtue generally are sweet and
desirable only when they cost nothing? Nothing worth having is to
be had without risk. A mother risks her child's life every time
she lets it ramble through the countryside, or cross the street,
or clamber over the rocks on the shore by itself. A father risks
his son's morals when he gives him a latchkey. The members of the
Joint Select Committee risked my producing a revolver and
shooting them when they admitted me to the room without having me
handcuffed. And these risks are no unreal ones. Every day some
child is maimed or drowned and some young man infected with
disease; and political assassinations have been appallingly
frequent of late years. Railway travelling has its risks;
motoring has its risks; aeroplaning has its risks; every advance
we make costs us a risk of some sort. And though these are only
risks to the individual, to the community they are certainties.
It is not certain that I will be killed this year in a railway
accident; but it is certain that somebody will. The invention
of printing and the freedom of the press have brought upon us,
not merely risks of their abuse, but the establishment as part of
our social routine of some of the worst evils a community can
suffer from. People who realize these evils shriek for the
suppression of motor cars, the virtual imprisonment and
enslavement of the young, the passing of Press Laws (especially
in Egypt, India, and Ireland), exactly as they shriek for a
censorship of the stage. The freedom of the stage will be abused
just as certainly as the complaisance and innocence of the
censorship is abused at present. It will also be used by writers
like myself for raising very difficult and disturbing questions,
social, political, and religious, at moments which may be
extremely inconvenient to the government. Is it certain that a
Committee of the Privy Council would stand up to all this as the
price of liberty? I doubt it. If I am to be at the mercy of a
nice amiable Committee of elderly gentlemen (I know all about
elderly gentlemen, being one myself) whose motto is the highly
popular one, "Anything for a quiet life" and who will make the
inevitable abuses of freedom by our blackguards an excuse for
interfering with any disquieting use of it by myself, then I
shall be worse off than I am with the Lord Chamberlain, whose
mind is not broad enough to obstruct the whole range of thought.
If it were, he would be given a more difficult post.


SHALL THE EXAMINER OF PLAYS STARVE?

And here I may be reminded that if I prefer the Lord Chamberlain
I can go to the Lord Chamberlain, who is to retain all his
present functions for the benefit of those who prefer to be
judged by him. But I am not so sure that the Lord Chamberlain
will be able to exercise those functions for long if resort to
him is to be optional. Let me be kinder to him than he has been
to me, and uncover for him the pitfalls which the Joint Select
Committee have dug (and concealed) in his path. Consider how the
voluntary system must inevitably work. The Joint Select Committee
expressly urges that the Lord Chamberlain's licence must not be a
bar to a prosecution. Granted that in spite of this reservation
the licence would prove in future as powerful a defence as
it has been in the past, yet the voluntary clause nevertheless
places the manager at the mercy of any author who makes it a
condition of his contract that his play shall not be submitted
for licence. I should probably take that course without
opposition from the manager. For the manager, knowing that three
of my plays have been refused a licence, and that it would be far
safer to produce a play for which no licence had been asked than
one for which it had been asked and refused, would agree that it
was more prudent, in my case, to avail himself of the power of
dispensing with the Lord Chamberlain's  licence. But now mark the
consequences. The manager, having thus discovered that his best
policy was to dispense with the licence in the few doubtful
cases, would presently ask himself why he should spend two
guineas each on licences for the many plays as to which no
question could conceivably arise. What risk does any manager run
in producing such works as Sweet Lavender, Peter Pan, The Silver
King, or any of the 99 per cent of plays that are equally neutral
on controversial questions? Does anyone seriously believe that
the managers would continue to pay the Lord Chamberlain two
guineas a play out of mere love and loyalty, only to create an
additional risk in the case of controversial plays, and to guard
against risks that do not exist in the case of the great bulk of
other productions? Only those would remain faithful to him who
produce such plays as the Select Committee began by discussing in
camera, and ended by refusing to discuss at all because they were
too nasty. These people would still try to get a licence, and
would still no doubt succeed as they do today. But could the
King's Reader of Plays live on his fees from these plays alone;
and if he could how long would his post survive the discredit of
licensing only pornographic plays? It is clear to me that the
Examiner would be starved out of existence, and the censorship
perish of desuetude. Perhaps that is exactly what the Select
Committee contemplated. If so, I have nothing more to say, except
that I think sudden death would be more merciful.


