laugh at them if they did. So well have the rescuers
learnt that Mrs Warren’s defence of herself
and indictment of society is the thing that most needs
saying, that those who know me personally reproach
me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my
energies on “pleasant plays” for the amusement
of frivolous people, when I can build up such excellent
stage sermons on their own work. Mrs Warren’s
Profession is the one play of mine which I could submit
to a censorship without doubt of the result; only,
it must not be the censorship of the minor theatre
critic, nor of an innocent court official like the
Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner, much less of people
who consciously profit by Mrs Warren’s profession,
or who personally make use of it, or who hold the widely
whispered view that it is an indispensable safety-valve
for the protection of domestic virtue, or, above all,
who are smitten with a sentimental affection for our
fallen sister, and would “take her up tenderly,
lift her with care, fashioned so slenderly, young,
and
so fair.” Nor am I prepared to
accept the verdict of the medical gentlemen who would
compulsorily sanitate and register Mrs Warren, whilst
leaving Mrs Warren’s patrons, especially her
military patrons, free to destroy her health and anybody
else’s without fear of reprisals. But I
should be quite content to have my play judged by,
say, a joint committee of the Central Vigilance Society
and the Salvation Army. And the sterner moralists
the members of the committee were, the better.
Some of the journalists I have shocked reason so unripely
that they will gather nothing from this but a confused
notion that I am accusing the National Vigilance Association
and the Salvation Army of complicity in my own scandalous
immorality. It will seem to them that people who
would stand this play would stand anything. They
are quite mistaken. Such an audience as I have
described would be revolted by many of our fashionable
plays. They would leave the theatre convinced
that the Plymouth Brother who still regards the playhouse
as one of the gates of hell is perhaps the safest
adviser on the subject of which he knows so little.
If I do not draw the same conclusion, it is not because
I am one of those who claim that art is exempt from
moral obligations, and deny that the writing or performance
of a play is a moral act, to be treated on exactly
the same footing as theft or murder if it produces
equally mischievous consequences. I am convinced
that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive,
the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in
the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct;
and I waive even this exception in favor of the art
of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples
of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to
crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom
real life means nothing. I have pointed out again
and again that the influence of the theatre in England
is growing so great that whilst private conduct, religion,