LORD GORELL'S AWAKENING

In the meantime, conceive the situation which would arise if a
licensed play were prosecuted. To make it clearer, let us imagine
any other offender--say a company promoter with a fraudulent
prospectus--pleading in Court that he had induced the Lord
Chamberlain to issue a certificate that the prospectus contained
nothing objectionable, and that on the strength of that
certificate he issued it; also, that by law the Court could do
nothing to him except order him to wind up his company. Some such
vision as this must have come to Lord Gorell when he at last
grappled seriously with the problem. Mr. Harcourt seized the
opportunity to make a last rally. He seconded Lord Gorell's
proposal that the Committee should admit that its scheme of an
optional censorship was an elaborate absurdity, and report that
all censorship before production was out of the question. But it
was too late: the volte face was too sudden and complete. It was
Lord Gorell whose vote had turned the close division which took
place on the question of receiving my statement. It was Lord
Gorell without whose countenance and authority the farce of the
books could never have been performed. Yet here was Lord Gorell,
after assenting to all the provisions for the optional
censorship paragraph by paragraph, suddenly informing his
colleagues that they had been wrong all through and that I had
been right all through, and inviting them to scrap half their
work and adopt my conclusion. No wonder Lord Gorell got only one
vote: that of Mr. Harcourt. But the incident is not the less
significant. Lord Gorell carried more weight than any other
member of the Committee on the legal and constitutional
aspect of the question. Had he begun where he left off--had he at
the outset put down his foot on the notion that an optional penal
law could ever be anything but a gross contradiction in terms,
that part of the Committee's proposals would never have come into
existence.


JUDGES: THEIR PROFESSIONAL LIMITATIONS

I do not, however, appeal to Lord Gorell's judgment on all
points. It is inevitable that a judge should be deeply impressed
by his professional experience with a sense of the impotence of
judges and laws and courts to deal satisfactorily with evils
which are so Protean and elusive as to defy definition, and which
yet seem to present quite simple problems to the common sense of
men of the world. You have only to imagine the Privy Council as
consisting of men of the world highly endowed with common sense,
to persuade yourself that the supplementing of the law by the
common sense of the Privy Council would settle the whole
difficulty. But no man knows what he means by common sense,
though every man can tell you that it is very uncommon, even in
Privy Councils. And since every ploughman is a man of the world,
it is evident that even the phrase itself does not mean what it
says. As a matter of fact, it means in ordinary use simply a man
who will not make himself disagreeable for the sake of a
principle: just the sort of man who should never be allowed to
meddle with political rights. Now to a judge a political right,
that is, a dogma which is above our laws and conditions our
laws, instead of being subject to them, is anarchic and
abhorrent. That is why I trust Lord Gorell when he is defending
the integrity of the law against the proposal to make it in any
sense optional, whilst I very strongly mistrust him, as I
mistrust all professional judges, when political rights are in
danger.


CONCLUSION

I must conclude by recommending the Government to take my advice
wherever it conflicts with that of the Joint Select Committee. It
is, I think, obviously more deeply considered and better
informed, though I say it that should not. At all events, I have
given my reasons; and at that I must leave it. As the tradition
which makes Malvolio not only Master of the Revels but Master
of the Mind of England, and which has come down to us from Henry
VIII., is manifestly doomed to the dustbin, the sooner it goes
there the better; for the democratic control which naturally
succeeds it can easily be limited so as to prevent it becoming
either a censorship or a tyranny. The Examiner of Plays should
receive a generous pension, and be set free to practise privately
as an expert adviser of theatrical managers. There is no reason
why they should be deprived of the counsel they so highly value.

It only remains to say that public performances of The Shewing-Up
of Blanco Posnet are still prohibited in Great Britain by the
Lord Chamberlain. An attempt was made to prevent even its
performance in Ireland by some indiscreet Castle officials in the
absence of the Lord Lieutenant. This attempt gave extraordinary
publicity to the production of the play; and every possible
effort was made to persuade the Irish public that the
performance would be an outrage to their religion, and to provoke
a repetition of the rioting that attended the first performances
of Synge's Playboy of the Western World before the most sensitive
and, on provocation, the most turbulent audience in the kingdom.
The directors of the Irish National Theatre, Lady Gregory and Mr.
William Butler Yeats, rose to the occasion with inspiriting
courage. I am a conciliatory person, and was willing, as I always
am, to make every concession in return for having my own way. But
Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats not only would not yield an inch, but
insisted, within the due limits of gallant warfare, on taking the
field with every circumstance of defiance, and winning the battle
with every trophy of victory. Their triumph was as complete as
they could have desired. The performance exhausted the
possibilities of success, and provoked no murmur, though it
inspired several approving sermons. Later on, Lady Gregory and
Mr. Yeats brought the play to London and performed it under the
Lord Chamberlain's nose, through the instrumentality of the Stage
Society.

After this, the play was again submitted to the Lord Chamberlain.
But, though beaten, he, too, understands the art of How Not To Do
It. He licensed the play, but endorsed on his licence the
condition that all the passages which implicated God in the
history of Blanco Posnet must be omitted in representation. All
the coarseness, the profligacy, the prostitution, the violence,
the drinking-bar humor into which the light shines in the play
are licensed, but the light itself is extinguished. I need hardly
say that I have not availed myself of this licence, and do not
intend to. There is enough licensed darkness in our theatres
today without my adding to it.

AYOT ST. LAWRENCE,
14TH JULY 1910.

POSTSCRIPT.--Since the above was written the Lord Chamberlain has
made an attempt to evade his responsibility and perhaps to
postpone his doom by appointing an advisory committee, unknown to
the law, on which he will presumably throw any odium that may
attach to refusals of licences in the future. This strange and
lawless body will hardly reassure our moralists, who
object much more to the plays he licenses than to those
he suppresses, and are therefore unmoved by his plea that
his refusals are few and far between. It consists of two
eminent actors (one retired), an Oxford professor of literature,
and two eminent barristers. As their assembly is neither created
by statute nor sanctioned by custom, it is difficult to know what
to call it until it advises the Lord Chamberlain to deprive some
author of his means of livelihood, when it will, I presume,
become a conspiracy, and be indictable accordingly; unless,
indeed, it can persuade the Courts to recognize it as a new
Estate of the Realm, created by the Lord Chamberlain. This
constitutional position is so questionable that I strongly
advise the members to resign promptly before the Lord
Chamberlain gets them into trouble.



THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET

A number of women are sitting working together in a big room not
unlike an old English tithe barn in its timbered construction,
but with windows high up next the roof. It is furnished as a
courthouse, with the floor raised next the walls, and on this
raised flooring a seat for the Sheriff, a rough jury box on his
right, and a bar to put prisoners to on his left. In the well in
the middle is a table with benches round it. A few other benches
are in disorder round the room. The autumn sun is shining warmly
through the windows and the open door. The women, whose dress and
speech are those of pioneers of civilisation in a territory of
the United States of America, are seated round the table and on
the benches, shucking nuts. The conversation is at its height.

BABSY [a bumptious young slattern, with some good looks] I say
that a man that would steal a horse would do anything.

LOTTIE [a sentimental girl, neat and clean] Well, I never should
look at it in that way. I do think killing a man is worse any day
than stealing a horse.

HANNAH [elderly and wise] I dont say it's right to kill a man. In
a place like this, where every man has to have a revolver, and
where theres so much to try people's tempers, the men get to be a
deal too free with one another in the way of shooting. God knows
it's hard enough to have to bring a boy into the world and nurse
him up to be a man only to have him brought home to you on a
shutter, perhaps for nothing, or only just to shew that the man
that killed him wasn't afraid of him. But men are like children
when they get a gun in their hands: theyre not content til theyve
used it on somebody.

JESSIE [a good-natured but sharp-tongued, hoity-toity young
woman; Babsy's rival in good looks and her superior in tidiness]
They shoot for the love of it. Look at them at a lynching. Theyre
not content to hang the man; but directly the poor creature is
swung up they all shoot him full of holes, wasting their
cartridges that cost solid money, and pretending they do it in
horror of his wickedness, though half of them would have a
rope round their own necks if all they did was known--let alone
the mess it makes.

LOTTIE. I wish we could get more civilized. I don't like all this
lynching and shooting. I don't believe any of us like it, if the
truth were known.

BABSY. Our Sheriff is a real strong man. You want a strong man
for a rough lot like our people here. He aint afraid to shoot and
he aint afraid to hang. Lucky for us quiet ones, too.

JESSIE. Oh, don't talk to me. I know what men are. Of course he
aint afraid to shoot and he aint afraid to hang. Wheres the risk
in that with the law on his side and the whole crowd at his back
longing for the lynching as if it was a spree? Would one of them
own to it or let him own to it if they lynched the wrong man? Not
them. What they call justice in this place is nothing but a
breaking out of the devil thats in all of us. What I want to see
is a Sheriff that aint afraid not to shoot and not to hang.

EMMA [a sneak who sides with Babsy or Jessie, according to the
fortune of war] Well, I must say it does sicken me to see Sheriff
Kemp putting down his foot, as he calls it. Why don't he put it
down on his wife? She wants it worse than half the men he
lynches. He and his Vigilance Committee, indeed!

BABSY [incensed] Oh, well! if people are going to take the part
of horse-thieves against the Sheriff--!

JESSIE. Who's taking the part of horse-thieves against the
Sheriff?

BABSY. You are. Waitle your own horse is stolen, and youll know
better. I had an uncle that died of thirst in the sage brush
because a negro stole his horse. But they caught him and burned
him; and serve him right, too.

EMMA. I have known that a child was born crooked because its
mother had to do a horse's work that was stolen.

BABSY. There! You hear that? I say stealing a horse is ten times
worse than killing a man. And if the Vigilance Committee ever
gets hold of you, youd better have killed twenty men than as much
as stole a saddle or bridle, much less a horse.

[Elder Daniels comes in.]

ELDER DANIELS. Sorry to disturb you, ladies; but the Vigilance
Committee has taken a prisoner; and they want the room to try him
in.

JESSIE. But they cant try him til Sheriff Kemp comes back from
the wharf.

ELDER DANIELS. Yes; but we have to keep the prisoner here til he
comes.

BABSY. What do you want to put him here for? Cant you tie him up
in the Sheriff's stable?

ELDER DANIELS. He has a soul to be saved, almost like the rest of
us. I am bound to try to put some religion into him before he
goes into his Maker's presence after the trial.

HANNAH. What has he done, Mr Daniels?

ELDER DANIELS. Stole a horse.

BABSY. And are we to be turned out of the town hall for a horse-
thief? Aint a stable good enough for his religion?

ELDER DANIELS. It may be good enough for his, Babsy; but, by your
leave, it is not good enough for mine. While I am Elder here, I
shall umbly endeavour to keep up the dignity of Him I serve to
the best of my small ability. So I must ask you to be good enough
to clear out. Allow me. [He takes the sack of husks and put it
out of the way against the panels of the jury box].

THE WOMEN [murmuring] Thats always the way. Just as we'd settled
down to work. What harm are we doing? Well, it is tiresome. Let
them finish the job themselves. Oh dear, oh dear! We cant have a
minute to ourselves. Shoving us out like that!

HANNAH. Whose horse was it, Mr Daniels?

ELDER DANIELS [returning to move the other sack] I am sorry to
say that it was the Sheriff's horse--the one he loaned to young
Strapper. Strapper loaned it to me; and the thief stole it,
thinking it was mine. If it had been mine, I'd have forgiven him
cheerfully. I'm sure I hoped he would get away; for he had two
hours start of the Vigilance Committee. But they caught him. [He
disposes of the other sack also].

JESSIE. It cant have been much of a horse if they caught him with
two hours start.

ELDER DANIELS [coming back to the centre of the group] The
strange thing is that he wasn't on the horse when they took him.
He was walking; and of course he denies that he ever had the
horse. The Sheriff's brother wanted to tie him up and lash him
till he confessed what he'd done with it; but I couldn't allow
that: it's not the law.